Life as a dentist can place a huge strain on your mental health. But with the help of exercise, you can make things a lot easier on yourself.
You don’t need to be a gym addict to see the benefits from exercise and it doesn’t take long to start seeing results.
Keep reading and you’ll learn mental health benefits of exercise. By the time you’re finished, you’ll feel a lot better about your ability to handle stress in the future.
Let’s begin!
The Importance of Doing What You Can Manage
For a lot of people, exercise can seem very intimidating. This is especially the case if they have very little personal experience with exercise. If you fall into this camp, you need to take a moment to reassure yourself that everything is going to be okay.
You don’t have to run a marathon to see the benefits from exercise.
As long as you’re moving in some form or another, you should see improvements in your mental and physical health.
You also shouldn’t worry about being self-conscious when exercising at your local gym. There are very few people, if any, that will judge you for running or cycling slowly in the gym. The ones that do judge you aren’t worth paying attention to.
With that said, let’s take a look at some exercise benefits.
Improved Sleep
Bad sleep can compound mental health problems as well as physical health problems.
If you have a bad sleep, you’re more likely to make mistakes when you’re working. If you make mistakes, you’ll find yourself falling into a deeper pit of despair. This can cause you to have an even worse sleep which leads to you making even more mistakes at work.
With the help of exercise, you can break the cycle. It’s worth noting that outside of exercise, you should still take some steps to improve your sleep.
This might include investing in light-diffusing curtains or blinds so your room is dark enough for you get a good sleep. You might want to try earplugs so you don’t find yourself waking up due to sounds outside your home.
You may even want to invest in an app that can help you wake up at the right time. You might have to pay for it, but think about the value they provide. If a certain app can help you wake up every day refreshed, it might be worth spending that initial $5 or so.
Better Physical Endurance
Another benefit of exercise is that it can improve your levels of physical endurance.
This is helpful when you consider that your mental health is likely going to be worse when you’re tired. You’re more likely to make mistakes or snap at people.
But if your physical endurance levels are up, you’ll be in a better mood throughout the rest of your day. This can help improve your productivity levels too.
If you want to improve your physical endurance, you may need to do some kind of exercise that pushes you.
It doesn’t need to leave you feeling as though you’re completely exhausted, but you do need to feel like you’re getting a workout. This will train your body to be stronger so you’ll have some extra capacity to work with during your normal day.
Improved Ability to Think
One of the good things about exercise is that it can improve your ability to think about things that might be bothering you.
This is because when you’re exercising, you’ll have the chance to mull over problems that have been gnawing away at you. Exercising will provide you with the opportunity to think about a solution to these problems.
Additionally, for a lot of people, their mental health often suffers because they spend their entire day looking at a screen. Exercise will give you a break from this.
You might want to think about developing a workout playlist you can use during your exercise routines. Empowering music, combined with physical activity, can have a massive impact on your mental health.
If you want to make things easier, consider investing in some Bluetooth headphones. You then won’t have to deal with headphone wires whilst you’re trying to complete a workout.
Should You Spend Money on a Personal Trainer?
A personal trainer can help you deal with any doubts you might have surrounding exercise.
Finding a good personal trainer isn’t always easy and you first need to define what you want them to help you with. For most people, you just need someone that can improve your general fitness.
A lot of gyms will provide a service where they’ll assign a personal trainer to you. You might need to pay for this service, but the return on investment can be worth the money.
You can always switch to another personal trainer if you want to. If you find the existing one isn’t a good fit for you, consider what you didn’t like about the service. Keep it in mind when trying to find your next personal trainer.
You can always find a personal trainer outside of the gym, too. If you perform a quick online search you should be able to find someone local that can help you. Or, you could ask your friends if they know of anyone that might be a good fit for you.
Maintaining Consistency
Consistency is of huge importance when it comes to exercising. If you’re not able to exercise consistently, you’re not going to feel all the benefits that you should.
There’s also the option of exercising with a friend. They can act as an accountability partner. Both of you might be in the same situation, where you both need to exercise to improve your life.
By working together you can help motivate each other so that you stick with the exercise.
You also need to make sure you set aside time to exercise. If you don’t do this then the odds of you exercising can fall quite dramatically as it will become something you just put off. If you need some advice on how to schedule exercise, check out the post from this company to get some actionable tips.
Keeping Yourself Motivated
To keep yourself motivated, you might want to think about tracking your results and setting a goal. The most obvious thing you can track is your weight. But you might not need to lose weight, so tracking it might not be ideal.
But you can track other metrics. If you’re using the exercise bike, you could measure how long it takes you to reach a certain distance. You could then work towards improving this over time.
Of course, you should only do this if its fun. You don’t want to make sure you’re enjoying your exercise. Otherwise, you won’t be improving your mental health as much as you should be.
Experimenting with Other Kinds of Exercise
Over time, you’ll want to experiment with other kinds of exercise. This is helpful if you want to keep your exercise exciting.
One of the easiest ways you can do this is by exercising outdoors. This can be a great option if you live in a rural area.
If you normally run on a treadmill, why not plan an outdoor run? Or, why not go on an outdoor bike ride? You could even go on a hike.
If you’re going to plan some outdoor activities, make sure you’re careful. There are a lot more risks when exercising outdoors. For instance, there’s the danger of a traffic accident when going out for a run.
For this reason, it’s a good idea to stay away from busy roads. You might also want to let friends know where you’ve gone. You may even want to enable location tracking on your phone, so someone can keep an eye on you.
Consider investing in a high-vis jacket, if you’re going to be doing any kind of running when it is dark.
Time to Experience the Mental Health Benefits of Exercising?
As a dentist, you have to deal with a lot of things on a day to day basis. This can put a huge strain on your mental health. But with the help of exercise, you can help reduce the amount of mental strain you’re feeling.
In this post, we’ve taken a look at some of the mental health benefits of exercising. You need to make sure you pick an exercise plan that you can stick with. You might want to work with a personal trainer to make things easier on yourself.
It’s also essential you exercise in a consistent manner. Otherwise, you’ll struggle to experience the mental health benefits that exercise has to offer.
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