Beautiful Readers,
Sometimes I think I'm a genius. Not about everything, but about certain things like men, women, popular trends, and what's good for you. Does this help me in my own life? Not a bit. But it sure does leave me feeling mighty smart sometimes.
So just try to guess what can be helpful to you that I predicted long ago was getting a bad rap it didn't always deserve! Stress! Yes that's right folks-- that fine chemical cocktail that courses through your body when you are being chased by a tiger or even just thinking about one.
Now don't get too excited, there are several common categories of stress that you should make every effort to avoid.
The above kinds of stress are bad. In fact they are so bad that they can literally affect your brain in a way leaving you less smart--the chemicals that are released in the above situations just go right ahead and shrink your neurons. These kinds of stress are also malevolent enough to increase your blood pressure and your risk of heart attack. You should work proactively to adjust your life so that you are not experiencing these kinds of stress.
But normal stress, that good old spike of adrenaline, and maybe a little follow up of cortisol now and again, can be just ducky! It can temporarily help you access information that you had previously forgotten, can build brain cells, and can make your muscles activate--as long as you have a reasonably good attitude about your stress.
What got me thinking about good stress versus bad stress recently, was the familiar sight of a woman about my age (that would be middle-aged for those of you who don't know) running through Prospect Park and looking absolutely miserable. Not the invigorating kind of "hurts so good" kind of miserable that you see on some runners, where you can tell they want to puke and that they are damn proud of it, but more of a "If I don't keep running, I will have failed." kind of thing. Depressing and with all my good fitness-y intuition, it felt wrong--with a capital W.
Now, some fitness types say that you HAVE to love your exercise to get through it and to get the most out of it, and, of course, that would be great, much like loving to floss would be great, but I have also seen people make huge improvements in their lives by starting to exercise regularly and just living with their hatred of it for awhile.
In my experience, it doesn't seem to matter much what attitude you start out with, love, hate, whatever,--the people who ultimately get past the misery while they are exercising do seem to benefit more. Clients who take ownership of the experience and believe that exercise is something that they personally want to do, even when it seems hard, overall benefit far more than the folks who may be exercising to please someone else, or because they think they have to. Exercising to appease a coach, husband, doctor, boyfriend,or that little voice in their head telling them they're fat, never seems to work out for long, and often has a weirdly un-relaxing effect, which always seems strange because positive exercise is the most relaxing thing (besides meditation) that I know of.
And now I know why. This weekend I ran into Newsweek's cover article Who Says Stress is Bad For
You which, while careful to clarify the pitfalls to ongoing stress, also illuminates some of the thing that can mitigate it's negative effects, and also describes how we can use it to our advantage.
This quote in particular seemed to describe the plight of the runner in the park.
For all of the science's shortfalls, there's animal research that suggests why something that should lower stress can actually cause stress if it's done in the wrong spirit. In a classic study, scientists put two rats in a cage, each of them locked in a running wheel. The first rat could exercise whenever he liked. The second was yoked to the first, forced to run when his counterpart did. Exercise, like meditation, usually tamps down stress and encourages neuron growth, and indeed, the first rat's brain bloomed with new cells. The second rat, however, lost brain cells. He was doing something that should have been good for his brain, but he lacked one crucial factor: control. He could not determine his own "workout" schedule, so he didn't perceive it as exercise. Instead, he experienced it as a literal rat race.
Our runner probably felt like she "had to run" that morning. Maybe it was the only time she would be free to do it that day, maybe she was tired and didn't feel like doing it at all. My advice? If I were her, I guess I would have tried to adjust either my schedule or my attitude--and if I couldn't have gotten over the misery, I probably would have headed home. A fitness coach recommending bailing on your morning run? Certainly. Sometimes. But not being able to work through what is sometimes known as "the suck" should be a lesson about the importance of making sure that you are feeling that your exercise is working for you and not vice versa, because with the right attitude and opportunity, fitness should make you feel great.
Fondly, Alix Florio, President; Beautiful Fitness
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