Harden Your Body, Ease Your Mind

By P. Myatt Murphy

When you're under stress, your body reacts by priming the muscles for action. Getting physical gives your body the action it craves.

But even if you've relieved the physical tension in your body, that doesn't mean you've reduced the knot in your noggin. "Why and how you exercise is far more important than just exercising when it comes to mental stress," says Paul J. Rosch, M.D., president of the American Institute of Stress and clinical professor of medicine and psychiatry at New York Medical College. In fact, approaching exercise the wrong way can actually escalate your mental stress. Here's how to work your muscles and "unwork" your mind.


Get Some Fresh Air
From a training standpoint, the difference between indoor and outdoor exercise doesn't mean much to your body. But it can have a big impact on how you burn off stress. Georg Eifert, Ph.D., professor of clinical psychology at West Virginia University, studied the effects environment has on stress reduction during exercise. Three test groups were asked to run the same distance. The first group ran outdoors, the other two exercised indoors on treadmills while listening to either nature sounds or nothing but their heartbeats. At the end of the experiment, the outside runners felt not only more refreshed but also had measurably lower levels of a key stress hormone.

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