Exercise to Relieve Stress

My friend went to a stress seminar and she learned something very interesting.  Namely, she learned that stress is the body's fight or flight response to potentially harmful stimuli.  Stress actually helps us in those times of extreme duress because it energizes us to take action, to do something. 

In the old days, when we lived in the jungle or had to deal with real animal predators, this response was very useful to us, and helped us to survive.  Nowadays, when our jungle is more steel in nature and our fears more imagined, we still feel that fight or flight response to unwanted stimuli.  The only problem now is that we don't react to it.  That is, we don't move, or take action.  We just sit there and endure it.  That means that we create that energy, and instead of acting to let it out, we trap it in. 

That repressed energy then ends up hurting us physically and mentally and emotionally.  So how do you let go of this energy so that it doesn't harm you?  The best way, said the stress expert to my friend, is to simply exercise.  If the whole reason we feel stress is so that we can act, and do something, if we do nothing, then that stress remains with us.  And if we keep feeling stress and bottling it up, that compounds all that energy on top of previous bottled energy, and harms us more and more each day we keep it in.  However, if we just exercise thirty minutes a day, we give ourselves an outlet to let that trapped energy out. 

Now that's a good reason to exercise.  If you told me that exercising would relieve all my stress, I would do it in a heartbeat.  It's that easy?  It's that simple?  I'd do it just to feel good after.  That's positive reinforcement.  That's something I could hold on to and feel good about.  For the past few decades, we've made exercise a bad word, a bad idea by associating it primarily with weight loss.  And so people feel that it's more of a punishment than a pleasure.  That bad reputation makes us dread doing it and means that we do it even less.  If we could now associate exercise with stress relief instead, I think we could convince a lot more people to go ahead and take up the towel.