Ideas for Exercises for Mental Health

When it comes to exercise, the physical benefits are well-documented, from lowering blood pressure and your risk of some diseases to improving your physical appearance.

Increasingly, the spotlight is being shone on the mental health benefits of working out, such as boosting your mood, improving sleep and easing symptoms of stress, anxiety and depression.

Science backs this up. One study found that increasing your activity levels from doing nothing, to exercising at least three times a week, reduces the risk of depression by up to 30 per cent. Another study found that individuals who engaged in exercise had 43% lower self-reported 'poor mental health' days than those who did not.

Despite the benefits, statistics show only 65.5 per cent of men and 54 per cent of women in the UK meet the daily recommended physical activity levels. The Department of Health recommends that adults should be active daily and complete at least 2.5 hours of physical activity per week.

However, this does not necessarily mean slogging it out at the gym (unless you want to) – there are plenty of ways to move your body and boost your mind.

Here are six types of workouts that could improve your mental health.

1. Running (or walking)

If you need motivation to get moving, the 'runner's high' – the clarity and expansion one feels after a jog or sprint session – should do the trick.

'Outdoor exercise or eco-therapy can be particularly beneficial and research suggests it can actually be as effective as antidepressants in treating mild to moderate depression,' says Mind Information Manager, Rachel Boyd.

Two 2007 studies commissioned by MIND revealed that 94 per cent said outdoor activities including running and walking had benefited their mental health, so for best results avoid the treadmill.

Melanie McKay took up running two years ago to lose weight, but now continues for the mental health benefits, as well as the community she's met through joining a group.'Running calms me almost instantly. I have a fairly busy mind, but also one prone to some pretty dark thoughts,' says McKay.

'When I'm running I've got time to think things over, analyse, understand, and process. It's amazing to have something so simple to focus on which has such an impact. I'm so much happier as a runner.'

2. Boxing

The rumours that hitting a punchbag releases stress and anger is true. Finding an outlet for aggression can be both empowering and healing. Short, sharp 'rounds' of punching, followed by rest, results in an intense interval session, which releases endorphins.

If you 'spar' with another boxer you can achieve 'flow', in which you are focussed solely on the task at hand/present moment; a state that everyone from Buddhist monks to Olympic athletes champion.

Boutique boxing classes are popping up everywhere, but local amateur boxing clubs are also a cost effective way of releasing the rage safely.

3. Pilates

The mental health benefits of Pilates often get overlooked because of the traditional focus on Pilates for back health and core strength.

'Joseph Pilates (Pilates' founder), believed so strongly in the connection between physical and mental health, he originally called his system of exercise 'Controlology', ie the control of the body with the mind,' says Karen Laing, a Pilates Instructor who has battled anxiety.

'Learning the skill of Pilates and focusing on technique and how your body feels while in a class is a very mindful activity,' she says. 'Pilates is brilliant for stress reduction and relaxation and great for Alpha types since there's no competitive element! Aside from the feelings of wellbeing from moving and mobilising your body, its focus on breathing and relaxation can help to switch on the body's parasympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for sleep and relaxation.'

4. Yoga

One of the main reasons yoga helps us create better mental health is that it integrates body and mind, although it also works well when incorporated with talking therapy and meditation.

'It's a bit of paradox – yoga looks like it's surface level but works deeply,' says Toni Roberts, a yoga therapist specialising in mental health issues. 'For everyone, particularly people who find it difficult or too scary to sit and look at their own mind, yoga can be a gateway to helping understand what they need physically mentally and emotionally. The continued focus on the breath brings yogis into the present moment and instigates a parasympathetic response from our nervous systems (responsible for 'rest and digest' and helping us calm down).'

These days there are many types of yoga and all contain the fundamental belief that we must balance our yin and yang (our more gentle and forceful energies) and work with our bodies to create holistic health and wellbeing.

5. Spin classes

These days, spin studios are more like nightclubs, with strobe lighting, bespoke playlists and sometimes even choreographed routines to make fitness fun, bringing participants into the present moment so they can leave their worries behind while they burn off anxiety via their pedals.

London's Boom Cycle founder Hilary Rowland is keen to ensure members' emotional and mental health improves as much as their physical fitness. She is only too aware of exercise's impact on the brain. 'Regular exercise encourages neurogenesis which is the growing of new brain cells' says Rowland. 'This allows us to focus better and learn quicker - plus exercising gives you an energy boost and the more energy you have the more productive you are!'

6. Resistance training

Lifting weights or bodyweight exercises can have a huge impact on how you feel and look; building muscle and self-esteem as well as curbing anxiety.

Recent research shows that low-moderate intensity resistance training produces a reliable and robust decreases in anxiety, but there's also evidence to show it helps improve cognition and may improve the functioning of your central nervous system (which has a big impact on mood and fatigue levels).

Karen Tippett took up resistance training sessions in Kent – working with kettlebells and her bodyweight to perform - when her father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. 'It was a time where it was necessary to keep going, keep focused and stay composed when I felt (and was) powerless and was constantly anxious,' she says.

'Using kettlebells with a trainer made me feel physically strong and this helped me to be emotionally present and grateful for the time left with Dad. As I could feel my physical strength increase, I became bolder mentally throughout the cancer journey. Since we lost Dad the Kettlebells classes have provided an amazing support from the ladies in the class and left me with a (safe) exhaustion level that has switched my mind and thoughts off enough for me to sleep.'

Written by Lucy Fry and featured on netdoctor.co.uk

Exercise and mental health

3-minute read

Exercise has many benefits, not only for your physical health but also your mental health. In your brain, exercise stimulates chemicals that improve your mood and the parts of the brain responsible for memory and learning.

Benefits of exercise

Physical activity and exercise has many benefits. It can:

• help you to feel better, even if you’re feeling okay

• reduce the risk of illnesses like heart and lung disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, cancer, dementia, Alzheimer’s diseaseand Parkinson's disease

• help people recover from a stroke and many other illnesses and conditions

• help you to lose weight if you want to, which is good for your health overall and might be good for your self-esteem

Mental health benefits of exercise

Exercise releases chemicals like endorphins and serotonin that improve your mood. It can also get you out in the world, help to reduce any feelings of loneliness and isolation, and put you in touch with other people.

If you exercise regularly, it can reduce your stress and symptoms of mental health conditions like depression and anxiety, and help with recovery from mental health issues.

It can also improve your sleep, which is important in many different ways.

Exercise and the mind

Exercise pumps blood to the brain, which can help you to think more clearly.

It increases the size of the hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for memory.

It also increases the connections between the nerve cells in the brain. This improves your memory and helps protect your brain against injury and disease.

How much exercise do you need?

Australian guidelines recommend adults do at least 30 minutes of moderate to intensive physical activity on most or all days of the week. You can make up 30 minutes over the day by combining shorter 10 to 15 minute sessions.

Practising mindfulness while doing exercise also reduces your stress and improves your mental health.

If money is a worry, think about local community centres, which often have affordable exercise groups. And if you have private health insurance, you might get help for gym membership as part of a mental health care plan.

You may struggle finding motivation, or staying motivated for exercise. Think about ways you can make exercise part of your daily routine and lifestyle. Choose something you enjoy, and ask your friends or family to help motivate you and to keep you on track.

If you own a dog, take them for walks in your local area.

Combine your exercise routine with a healthy diet to boost your motivation and energy for exercise.

Where to get support

• Jean Hailes for Women’s Health has tips on how to implement an exercise program.

• The Black Dog Institute has information on depression and benefits of exercise.

• SA Health has information on the beneficial effects of walking on mood.

Sources:

Australian Government Department of Health (Australia's Physical Activity and Sedentary Behaviour Guidelines), British Journal of Pharmacology (Exercise acts as a drug), Black Dog Institute (Exercise & depression), Jean Hailes for Women’s Health (Physical activity & exercise), Physical Activity Australia (Exercise and mental health)

New technologies can help maintain mental health in times of crisis

For mental health services in Edmonton and online, please seek more information from our friends from Around The Corner Counselling

Over the past few weeks, there has been a considerable and unprecedented increase in awareness of the importance of mental health. In fact, no mental health awareness campaign has ever had as much impact as the one sparked by the COVID-19 crisis.

Nearly four billion people are confined to their homes, voluntarily or compulsorily, and are more prone to stress, anxiety, fear, sadness, frustration, irritability and anger. Government leaders talk about mental health almost every day at their news briefings.

“It’s normal to feel anxious or stressed,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said at one briefing, before thanking mental health professionals who provide services at a distance.

Two days earlier, Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister said he had experienced several episodes of depression in his lifetime.

The social relevance of digital technologies in mental health has never seemed so great, whereas just a few weeks ago, e-mental health was a subject reserved for experts and technophiles.

Today, there is widespread mobilization to accelerate innovation and research in this field. This is evident by announcements from the Government of Manitoba, the federal government and the American Psychological Association. It’s unexpected, but it’s good news, because telepsychotherapy, for example, is lagging behind telemedicine.

A young but promising field

E-mental health is an area of research and intervention that emerged in the early 2000s. Telepsychotherapy is the best known form, but this field is vast and also includes access to medical information, co-ordination of care pathways, prevention and follow-up applications, self-care or mutual aid online. In short, everything that can be done with digital technologies to provide mental health care and information can be linked to e-mental health.

This does not mean replacing psychiatrists and psychologists with artificial intelligence systems, or abandoning face-to-face meetings for virtual consultations. Rather, the challenge is to harness the potential of digital technologies to improve access to care or effectiveness of treatment, particularly where conventional approaches are poorly accessible, failing, saturated or absent.

As noted by the Mental Health Commission of Canada, e-mental health services are a complementary solution to traditional care. For example, there are science-based digital services to detect and manage stress (iSmart), overcome insomnia (Sleepio), support the self-management of mood disorders (Aller mieux à ma façon), or mitigate the impact of auditory hallucinations in schizophrenia through virtual reality (Centre Axel).

These types of digital mental health services offer novel non-pharmacological approaches, provided they are based — like those mentioned above — on proven research protocols.

Issues of credibility and trust

There are thousands of mental health mobile phone applications but very few have been scientifically validated. The supply is confusing and varied and the effectiveness of these applications is often difficult to evaluate. Added to this are concerns about privacy and security, lack of availability or lack of information disseminated to the public.

The capacity of new technologies to have a large-scale impact is very real, but it has not yet taken off. Very few e-mental health services meet the following four quality criteria: scientific validation, user experience, data privacy and security, and economic viability of the service.

For example, the mobile applications offered by mental health start-ups are often very user-experience oriented but have little scientific and ethical validation. Conversely, applications developed by clinical researchers are highly clinically and ethically relevant, but neglect user experience and commercialization.

The teleconsultation issue

The glaring lack of telemental health solutions specifically adapted to the practice of psychiatric care means the available telemedicine services will have to meet most of the demand, especially in the context of the COVID-19 crisis.

Psychologists or psychotherapists who wish to offer their services remotely have little choice but to use these generic telemedicine or videoconferencing services. In the absence of alternatives adapted to mental health, professional associations in the sector such as the American Psychological Association in the United States or the Ordre des psychologues du Québec must rely on these. But telepsychotherapy is not telemedicine, and solutions specific to mental health are needed.

In a face-to-face consultation, in fact, psychologists’ offices do not resemble medical spaces at all. As my colleague Francis Levasseur has clearly shown, psychologists’ offices are “relationship spaces” that obey a particular style in the arrangement of furniture and objects.

This arrangement of space or design of place is fully part of the framework offered by psychologists and psychotherapists. What happens to it on a screen? How do you transpose the spirit of the practice into a digital interface? In terms of e-mental health, this is a major issue, which should not be trampled over in the urgency of the situation.

Psychotherapy is not only a treatment: it is also a user experience in which technology plays a mediating role between clinician and patient, whether online with screens and interfaces, or offline with the walls and purposefully arranged furniture.

Written by Stéphane Vial and featured on The Conversation.

20 Seconds to Optimize Hand Wellness

One of the world’s most crucial and selfless acts is still simply washing your hands.

It’s a familiar situation in a public restroom: You’re on your way in, and someone else is leaving without washing their hands. They see you, and wheel around toward the sink. They start whistling, as if to seem casual, and then give their hands a quick spritz with water.

Even among people who will never see each other again, there’s a compulsion to perform a tiny baptism of the fingertips: Not enough scrubbing or soap to actually remove a virus, just enough to signal civility. Accordingly many Americans’ standard of what constitutes a washing of the hands is abysmal. Studies have put the average hand-washing time at about six seconds, less than half of what is recommended by global-health guidelines. Only around 5 percent of us regularly wash long and thoroughly enough.

Our failures feel newly relevant as, for the past month, panic has gripped parts of the world over how to stop the spread of a deadly strain of coronavirus—a variant of the common-cold virus. So far, the virus is known to have killed at least 500 people and infected some 25,000 more, primarily in China, where the outbreak began. In response to the crisis, the country has enacted a historically unprecedented quarantine. Streets in the urban heart of Wuhan are seen empty, and people caught outside are berated by drones.

The U.S. government dipped its toe into similar waters on Sunday, ordering a mandatory two-week quarantine of all travelers inbound from Hubei province. Two-thirds of Americans feel that the virus is a “real threat,” according to an NPR poll released yesterday, and a sense of need for forcible action is pervasive. Scientists at the National Institutes of Health have mobilized to work on an emergency vaccine. Face masks have sold out in many places, despite little evidence that they are helpful outside of specific situations.

Amid so much concern and resource allocation, many people remain dismissive of the most widely accepted, simple advice to slow the spread of most viruses. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other agencies around the world have one clear, concise, definitive recommendation: Wash your hands for at least 20 seconds.

Last week on The Daily Show, Trevor Noah captured the standard response to that advice when he joked, “Wash your hands? Scientists always warn us about some new, weird death virus, and then when we say, ‘What’s the plan?,’ they’re like, ‘Uh, wash your hands.’” The audience laughed. “That’s not a plan!”

Hand-washing does seem extremely obvious—which may be the problem. Those of us who have lived our entire lives removed from epidemics of cholera and other deadly hygiene-related outbreaks haven’t witnessed the power of hand-washing and take it for granted. But it may be the single most important thing any given person can do to help stop and prevent outbreaks.

Respiratory infections are diseases we very often give to ourselves. People are told to cover their coughs and sneezes, but studies show a vast majority don’t wash their hands after doing so. Someone carrying the pathogenic microbes might shake your hand, or touch a doorknob or desk that you later touch. Once you pick them up, if you touch your face, the circle is complete.

It’s impossible to know exactly how much people have changed their hand-washing habits since the outbreak first made headlines a month ago; comprehensive studies have not yet been published. But America’s general history of focusing less on evidence-based preventive behaviors than on billable treatments does not bode well, nor does our health-care system’s tendency to prize newer, marketable products over the cheap and obvious ones.

To get some vague sense of whether the long-standing 20-second guideline is suddenly resonating widely, I asked people on Twitter whether their hand-washing length has changed in recent weeks. A few people told me that they’re becoming more conscious of others’ behavior—and that they’re especially grossed out when witnessing the three-second spritzes or performative soapless washes. But no one said Yes, I’ve started to actually wash my hands properly. I never really used to do it. While that’s likely not something people are eager to admit, suboptimal standards seem common even among those who you’d think would be most meticulous. “Sometimes researchers who work in labs with viruses don't take that much caution in washing their hands,” Robert Lawrence, a biochemist and science writer, told me.

Following outbreaks always makes me conscious of my own habits, and those of everyone around me, too. I haven’t noticed any changes in the bathrooms I frequent. Subtle shifts could be happening, but I assumed that our HR department wouldn’t let me put a video camera in our office restroom to get a proper sample size.

What would make people want to change? At what point does “I’m really freaked out by this virus” become “I’m so freaked out by this virus that I’m going to regularly wash my hands for at least 20 full seconds”? Even if you have zero fear of the flu or coronavirus, or death at all, there is good reason to spend 20 seconds. Guys have said to me: I didn’t pee on my hands, so why should I wash them? To which I say: Man, the point isn’t to get pee off of your hands. The act is, truly, a selfless one. Hand-washing could help prevent the millions of cases of cold, flu, and gastrointestinal disease that spread around the world each year. In the U.S., we apparently believe we’re too important to spare 20 seconds to play our part in not contaminating others.

Instead of shaming hand-hygiene negligence, it may be more productive to celebrate hygienic awakenings. Part of the solution is developing a routine that everyone enjoys and looks forward to. If washing our hands feels like penance, we will never keep it up. One way is to kill time by singing. This is, no joke, one of the official CDC recommendations: “Need a timer? Hum the ‘Happy Birthday’ song from beginning to end twice.”

Since humming that song as you loom over a sink makes you sound unhinged anyway, you might as well sing. If “Happy Birthday” isn’t feasible because of the melodic range, feel free to try a cooler song I made up: “I’m washing these hands, oh yes I am, yes I am,” to the tune of “The Wheels on the Bus.” You’ll know you’ve sung long enough when the person next to you has sung “Happy Birthday” twice. Then you’re supposed to dry your hands, which I find can be done just by putting your arms out to your sides and spinning around a few times.

Written by James Hamblin, M.D., featured on The Atlantic