Wellness
- Overcoming your worry
There
are a lot of us that spend too much time worrying.
According to The National Institute on Mental
Health, approximately 40 million American adults
ages 18 and older, or about 18.1 percent of people
in this age group in a given year, have an anxiety
disorder. Anxiety prevents us from being happy,
can cause physical ailments, and keeps us from
taking healthy risks that may improve the quality
of our lives.
Worry
may be a trait that is passed on genetically from
your family or it may be an outcome of your environment.
One or both of your parents may suffer from intense
anxiety and you learn to be anxious because it
is modeled for you as a way of living. The worry
is usually driven by a need to have a guaranteed
outcome. Of course there are very few situations
that result in a sure-fire conclusion. Therefore
the worrying does not seem to have any purpose
or any positive effects in one’s life.
The
worrying can become habitual where you immediately
turn to the feelings of anxiousness in your stomach,
the endless spinning of your thoughts and the
sense that disaster is about to occur. You believe
that there is not an alternative to this way of
being because you have been processing information
in this manner your entire life.
However,
there is a means to transform the worrying to
peace through physical exercise. There are many
studies that conclude that physical exercise brings
a state of well being
and
calmness. There is research that indicates that
working out as little as 15 minutes at a time
will enable you to reach this state.
First,
make an appointment with your physician to clear
you for participating in physical exercise. While
you are walking, running, biking or other aerobic
activity do the following:
A
regular exercise program will help ease your worrying.
You will notice that the confusion that is created
by anxiety will decrease or dissipate. You will
discover that issues that once seemed impossible
to approach, much less resolve, and become much
easier to work through. You can learn to capture
this peaceful feeling that you obtain from exercising
while you are sedentary. This process won’t
happen overnight, but it can with practice.
A
regular exercise program can lead you to living
a life where you focus on living happily in the
present instead of worrying about the future or
dreading the past.