Exercising Your Body Before Your Mind

Exercising your body before your mind may sound either obvious or weird to you, yet the principle is very simple, though often times overlooked.

Sometimes there are many silver linings to be taken from situations you might find yourself in. After one particularly distressing course of events, I found that I had lost about three and a half stone in weight. The details matter not and although my first thought wasn’t to begin exercising my body before my mind, it was one that I came across by accident and not design.

The thing was, I couldn’t do anything about how my mind was, I had no idea where to start in trying to solve that one. So rather than stress about my lack of concentration or the inability to make any decisions, important or otherwise, I decided to look in other directions for a solution.

Exercising Your  Body

I had finished feeling sorry for myself and no longer felt the urge to spend endless hours on the sofa. I had a need to create some sort of achievement each day, something that would say. “I’ve done this today” small or large didn’t matter. I still had my vices but they were becoming less insistent.

So, I took to going for long walks, on my own. This helped in a number of ways. Being out alone was scary in itself, at the start, so I was facing that fear head on, which was a good thing.

The further I walked, the greater the time I was out of the house, which again, was a good thing. Lastly and more importantly, it was giving me much-needed exercise and this was to become the start of some of the best self-help therapy I could have.

Running and Endorphins

As the days turned into weeks I found that the initial feel good factor of the long walks was starting to wear a bit thin. However, we had a treadmill in the house that had possibly been used no more than half a dozen times, in as many years. Time to push this exercising lark.

Running had never come naturally to me (I wasn’t into exercising, duh!) and was certainly not something I had ever aspired to. Let’s just say that I was built for comfort, not speed. However, I was now considerably lighter than I had ever been for most of my adult life, so moving the now ‘svelte-like’ body of mine, wasn’t so much of an issue.

Inevitably, the day came when I finally dusted off my trainers and took to the ‘mill’. My first run wasn’t worth writing home about, ten minutes tops, in fact, it might have been six, it was a start though.

Exercise comes highly recommended from the medical profession. Not only is it good for your body, the little recognised by-product is that it is also good for your mind. Who knew ?

When you exercise, your body starts to get bombarded with endorphins. They are the bodies natural opiates. Now we’re not going to go into depth about opiates and other feel good additives. The long and the short of it is that when exercising, your body releases endorphins and you can’t help but feel good. Just to back me up, I found an excellent article, that is well worth a read. “Under ten minutes of exercise needed to reach endorphin high, study finds.”

OCD and Exercising

Obsessive Compulsive disorder and I are firm friends. In truth, most of us probably have it to varying degrees. As a young person I was an ‘equal opportunities’ toucher’, as I like to put it. If one of my fingers touched something I would need to make sure all of my fingers did the same, equally.

Making things symmetrical was another trait, along with facing pulling, though I’m not totally sure that was a ‘thing’. Throw in apologising and the standard guilt complex for good measure. None of these aspects were majorly debilitating, more of an annoyance, plus I didn’t really understand why I was doing them, just accepted them as being part of me.

Back to the treadmill. So, now each time I went for a run I would write down my time and distance in a notebook. The next time I ran, I would check beforehand to see what my previous time and distance was and make sure I did the same or more.

Over time, I progressed from six or ten minutes, to sixteen minutes, then to thirty minutes and eventually running for over an hour. In time, it became unsustainable. I was running every day and if I did miss a day, for whatever reason, my mood would take a plunge. There is the possibility that I may have an ‘addictive’ personality, which isn’t always a bad thing and can have certain benefits.

Eventually, the inevitable happened and I started to get injuries. It probably didn’t help that I had never invested in the proper footwear. A good dose of ‘Plantar fasciitis’ struck me down. This resulted in me taking up ‘Bare-foot’ running which in turn led to something ‘snapping’ in my left foot. We think it was a tendon or ligament. That pretty much ended running as part of my ‘exercising your body’ regime.

The Seed Had Been Sewn

So, the ‘exercising your body’ seed had been well and truly sewn and although the initial set back was dis-heartening, I now had a more powerful tool to work with. I might not be able to run for fun, or get instant access to the opiates but I would find other activities that would come close.

I had also learnt more about myself and could take steps in the future to reconcile the insatiable urge to keep pushing, adding more and more to whatever I had turned my hand to. I put together a more holistic program that I could do on a daily basis. This enabled me to swap and change my daily routine which then alleviated the need to constantly ‘up the anti.’

The Mind Waits For No Man (Exercising Your Mind)

Everything works together, more often when you don’t even realise its happening. I was working hard to feel better by my own hand. More exercising lead to me being more conscious of my diet and nutrition, there’s more on that in

“The Start Of A Healthy Lifestyle (Food Combining)”.

I was also starting to re-engage with the written word, either digitally or the old-fashioned book from. This happened almost surreptitiously while I was researching different forms of exercise. I was also trawling the internet for inspiration, tips and techniques on how I could better my physical self.

So in doing this, my mind was slowly starting to wake up. Not overnight, I still couldn’t bring myself to sit down and read fiction, not yet. I had eyes only for factual. There’s bound to be a term for that, but for me I just needed facts. There rest would come back with time.

Exercising had given me a new lease of life that I had not expected. I had learnt to respect it (and abuse it at the start) It now has a place in my day to day life, or week to week, as I no longer have the need to work out on a daily basis, not if I don’t want to.

What started with a six or ten-minute run,
with a few ups and down along the way,
culminated in competing in a local 10k race.

I know that not everything can last forever and certain things have a place and a time. I look back fondly at those times and sometimes even think it would be nice to revisit them. Alas, I fear that might never be the case.  I know it should be a case of ‘Never say never’ but in truth, I have no reason to go back there.

Exercising your body before your mind is still a sentiment I stand by but for me it was a means to an end. It was the start of a ten year learning curve that has led me to where I am today.

The long and the short of it was that exercising my body had given me my mind back.

Sycamore McBride.