Fitness
and Wellness
Overcoming
your worry
There
are a lot of us that spend too much time worrying. According
to The National Institute on Mental Health, approximately
40 million American adults ages 18 and older, or about 18.1
percent of people in this age group in a given year, have
an anxiety disorder. Anxiety prevents us from being happy,
can cause physical ailments, and keeps us from taking healthy
risks that may improve the quality of our lives.
Worry
may be a trait that is passed on genetically from your family
or it may be an outcome of your environment. One or both
of your parents may suffer from intense anxiety and you
learn to be anxious because it is modeled for you as a way
of living. The worry is usually driven by a need to have
a guaranteed outcome. Of course there are very few situations
that result in a sure-fire conclusion. Therefore the worrying
does not seem to have any purpose or any positive effects
in one’s life.
The
worrying can become habitual where you immediately turn
to the feelings of anxiousness in your stomach, the endless
spinning of your thoughts and the sense that disaster is
about to occur. You believe that there is not an alternative
to this way of being because you have been processing information
in this manner your entire life.
However,
there is a means to transform the worrying to peace through
physical exercise. There are many studies that conclude
that physical exercise brings a state of well being and
calmness. There is research that indicates that working
out as little as 15 minutes at a time will enable you to
reach this state.
First,
make an appointment with your physician to clear you for
participating in physical exercise. While you are walking,
running, biking or other aerobic activity do the following:
A
regular exercise program will help ease your worrying. You
will notice that the confusion that is created by anxiety
will decrease or dissipate. You will discover that issues
that once seemed impossible to approach, much less resolve,
and become much easier to work through. You can learn to
capture this peaceful feeling that you obtain from exercising
while you are sedentary. This process won’t happen
overnight, but it can with practice.
A
regular exercise program can lead you to living a life where
you focus on living happily in the present instead of worrying
about the future or dreading the past.
