Mental Health Day

Where is the fine line between using exercise to assist your mental health and it starting to affect your mental health?

I know many people (myself included) who at some point found that exercise helped improve mood, anxiety symptoms, depression and just general sense of well being. A common thing you will hear amongst regular exercisers after a session is ‘I needed that’.

And it’s proven that exercise is very beneficial for people’s mental health and well as physical.

It can become the opposite though. A bit like an effective drug, it can in cases become addictive, where the idea of not training has a negative effect on how a person feels.

I know myself I often feel worse about myself in general if I have a spell of inactivity and I’ve known people fearful of taking a break because it’s the thing that helps them.

The issue when this becomes the case is that it makes it hard to cope if you get ill, injured or have something that truly prevents you from training.

Tuesday was World Mental Health Day. As part of days where we look at how we can improve our mental health it’s also useful to understand the wider picture and how some things (like advice about exercise) aren’t always black and white. If you do struggle with not being able to train, to the point where that affects you negatively, as opposed to being able to train helps you, it’s worth taking a moment to consider how you can tackle this.