Multi-Layered Benefits of Exercise
Hello everyone, wherever you are in the world!
For this week’s post, I was planning to write about three foundational practices that I have adapted over the years and that helped me in my mental health journey: exercise/working out, meditation, and journaling. Once I started writing the part on exercise, however, I realized that I had more to say about it than I had thought before and decided to dedicate a whole post to the topic.
Some of you may be rolling your eyes at this point. I don’t blame you. I know we have all been bombarded with articles and social media posts about the benefits of exercise. What I want to do, however, is to give you a personal take on this tried-and-true habit and tell you how it impacted my mental and physical health in addition to having some unexpected positive effects in other domains of my life.
Photo Credit: Victor Freitas
I started working out towards the end of 2006 when I was in college because I was very skinny. If I weren’t too embarrassed, I would put up photos here from that period, but I’ll spare you the horror. What started as a tool to look more like a human being rather than a scarecrow, however, evolved over the years into a key habit that helped me regulate and improve my physical and mental health while also instilling in me a sense of discipline that I could extrapolate and apply in other areas of my life.
Not surprisingly, I started with lifting weights because, well, my goal was to look better, and being a young 21-year-old male, I gravitated towards the “ideal” masculine stereotype, with large and bulging muscles. Once I saw some initial results, I became more motivated to stick with it, and over the years it turned into a habit. I am happy to look back and say that I did reach my initial goal of putting on more muscle mass and that I do not look like an undernourished kid anymore. My posture has also become infinitely better. Overall, even though I know that I will not be gracing the cover of Men’s Health magazine anytime soon, I feel more satisfied and confident about how I look and move in the world.
In tandem with the changes in my physique, were the changes in how I ate. When I first began working out, I had a pretty lousy diet that included a lot of junk food and soda. As I kept up with my exercise practice, however, I started to become more conscious of what I was doing when it came to eating. I made several incremental changes over the years, trying to cut back on the usual unhealthy stuff or limiting them as much as I could while making healthier choices (drinking more water, increasing my protein intake, etc…). I am not a 100% “clean eater” by any means or obsess too much about every single thing I put in my mouth but in general, maintaining my exercise practice certainly led me to make more conscious decisions about my overall nutrition which I hope will benefit me in the long run, especially as I get older.
Even more transformative, however, was that exercise has taught me the importance and value of consistent effort. In the past 17 years, I made a point of working out 3 to 5 times every week. Obviously, there were periods when I could not do it or keep up with my schedule, like when I was going through depressive periods in my life or when I was traveling for research purposes. I always came back to it, however, and witnessed first-hand how consistent practice paid off in the end.
The thing with exercise is that you never see the results right away. The best you would get is incremental progress. Even though it can be frustrating at first, over time I came to appreciate the whole beauty of it. What exercise ultimately taught me was that the only way for me to achieve any permanent results in life was to adopt a long-term perspective and keep working consistently until I reach my goals. It also showed me the necessity of staying with and pushing through discomfort if I wanted to achieve any kind of growth, whether it is personal or professional.
When I was writing my Ph.D. dissertation, for instance, I tried to apply this lesson by making myself sit down and write a certain number of words every day. No matter how much I did not want to do it, no matter how hard I felt it was going to be, I made a habit of showing up every day at my desk, just like I showed up in the gym, and started typing. And it worked. What initially started as a 200-word paragraph turned into a whole damn dissertation in three years through consistent effort (whether it was good or not, is another point, but at least it was good enough to get me my degree).
The same goes for therapy. As I have written before, my therapeutic process was and continues to be full of ups and downs. For a long time, I was far away from seeing any type of results or improvements. But I kept showing up in my therapist’s office (and post-Covid in front of my computer or iPhone), week after week because I knew that the only way for me to improve and get better was to be consistent with my efforts. And yes, I attribute a lot of this to establishing a core exercise practice that I stuck to over the years.
Finally, through exercise, I also learned to focus on the craft and enjoy the process. As I got more and more into the habit of exercising, instead of worrying about a nebulous future goal, I tried to be more “present” with every training session, every set, and every rep that I was performing.
This is another highly “transferrable” principle that I try to apply in other domains of my life as much as I can. For instance, currently, I am working on turning my Ph.D. dissertation into a book manuscript, which is a long and daunting process. Instead of obsessing about the end result, however, I try to break it down and focus on one single aspect that I need to work on each day and let go of the rest. This mindset shift also allows me to actually enjoy the process of writing and working towards something that gives me joy and satisfaction.
I’ll wrap this up by saying that exercise has definitely been one of the most foundational and transformative practices of my life, which helped me in ways that I could not have foreseen when I first started as a skinny 21-year-old.
Until next week!