Building Up Your Exercise for Mental Health (Paid Supporter Post)
You know movement is good for your mental health - so how can you build yours up?
This is a paid supporter post of The More|Better substack, a weekly dose of fitness, wellness, and wellbeing content here to help you make sense of all the nonsense. Written by personal trainer, wellness coach, and positive psychology practitioner Darlene Marshall.
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How to Exercise to Boost Mental Health
Fitness professionals know a lot about the body. A decent one knows basic muscular anatomy. A competent trainer knows how to program to shift your physiology. A great trainer knows how to integrate a customized program into your day to day life.
What most trainers don’t know?
How movement can shift mental health outcomes AND how to support someone making those changes successfully in their own life.
Why?
They’re not trained to do that.
You might be thinking to yourself but Darlene… you’re a personal trainer. Why should I listen to you?
Good question. The answer: because I have a Masters degree in the scientific study of human happiness and wellbeing (positive psychology) and we spent a good chunk of that time studying positive emotions, sustainable lifestyle change, and motivation.
Does that make me qualified to talk about mental health and lifestyle? Let’s see…
The Typical Approach to Mental Health
Most people when they begin to struggle with their mental health seek out a therapist. Someone trained in talking about how the events of your life so far have affected your current state and symptoms. That person is listening for symptoms they can use to label a diagnosis and hopefully deploy a treatment protocol, an extension of the western medical model.
What most of these people aren’t trained in is how to build happiness (the study of Applied Positive Psychology).
(To be clear: I am not knocking therapy or therapists directly. Only describing a current paradigm that doesn’t work for a significant slice of the population for reasons like money, time, access, and the actually efficacy of the practices.)
The problem for many people is talking about their problems doesn’t actually help.
Fortunately, research has identified that there are lifestyle practices that are more effective than therapy for those with mild to moderate and episodic depression and anxiety (the two most common mental health conditions) - and for those with severe depression or anxiety, those same lifestyle practices make medication more effective!
You can read all about that in this post:
Which begs the question we’re here to ask: how do you actually build a moment practice for your mental health!?