The Impact of Physical Activity on Well-Being

There’s many, many, many studies happening right now about the effects on physical activity on our mental states and predominantly our emotional states. And I would add to it our ability to take action on our dreams. So, first off, we’re going to go back to energy. Without energy, you don’t have a project. Without energy, you don’t, you’re not able to think straight. You’re not able to feel the emotions that will support your dreams. Physical activity. We have a lot of ideas about what that means. Most of the time we say, okay, it means sport. But physical activity for the body, there’s many different ranges. It means movement, movement of any kind. Why do I make that distinction? Because a lot of people say, how can I become more embodied? And a lot of the answers are, okay, I need to do a lot of sports and no, look, I’m a very healthy person and I don’t go out and do sports. What I do is I am continuously aware, going back to the five principles. I’m attentive that I live in a physical body. I’m attentive to my surroundings, I’m attentive to whether I’m moving or freezing.And physical activity, the more that you are doing physical activity and that means literally moving your body, moving. If you notice, well, I’m feeling kind of low, check into your body and you will notice, I’m not moving, I’m stiff. Oh, whew. It changes things like that. It’s not difficult. Now. Second part of that is physical activity, walking, biking, yoga, anything that elevates your heart rate, anything that gets you again moving and releases our happiness drugs, it releases serotonin, it gets our endorphins feeding our brain. A lot of people today are experiencing depression, anxiety, all of these things and from a body standpoint, if you are looking at what depression is, literally, it’s a depression of our energy states. When we are feeling depressed, just tune into your own experience. We don’t move. We barely breathe. We stare into one place. We don’t move our eyes, which is connecting our brains, right? Anxiety, same thing. I’m frozen. I’m, I’m contracted. I don’t move. So movement or physical exercise, physicality I would say, being attuned to your body gives you a very simple now state check-in. What’s going on actually right now. Oh, while I was tripping out on my mind movie about all the things that could possibly be going wrong. Yeah. Most of the time we freeze and we stopped breathing. Do a physicality check, which means turn into your reality and notice actually, you know, I’m just, I’m fine. There’s a lot of worries out there. Let me tune back into my body. Let me notice where I am. Let me notice that right now in my physicality. I’m fine. And then amplify that by moving and raising your level of energy or moving and relaxing your levels of energy, depending on whether you’re depressive, meaning low energy or anxiety, meaning I need to get back into my now state, which is, hello, I’m actually okay right now. Yeah. So physical exercise is very, very important, for changing our brain states.