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Apr 21, 2022
✨POV✨: You've heard this a million times - exercise to feel better. You know it's shallow and honestly, an overused piece of advice. You know that it won't magically erase your triggers. But you're also curious. The number of people posting about their lives changing after beginning to workout is making you want to try it out.
Is Exercise a Depression Cure, really? 🤔
Working out will not cure our depression, but it can definitely help us feel better while we are on our healing journey. It can help cure depression.
This in no way means that working out will always make us feel better or that, we will not have the mental health concerns we do now, but it does mean that we will notice a positive shift in our moods and mental health. Worth a shot, innit?
Exercises to Treat Depression 👟
Working out helps relieve symptoms of depression by pumping our bodies with feel-good hormones like dopamine, endorphins, oxytocin, and serotonin. The levels of these hormones dip when we are experiencing depression, so regular exercise helps bring these hormones back to level (and higher!).
Doing any one of these exercises for 30 minutes on at least 3 days a week can bring down the severity of our depression symptoms and kick-start us on our journey of treating depression.
🚶🏼♀️ Long Walks
One step at a time.
Taking long walks can be extremely therapeutic and they don't have to be the kinds that make us pant. It's important that we focus on being regular more than achieving distance or calorie-burn targets.
Enjoy the ride, plug in your favorite music, or click here if you’re thinking, “I want to start my day with a mindful walk”, and breathe in the fresh air.
🏃🏼♂️ Running
Slow and steady.
Running gets our heart rate up and boosts the amount of oxygen we're taking in. And oxygen is the OG brain food - it helps the brain outperform itself by pumping more of those feel-good hormones.
We don't need to run a mile on the first day or even the first week. We can alternate running and walking until our body catches the drift.
💃🏻 Dancing
Dancing helps loosen up our bodies and feel safe in our own skin. The best part is that we can dance in our room, our garden, or any place we're comfortable dancing in (at any time of the day or night). It may seem silly at first but guess who it isn't silly to? Our mental health.
We can put on some of our favorite beats and shake it off.
Last Word on Mental Health 🤍
Other than being a positive lifestyle change, regular exercise as a depression treatment also falls under the complementary and integrative health approaches. This approach combines conventional (like talk therapy & medication) and unconventional forms of therapy to boost overall well-being, along with depression.
New research is flooding with ways in which we can help heal depression. And with each day, there's more evidence pointing to the interdependence between physical health and mental health. But definitely not in a way that having good physical health guarantees good mental health. To know more about this, click here.
And until next time, keep movin'.
Note on Mental Disorders 🚩
Clinical depression can be of many different types - moderate depression, severe depression (aka major depression or major depressive disorder), treatment-resistant depression, or more. If you have symptoms of clinical depression or thoughts of self-harm, please use the national suicide prevention lifeline or contact a mental health professional to seek treatment options.
Antidepressant medications (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) may be prescribed in the case of severe symptoms, in combination with a form of therapy such as interpersonal therapy, electroconvulsive therapy, transcranial magnetic stimulation, or progressive muscle relaxation techniques, based on severity and type of depression.
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