How Physical Exercise Helps My Mental Health

Content Warning: Fears of health problems, disease, and death will be discussed.

I’ve had some degree of health anxiety all my life. I remember reacting with fear to what turned out to be fairly trivial symptoms since at least I was a teenager. But from the latter part of 2012 to the first few months of 2013 I experienced one of the worst times of my life, extreme anxiety about my health, every day, or at least I don’t remember a day during this time when I didn’t experience it, for about six months. But I managed to bring it down to a manageable level, and now my health anxiety probably bothers me less than my other anxiety issues.

What started the really bad health anxiety in 2012, near as I can tell, is because I was and still am overweight. I had really horrible thoughts about how my overeating was going to cause me to have a heart attack or a stroke. I was terrified that I would die. So, I went on a diet, and I lost three stone, hurray!

Except, the health anxiety was still there. A little dizzy? I’m having a stroke! Slight chest pain? I’m having a heart attack! A headache? That’s a brain tumor! And this was what it was like, pretty much every day, for a period of about six months. Fearing every day that I would either get a horrific illness, or die. And that was my life, always tired, because when I went to bed I was kept awake all night by worry.

After a few months of this, I remember I had a dental appointment, and back then my anxiety about going to the dentist was much worse than what it was now (this issue was largely solved by going to the dentist much more regularly, therefore taking the fear out of it.) My anxiety about going to the dentist was really bad, so, I started walking really fast. I can’t remember how long I did it for, I think it must have been for a half an hour, and, the anxiety had greatly reduced. I had already had had some vague idea about how physical exercise could act as an anxiety suppressant, but just the act of doing a bit of fast walking made it easier to go to the dentist. And it got me thinking, could exercise be used to treat my health anxiety?

I started doing a lot of research on the benefits of regular exercise on health anxiety, and the general consensus seemed to be that it was extremely effective. I watched many you tube videos where people who had quite bad health anxiety managed to bring it down to a manageable level through exercise. Perhaps I had finally hit on some kind of solution!

So I started fast walking every day. I can’t remember how long I did it for every day, but I’m pretty sure it was for at least half an hour, and it wasn’t long before the health anxiety had greatly reduced, and I felt like I had my life back. I was so tired after fast walking, that when I went to bed, I would actually sleep well. The feedback loop of anxiety meaning I didn’t sleep which in turn increased my anxiety had been broken.

As my weight reduced and my energy went up, the fast walking just started to feel like regular walking, so that’s when I got into running. It was a slow process at first, because my tendency was not so much to run but to hit the ground as hard as I could with my feet, so I took it at a very slow speed at first, and then got to the point where I was able to run effectively. It got to the point where I ran up Patrick’s Hill, a hill so steep that if it was any steeper it wouldn’t be a hill, it would be a wall.

The intensity of my panic attacks reduced a great deal. I don’t think I’ll ever be free of them, but, it’s been a long time since I’ve had a panic attack so bad that it felt like I was going to die. They are still there, and they’re annoying, but they’re just not as severe as they were.

In 2014 I had a leg injury, and was unable to run for a good bit of time, so that’s when I got into cycling. I much preferred the cycling to the running, because with a bike you can go on an adventure, while running is so tiring that you can’t really run further than you can walk, on a bike I can go as much as forty miles in a single day, and some of my fondest memories have been of going for an adventure on the bike.

Physical exercise helps me a lot with not just anxiety, but the fact that I have an overactive brain. At the moment I’m spending a lot of time learning about space probes, mainly the Voyager, Gallileo and Cassini probes, which I’ve found to be a very rewarding experience. But, the problem is I find learning about fascinating topics to be addictive, so yesterday I was learning about these topics so much that I ended up exhausting myself, and still I couldn’t stop! So I knew what to do, get the bike out of the shed and cycle for an hour and a half through the beautiful sunshine. When I’m anxious, or upset, or when my brain just won’t shut the hell up for five minutes, the bike has been my best friend.

In 2016, I was hit by really bad seasonal affective disorder during the Winter. Every day I was getting out of bed knowing I would feel miserable for the entire day. So during this time I was going on cycles that lasted about an hour and a half every day. The seasonal affective disorder was quite bad, so I still felt terrible, but the exercise and getting out in the open air lifted my spirits just a little, and that was worth a lot.

Of course, it has become a double edged sword, because for reasons even people who are experts on bikes can’t explain, my bike is constantly beset with mechanical problems, no matter what I do, so now my travel anxiety means that if I go too far on the bike I become worried about being stranded ten or twenty miles from home. And my brain just doesn’t have a useful feature that says, “If that happens you’ll get home somehow”, no, my brain imagines that if that happens, I will be out all night, terrified, in the freezing cold, with no hope! Damn you travel anxiety, this was going so well!

I don’t believe if somebody has an anxiety disorder or other mental health issue, that physical exercise will solve all of their problems. Indeed, in the early days of my cycling, when I felt bad, I would resolve to cycle more to get rid of the bad feelings. Sometimes it can be effective to increase your exercise regime as a way of dealing with a bout of anxiety induced insomnia, tire yourself out so you can get a bit of sleep. But I still had to get to a point where I didn’t fear having an anxiety attack as much, because I learned that no amount of physical exercise will stop them completely. So I had to get to a point where, usually, though not always, I can just say, “Oh, I feel dizzy for some reason, but it’s okay, it’s just my body being weird!”

I also don’t like how for every mental health problem under the sun, physical exercise is touted as a cure all, even for conditions which quite clearly cannot simply be treated with exercise! I think this attitude completely misunderstands the roll of exercise in mental health. Yes it can pull you out of a tough spot, as it did for me, but it won’t fix everything. Whatever your struggle is, exercise is one of many things that will help you along. It is not something that will fix everything by itself.

But it has helped me a lot. It brought my health anxiety down from nothing less than a nightmare to something I can deal with. And if the Winter brings back the dreaded seasonal affective disorder, I know that the bike will be there to give me a little bit of a boost. And when I’ve focused on something I’m passionate about to the point where I’ve just put myself into a state of frustration, whether it be the album I’m working on, learning about space exploration, or yes, even this blog, I know that a long cycle through the warm sunshine will help my overactive brain calm down a bit, if only for a short time.