13 Vital Reasons You Need Exercise For Your Holistic Healing And Wellness

7. Can Help To Destress Your Mind And Body 

Exercise can help to relieve chronic stress and tension from the body and mind. Exercise is a healthy coping mechanism for stress, and can replace more harmful or destructive habits that you may have been using to cope with stress such as addiction, alcoholism, smoking, excessive shopping, or mindless social media engagement. 

A medical journal by the British Journal of Health Psychology notes that physical activity is related to better mood and reduced stress.⁷ 

Not only is stress uncomfortable for the mind but chronic stress wreaks havoc on your body, holistic health and overall wellness too. 

In 1993, Bruce McEwen and Eliot Stellar formulated the term ‘allostatic overload’ to represent the consequences of chronic and repeated stress. 

Allostatic load is regarded as cumulative physiological damage to the body as a result of prolonged, chronic, or recurring stress. This is mainly due to the heightened or overly fluctuating neuroendocrine response of the body which results in an unsettled nervous system and unbalanced hormones. 

A medical journal by the European Journal of Pharmacology explains that acute stress responses are a normal function that is important for adaptation and survival.⁸

Your cardiovascular, autonomic, neural, metabolic, and immune systems respond to minor stress and behave accordingly so that you can endure changes in the natural environment.

However, chronic or repeated stress can both encourage and provoke pathophysiologies such as diseases, disorders, and abnormalities through the dysregulation of these very same biological systems that would usually protect you.⁸ 

Not only that, but the strain of coping with chronic and repeated stress can cause other harmful behavioural changes such as escapism through smoking, drinking alcohol, drugs, eating disorders, and disturbed sleep.

Medical research shows that even though chronic stress results in changes in the amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex areas of the brain, the effects are mainly reversible if the chronic stress only lasts for weeks. But, the jury is still out on the effects of long-term stress that lasts months and years. It is theorized that long-term stress lasting for months or years could possibly have irreversible effects on your brain.⁸

8. It Helps With Muscle Strength And Flexibility

A well-balanced exercise routine helps you to maintain good muscle strength, flexibility, and cardiovascular endurance. For example, you could opt for a mix of weight training, resistance training, aerobic exercise, yoga, and cycling to get a good balance of building and maintaining muscle strength, flexibility, and cardiovascular fitness.

There are mental, emotional, and energetic links between how we approach our body and movement, and how we move through the world and respond to life.

Weight training helps to build physical and inner strength, yoga helps to build physical, emotional and mental flexibility for swift adaptation, and dance helps to nurture creativity, playfulness, and the ability to freely flow through life.

If you’d like to learn more about how to create a good exercise routine, then check out my article here.

9. Can Aid In Addiction Recovery

Exercise and movement can play a helping hand in coping with addiction and managing recovery. Addiction recovery involves a great deal of mindfulness along with being connected to your body, senses and emotions. 

Consciously understanding your emotions and senses helps you to feel what you’re really feeling in the moment. This mindful understanding of what you’re feeling in your mind and body helps you to process the input, feeling, emotion, or sensation as opposed to using your crutch of choice to escape, disassociate or numb yourself.

Exercise and movement, in particular, help you to become connected to your body and to the emotions and feelings that you store in your body. 

The development of this mindful connection helps you understand what you’re feeling and when you might need to pay attention and process emotions, thoughts or feelings as opposed to resorting to addictive habits and behaviours.

Being tuned into your body and mind helps you to avoid triggers, and notice when you’re being triggered so that you can self-soothe and rewrite previous addictive habits.

10. Make Better Decisions 

Exercise helps you to make much better decisions because it improves cognitive function. 

A medical journal by Frontiers in Psychology notes that physical exercise benefits cognitive function, well-being, and helps to protect against neurodegeneration.⁹

It also notes that moderate exercise helps to improve memory and cognitive elasticity, whilst intense exercise helps to improve the rate of information processing.⁹

Overall, having a good regular exercise routine that includes moderate and high-intensity physical activity helps you to think and process information with more clarity and make better decisions because your cognitive function is better.

11. Improves Sexual Confidence And Libido

Having a regular moderate exercise routine and good physical activity level can help to increase sexual confidence and sexual self-esteem. When you look better, feel strong, and supple, you also tend to feel much sexier and more confident in your body. 

And when you feel sexier in your own skin and more confident in your body, your libido can often increase in correlation.

Exercise also helps to move stagnant energy through the energy channels and chakras, along with svadhistana chakra, or the sacral chakra, which is responsible for passion, creativity, and sexual energy.

If you’d like to learn more about sexual awakening for women, then check out my article here.

12. Increased Energy And Sense Of Vitality

There is the common assumption that exercise wears you out and makes you tired. And whilst this can be true in some cases, and even temporarily directly after exercising—on the whole, moderate and regular exercise increases your energy and gives you a more intense sense of vitality.

When you connect to your body and have a consistent physical activity or movement routine it makes you feel strong, supple, vivacious, and alive. 

A medical journal by Sports Medicine notes that clinical studies suggest there is a correlation between exercise and reduced feelings of tiredness, fatigue, and low energy compared to inactive peers.¹º

13. Helps To Manage Weight And Fat

If managing your weight and body fat percentage is of importance to you, then exercise and physical activity are an obvious benefit for you.

The 2021 Health Survey for England calculated that approximately 40% of adults in England are overweight, and approximately 26% are obese.¹²

In the United Kingdom, the treatment of obesity costs the NHS approximately $6 billion annually and is set to rise to over $9 billion.¹³ A medical journal by Progress in Cardiovascular Diseases reports that obesity is a public health concern.¹¹ 

It also notes that obese individuals are at high risk for a variety of cardiovascular diseases such as stroke, coronary heart disease, and heart failure. The American Heart Association recommends weight loss for overweight and obese individuals to help decrease the risk of cardiovascular diseases and conditions. 

The physical activity guidelines of a medical journal—Progress in Cardiovascular Diseases—recommend either high physical activity or exercise in all overweight and obese treatment plans because of their association with a variety of different cardiovascular benefits.¹¹

Whilst medical research by the Journal of Education and Health Promotion reports that the combination of obesity and inactivity has resulted in a higher number of people suffering from a variety of sexual dysfunctions.¹⁴ Their study supports growing evidence that there is a positive association between physical fitness, exercise, sexual function, and sexual health.

Not only is exercise good for managing weight loss, obesity, and cardiovascular health, but it can also increase sexual health for overweight and clinically obese individuals too. 

Conclusion 

Did you realise that exercise and daily physical activity were so vital for holistic healing and wellness? What are your favourite ways to keep active and healthy? Let me know in the comments.