Move Yourself

My favorite place has always been the bush. I love to walk through it as often as I can - it's so beautiful, and there’s something I find calming about the sounds, and the smells. 

There’s no question that regular exercise has great range of well-documented benefits:

• Creates good endorphins in your body
• Improves your ability to manage stress
• Boosts your energy
• Reduces reliance on things like caffeine or sugar

When you choose to move your body on a daily basis, your body’s biochemistry produces a chemical call “tryptophan”.  Tryptophan helps our body do a range of different things, but as you go through the chemical pathway, tryptophan then converts into serotonin. Now, serotonin is a critical neurotransmitter that is produced primarily in our gut, and it travels from our gut, up to our brain. So while serotonin lives in our brain, it all begins with exercise and movement in our gut.  And most people are already aware that serotonin is a key chemical used in mood regulation and management. This is why exercise and gut health is critical to personal health, and wellbeing. 

The past few months have been quite difficult – with huge changes to daily life, worries about lockdowns, home school, working and staying healthy. If you’re anything like me (a regular human) then we’re all finding it's become more and more challenging to regulate and manage our own mood.

So how do we apply this knowledge?

One of the things that I go out of my way to do is to move every day, sometimes I just walk around the block, and I just do something short. Sometimes I go for a run, sometimes I'll be in the bush – but it’s all important to me so I can retain control of my mood.

I encourage you to make some kind of decision about how you're going to move every day. Look through your calendar, and figure out where you have 30 minutes to allocate some time to move. Then decide what it is that you want to do. Do you want to walk or jog? Do an online yoga program? How about riding your bike or scooter? What about boxing, tai chi, dancing, swimming…  What's your favourite way to move? Once you've got it locked in your calendar, and you've listed your favourite activities, then it becomes really easy to just do it each day. Especially if you have the discipline of just doing everything that's in your calendar.

So finding ways to move every day, is going to produce more serotonin, which means you're better able to manage your mood. You're going to feel good for a larger portion of time.

Something as basic as “walking” is totally accessible to you, it’s free, and absolutely achievable on a daily basis. It’s critical to our wellbeing as humans.

This is a huge topic, and something I cover in many of my online courses and coaching – more details are available if this interests you. In the meantime I invite you to register for our upcoming FREE webinar, as we launch our new Wellbeing Programme.