Can Exercise Help My Anxiety?

If you suffer from anxiety or panic attacks the best thing you can do for yourself is start a daily exercise program. When you increase your daily activity level, challenge your muscles, and maintain a healthy body weight and body fat percentage, you will feel less physical tension.
Physical tension such as tight shoulder and neck muscles is often seen as a result of excessive anxiety, stress, and the overwhelming fear of future panic attacks, but it can actually be a contributing factor that keeps your anxiety high. When you start to exercise you release the tension from your muscles, free your mind of stress, and release endorphins that are known to promote a sense of well being and happiness.
Many doctors and therapists often recommend a regular exercise program and healthy diet as part of a treatment plan to overcome anxiety. It can be difficult to get going with exercise, especially if your anxiety heightens when you go to a health club or if you fear panic attacks when you go outside for walks.
The following tips will help you get going with exercise so you can naturally relieve some, if not all, of your anxiety or panic attacks.
Start Slow
Don't start out saying you are going to train for a half marathon or walk five miles a day. You cannot realistically live up to those goals, so setting them can only guarantee failure down the line. Failure likely means a return to your previous lifestyle and increase in anxiety and panic attacks.
Think of what you can realistically get yourself to do right now and that is your starting point. Don't feel bad if it is only five minutes down the block and back or ten minutes on the treadmill at home. You can add to your time and intensity later on as you start to feel better physically and mentally.
Challenge Yourself
Wherever you start out right now, make a point to continually challenge yourself. Your intensity level and length of workout time should always be changing as you become stronger physically. You want to start at a point that is a little challenging and then continually push further so it remains a bit difficult at all times.
If your exercise feels easy or you barely break a sweat, then it's time to pick up the intensity. Aim for at least a half hour a day at an intensity that is challenging to your muscles and cardiovascular system.
Mental Relaxation
If you can get your mind to calm down and release tension, worries, and stressful negative thinking you can make great progress to ridding yourself of anxiety and panic attacks. Exercise can help if you add in a few sessions of yoga, Pilates, or tai chi a few times a week.
All of these exercises include a mental component that releases stress and anxiety from the brain. They will help you relax and become more peaceful in general, as long as you practice them routinely.
Remember, start wherever you are today but consistently push yourself to higher and higher levels of physical conditioning. Exercise should become a normal aspect of your daily life that you just do on auto-pilot. When you have that level of commitment to it you will start seeing results, both mentally and physically! You can also combine this method with other ways to help anxiety like natural herbs for anxiety, self help book and vitamins. Just believe that something can be done about the anxiety problem and than goahead and do something about it.