Many teenage kids go to their local gym, usually with a friend or, in some cases, multiple friends. I am one of these teenagers who go to the local gym with friends almost every day. The gym provides mental and physical strength to people of all ages and allows people to grow as people. The gym is beneficial to everyone’s health in every way possible.
PMC gave the statistic that “Aerobic exercises, including jogging, swimming, cycling, walking, gardening, and dancing, have been proven to reduce anxiety and depression.” Aerobic exercises help because they increase blood circulation to the brain and are accompanied by an influence on the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, which is the psychological reactivity stress.
Many people suffer from mental health conditions such as body dysmorphia, where the person is unhappy with their appearance and worries about their flaws. The gym is the one place where people could work on fixing those flaws, and getting over things related to body dysmorphia to combine with helping their mental health. This is why many people will find themselves in the gym to help healthily get over their body dysmorphia.
Haven reported that “When a person gets regular physical activity, it can improve their sleep. According to the Sleep Foundation, exercise can not only reduce the time that it takes for a person to fall asleep, but it can also help the quality of that sleep.” Being physically active allows you to sleep more and get a better night of sleep solely due to being physically active. Getting more and better sleep, helps your mental health dramatically due to sleep deprivation, and sleep loss goes accordingly with many traumatic mental health issues.
The gym gives motivation to people to be better. Having a consistent gym schedule, allows people to be motivated, determined, and have goals for their improvement. Staying on a healthy schedule allows people to be self-managed, and improve themselves, which will alter into helping their mental health.
The gym has helped my friends and me become more active and stronger due to us being on a healthy schedule going 5 days a week. The gym has been the way for me to build social connections with people from different schools, and meet new people that have influenced me to keep going. These social connections are what some people want to help increase their mental health, because of how it feels when you meet new people, and simply have conversations with them.
In some cases, mental health specialists may prescribe patients to exercise if they feel as if it will benefit them, which helps prove that the gym plays a role in helping people’s mental battery. There is a direct relationship between your body and your brain, so taking care of your body and staying healthy will bring your mental status up.
Even exercises such as yoga could help your mental health so much more than you could think, and this is simply because you are calm and stretching. While doing yoga you take deep breaths which help calm you down, and by doing this it helps relieve stress and anxiety, which both play a major role in mental health problems. These slight stretches help the mind to muscle connections deeply, and with this connection, it strengthens your mental status towards most stressors that you have going on at the time.
You could also participate in team stuff such as basketball at an open gym, or volleyball, and even just doing stuff with friends like lifting weights. By doing things that involve other people to work together it helps them become socially inclined. With talking and working together to do stuff you have to be socially responsible and accountable. These team activities help mental health a lot because of your building social connections, and making new friends by working as a team. I find that working as a team is the most beneficial to bringing your mental health up because some people don’t like talking to others, but when participating in team sports it helps build a social connection to break the barrier.
There are many more explanations of how exercising benefits your mental health but to keep it short, it provides social battery, and it is proven to bring blood circulation to your brain that helps calm the reactivity of stress. Then it also helps people relieve stress, and anxiety, and remain calm, which is good to do when you’re suffering from mental health issues. Finally, the gym provides motivation and goals to people, and by doing that it gives people the right mindset to better themselves which will ultimately better their mental health.
