Ditch Stress

TLDR: The best exercise to relieve stress is the one you will actually do, with a plan on how you will do it, that starts small.

Haha that may seem cheeky, but it’s honestly the truth. If setting yourself up for a big ambitious goal, by going from couch potato to straight outta the gate with balls to the wall exercise plan was working, then maybe New Year’s resolution plans would have a higher success rate than 8% within one month. Yeah that means 92% dropped the habit in less than 4 weeks. Dismal!

Exercise is a powerful tool in your stress reduction toolbox. It can help to reduce your stress levels and lessen fatigue, as well as improve alertness and concentration. This can be super helpful when stress has depleted your energy or concentration. 

Exercise in almost any form can act as a stress reliever. Which is great news, because it means that it’s not just a runner’s high that will bust stress. Being active can boost your feel-good endorphins and distract you from daily worries.

The great news is that if you’re not an athlete or even if you’re out of shape, you can still make a little exercise go a long way toward stress management. Exercise can provide stress relief for your body by imitating stress such as the “flight or fight” response, and allow your body to practice working through that stress.

Positive Effect of Exercise

Exercise can also lead to positive effects in your body — including your cardiovascular, digestive and immune systems — thereby helping to protect your body from the harmful effects of stress.

It also helps your mind. It can be meditation in motion, where your body moves in repetitive patterns over and over again, allowing your mind to concentrate only on your body’s movements and not the day’s irritations. This focus can help you stay calm, clear and focused in everything you do.

Exercise also improves your mood! Regular exercise can increase self-confidence, improve your mood, help you relax, and lower symptoms of mild depression and anxiety. Exercise can also improve your sleep, which is often disrupted by stress, depression and anxiety. 

All of these exercise benefits can ease your stress levels and give you a sense of command over your body and your life. When stress affects the brain, the rest of the body is impacted as well. Exercise has such powerful positive effects for the body, which can in turn, help your mind to feel better too.

Making Exercise a Habit

Maybe you already know you need to get moving, and the problem is that exercise only works if you do it, and making it a habit is challenging! The stats are pretty glum: Less than 5% of adults participate in 30 minutes of physical activity each day; only one in three adults receive the recommended amount of physical activity each week. Only 35 – 44% of adults 75 years or older are physically active, and 28-34% of adults ages 65-74 are physically active.

We know we just talked about Atomic Habits in our last post, but James Clear’s book is so useful! If you haven’t read Atomic Habits by James Clear, this is actually one of the best places to start your new exercise plan. That sounds confusing, doesn’t it? You’d think the advice would be to get to a gym or buy some at home exercise equipment, maybe find some videos on YouTube. Those are all great when you’ve got that exercise habit going, but to get somewhere, you have to get started.

How we can Create Behaviour Change

One useful way to get started is to see how ready you are to make a change, this is called change talk, and it can be useful to coach yourself to success. The Transtheoretical Model of Behavior Change lists five stages: precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action and maintenance.

These basically break down to not even thinking about it, thinking about it (we love to call this the ready to be ready phase), getting ready to do the action through preparation, taking action and keeping up with the changes you’ve made.

Many exercise plans head right toward taking action, without really passing through the other stages. It is helpful to think about why you want to make a change before you start. This can give you the all important why. Knowing your why can get you through challenges and help you stay in the action and maintenance stages. Ideally, as they say in the biz, find a why that makes you cry.

That sounds awful, and we mean more of a happy cry! You are looking for a why that pulls your heart strings, and this will be different for every person. Is it to see your children grow up, to stay healthy and independant to old age, to relieve your stress and feel better about life every day? Dig deep and find a reason that really resonates for you to start an exercise plan.

Are you Ready to be Ready?

Another helpful step is to assess where you are on a scale of 1-10. On this scale 1 is I have no desire to exercise, period. A 10 is I can’t wait to get started, show me the dumbbells (or whatever fitness equipment you will use on your amazing journey!). Then we do more change talk. Let’s say you are a 6, then ask yourself why you are 6 and not a 4? What makes you feel more ready for change?

This can be really useful in getting to that why as well. You can do a mini-assessment of where you are at, and what you could do to really get going. If you feel motivated by a health concern and you know of a rad pilates class that your friends are doing that would be fun, you can add that to your why I’m ready list. Build yourself a motivational net of the reasons you can do this thing!

Taking Action

Even if most of us know exercise will help us, it’s not making it from knowledge to action, and it’s only action that counts. So we need a better system to get active, and this is where habits come in.

Now the key part is next, so listen closely: Don’t bust on out doing HIIT for 45 minutes 6 times a week. For starters, you could hurt yourself, but honestly, this is like impossible to sustain. 

As James Clear states in his fantastic book, a habit requires: a cue, craving, response and reward. The cue triggers your brain to initiate a behavior. Your brain is always scanning the environment for cues.

Cravings are the next step of a habit, and they are the motivating force behind all habits, they are the desire to act. These differ from person to person. The third step is the response, which is the actual habit you perform. This can be a thought or an action.

The sticky bit here is that for a response to occur it depends on how motivated you are and how much friction is associated with the behaviour. If a particular action takes more effort, either physical or mental, than you are willing to expend, you won’t do it.

The last step is that the response delivers a reward. Rewards are the end goal of every habit, and the cue is about noticing the reward. The craving is about wanting the reward and we hunt rewards because they either satisfy us, or teach us.

It becomes a cue because the action leads to a reward, which triggers our brain to do it all over again! The main purpose of rewards is to satisfy cravings, such as drinking water when you are thirsty. Secondarily, rewards teach us which actions to repeat in the future. Rewards close the feedback loop and complete the habit cycle.

It’s pretty easy to see how this would work for a habit we are not so keen on, say, eating all the donuts. You see the donut, which is the cue. Your body craves that sugar/fat hit, and you are motivated to eat. The response is eating the donut, and the reward is the rush of the sugar high.

However if a behaviour doesn’t make it past any of these four stages, it will not become a habit. This might be good news for a bad habit, because that means if you can nip a bad habit in the bud by making one of these four stages tough, you’ll stop doing it.

Building the Right Habits

But let’s flip that to creating happy habits that we want to have! We need to encourage all four stages of the exercise habit so that we can build a solid movement plan that gives us all those stress reducing benetis.

So as James Clear says: Make things obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying. So to create your exercise plan, start by making fitness obvious to you. Leave out your gym wear, have weights at home, have your running shoes by the door. Make sure there are cues in your environment to remind you about exercise.

Make it attractive, this is where we pick the exercises that you like best, so if you hate running, maybe don’t sign up for a half-marathon. Of course you can always do that down the road, but if you are building an exercise plan, and you like to dance, see if there is a Zumba class instead to start. Find exercise clothes you love and that make you feel good. Let yourself watch trashy TV when you walk on the treadmill.

Next is make it easy! You need to create an environment where doing the hard thing is as easy as possible. Do not, I repeat do not, start with a super intense, multi day a week plan. This will set you up for pain, possible injury and disappointment. You want to vanquish as much needless friction, and focus on setting the bar low. 

Want to become a runner? Have a habit to put your running shoes on. Want to start a gym habit? Lay your gym clothes out (we’re not even talking about working out). Do that, trick yourself into becoming consistent and then scale it up.

Finally, make is satisfying. What is immediately rewarded is repeated, while what is immediately punished is avoided. To make a habit stick you need to feel successful immediately in some way. For exercise you can make lots of different kinds of rewards: have a healthy smoothie or snack afterwards, or some tasty electrolytes, maybe a hop in a sauna, whatever floats your boat. 

By rewarding yourself with something enjoyable right after exercising, you make it satisfying, which makes you more inclined to repeat the behavior and become consistent. You want to associate an immediate pleasure to continue moving towards your goals.

Put me in Coach!

So there you have it, a plan for making exercise work for you in your stress busting toolkit. When you are feeling overwhelmed by life, fitness can seem like the last thing you want to do. So remember: make it obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying. Set the bar low so you can feel successful every time, and then scale it up when you are ready for more!