Exercising for lower stress
I don’t do enough about the ‘low stress’ part of this site, but I intend to correct that, starting now.
One of the things I’ve started doing in the past couple of weeks is exercising regularly. What’s the benefits of regular exercise? Lower stress, for one thing. Several more reasons are outlined in this helpful post, such as more physical endurance, clearer thinking, strong immune system and other reasons.
What I’ve started, essentially, is this:
- run for half an hour a day, 3 days a week (Mondays, Fridays and Saturdays)
- some basic dumbbell exercises twice a week (Tuesdays and Thursdays)
- rowing or running for half an hour after the dumbbells
I might even start attending kung fu or kickboxing classes once a week - if so, I’ll not run on the day I do that. Because I live in a pretty tight space compard to when I lived in the US, dumbbells instead of barbells are the better option for me - they take up far less room and I just need a chair instead of a large weight bench.
Apart from helping to lose weight and eat better, the idea of all this is to burn off frustrations and have ‘me time’ to think about things while I’m doing this stuff. More importantly, the exercise allows me to think of nothing at all except what I’m doing right at that moment. Dodging uneven pavement and curbs while I’m running or pausing correctly while I’m on the dumbbells occupies everything I’m doing at that moment, for that half hour or hour. It’s just like meditation, which I’ve tried before but could never concentrate fully on 
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