Cleanse Your Mind While You Exercise
Exercise helps thinking through problems
A lot has been written about how exercise helps to cleanse your body of toxins by keeping it operating at optimum levels. But exercise can also help to cleanse your mind.
Exercise can help cleanse our minds at various levels depending on the intensity of the workout.
Obviously if you’re doing a 100-meter dash then there’s not a lot of opportunity for deep thought, and if you’re swimming a mile and fatigued then your focus may be more of survival and not drowning than wrestling with your last fruitless dialogue with your teenager.
But even in these extremes you’ve provided a means for cleansing.
Many people use exercise to remove themselves from a stressful existence. An activity such as a team sport or playing tennis requires focus on others, so for the time you exercise you’ve provided your mind relief and a chance to rejuvenate.
You’ve cleansed your mind albeit for a defined period. If done regularly and enough this exercise focus can aid a mind shift in resolving deep ingrained problems.
Many elite athletes work out issues through their exercise routines. This can be a problem related to their confidence or competition or an issue in life their experiencing. And we’ve all heard of the ability of professional athletes to visualize performing at a high level or winning a championship as a way to prepare for the actual competition. This visualization allows them to focus on the possibilities rather than dwell on negative outcomes.
Now take this down a few levels to people like us and while we may not be looking to go for a gold medal – just finishing would be nice – most of us can visualize what that might look like. If you’re doing exercise for weight loss then visualize your end goal as you perform your workout.
Walking has many benefits and is good for the brain because it increases blood circulation and hence the oxygen and glucose to this muscle. Because it’s not usually strenuous on other muscles then there’s more oxygen and glucose that reaches your brain and it seems to help you think clearer. If I’m struggling with a particularly difficult problem then a long walk in a scenic park is conducive to my problem solving process.
Boredom however is toxic. If you’re bored while exercising then this can unravel any good in the cleansing of your mind. Many people find running or even walking on a treadmill boring. They can’t wait for their allotted time or distance to finish, and so little healing or problem solving is taking place as the mind is consumed with just getting to the end.
Please do find an exercise you enjoy, and this can be jogging or cycling on country roads, or swimming laps, or even skipping – don’t laugh, boxers when training skip for 20-30 minutes at a time, and it becomes so second-nature for them they can drift away and think about upcoming competition.
Recent studies have shown exercising improves memory and functions such as planning, organization, solving puzzles and other intellectual tasks. There is also mounting evidence – still ongoing studies on this one – exercise can have a protective effect on the brain and may even help prevent dementia including Alzheimer’s disease.
I hope by now you can see how exercise can be used to cleanse your mind of the clutter that gets lodged from our daily existence, and provide an opportunity to think clearly about those positive changes we all want to make in our life.
Erika Slater, CH
Free At Last Hypnosis
erika@smoke-free-at-last.com
www.smoke-free-at-last.com
508-529-2490
Filed Under: Health
