In the spring of my junior year of high school, I decided to train to be a beach lifeguard. My goal was not to serve the community or to protect helpless swimmers from vicious ocean rip currents. My sole desire was to meet cute girls at the beach—period. It didn’t matter that the other lifeguards in training were seasoned, competitive swimmers. I was on a mission to meet the ladies, and not even an exhausting training swim with kids who could swim a mile without breaking a sweat was going to scare me off. That feeling lasted until about mile marker one. At that point I began to feel an extreme ache in my side and an overwhelming desire to throw up. Hindsight is 20/20, but something tells me that lying on the training pool deck in agony is not all that attractive to the girls I was trying to impress. My encouragement to you here is simple: don’t make the rookie mistake I made as a young man and over exercise to the point of exhaustion. Regular exercise has consistently been associated with lower stress levels, and the beautiful thing is, you don’t have to push yourself to the brink of physical exhaustion for the exercise to help reduce stress.
Researchers have found that whether a person exercises at 80 percent or 40 percent of his capacity, the effect on stress is the same as long as he works out for at least twenty to thirty minutes. In short, there is no correlation between how hard you work out and the stress reducing benefit you receive. Do you know what this means? It means that my push-it-to-the-brink philosophy as a teenager was, well, nothing more than a teenage philosophy. The idea that you have to kill yourself to get the stress-reducing benefit of exercise is a myth. You can live a less stressed life if you simply decide to fit twenty to thirty minutes of exercise into your day. No marathon training here; just moderate exercise such as walking, jogging, bike riding, gardening, or tennis will do the trick. Focusing on moderate exercise that you actually enjoy will greatly increase the likelihood that you actually follow through with your routine everyday, which is key to the mental health benefits you are looking to produce.
I’ve created a worksheet to help you think through how to start an exercise routine that will help you manage your stressful life. You can find the worksheet on my website at floridacounselingcenters.com. The worksheet will help you implement the following helpful strategies into your daily routine: