Use Exercise to Prevent Depression and Anxiety
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A person who exercises regularly is clearly outgoing and therefore is able to remove the focus from within the self to the surroundings. This is a very healthy sign. By doing so a person definitely pushes the risk of mental illnesses such as anxiety and depression away.

You may straightaway ask the question as to the specific connection between exercise and these two disparate mental conditions. You may express surprise to even hypothetically consider a connection between them. But there truly exists such a connection.

To understand about this connect you need to understand the very nature of anxiety and depression. Both of them are mental conditions with depression preceding anxiety. Depression is a mental disorder in which the mind of a person is unable to balance the normal range of emotions, thoughts, and energy. Anxiety is a state of continual worry or extreme apprehension.

Both arise after high stress plagues the mind continuously for a long period of time. The person who suffers from anxiety and depression wallows all the time within the self and does not know how to come out of the severely depressed mental state he/she is in.

Except for genetically-induced depression and anxiety, the environmentally-induced form of the mental condition is caused because of continuous high mental stress. The depression and succeeding anxiety occurs because the mental stress has not been allowed to be relieved at all.

It is important to understand that mental stress needs to be relieved regularly. Otherwise, a person can easily fall prey to the twin scourges of depression and anxiety. This is where exercise comes in in a big way. When you exercise, you relieve the stress built up in your muscles and increase the heart rate that has great benefits for your physical health.

At the same time, the activity of exercise temporarily removes the attention of the mind away from the solely mental (stressful thoughts) and on the physical (health-wise beneficial). Thereby, it relieves the mental stress. Exercise builds up beta-endorphins and serotonin levels in your body. These play an important role in preventing depression and anxiety.

So what we find is that a person can easily prevent depression and anxiety from gaining a foothold in his/her mind by exercising regularly. In other words exercising regularly helps prevent the environmentally-induced variety of depression and anxiety. This is the connection between exercise and depression and anxiety. The form of exercise you do is not important because the real benefit of exercise is from the mental effect on the person rather than from any direct physical effect.

However, once you are already afflicted with the two harmful mental conditions, it becomes difficult to combat them. Doctors usually treat depression and anxiety with antidepressant medicines and cognitive behavior therapy.

Depressed people find it really very hard to concentrate on any form of physical activity, leave aside exercise. Moreover, the anti-depressants they take also have a mind-numbing effect which also increases inertia against exercise in them.

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