How Exercise Helps with Mental Health
Exercise is beneficial for mental health for many reasons, but one of the most important is that it helps us tolerate feeling bad, which is a game-changer for emotional well-being. Why is this important?
The key lies in understanding that trauma isn’t just catastrophic events you see on the news. It includes the various emotional wounds from childhood, family, school, and living in a culture steeped in fear of scarcity. When we are triggered by things like work challenges, financial stress, and conflicts in relationships, the distress comes from trauma being activated in our subconscious. If we don’t exercise, our capacity to endure these feelings diminishes, and the impact of trauma on our lives grows, because most of us are constantly being exposed to these kinds of stressors.
This mechanism was designed to protect us when we were cave people. In those days, we were constantly surrounded by danger from animals and the elements. If we didn’t immediately respond when a tiger was nearby, we could easily die. For this reason, our animal brains are programmed to make us feel more and more agitated when we don’t deal with threats that it perceives.
The Modern-Day Tiger
We don’t face literal tigers today. Our lives are actually quite safe, for the most part. Instead, our enemies are the shadows of past experiences—rejection, shame, helplessness, terror, feeling unlovable. These feelings and memories often stay buried because they’re too painful to confront. Yet, our animal brain remains aware of them, because it thinks they could kill us. When challenges happen with work, finances, relationships, or simply from living in a world filled with signals that we are not good enough, pretty enough, or secure enough, these buried feelings are constantly triggered. Our animal brain tries to grab our attention by making us feel anxious, edgy, and defensive, which makes navigating life more difficult. But because the actual source of the threat is buried outside of our awareness, we don’t know how to respond, and now we feel really bad and don’t know how to fix it.
To escape this discomfort, we often turn to coping mechanisms: scrolling social media, binge-watching TV, overeating, shopping, drinking, overworking, or fixating on arguments or world events. While these behaviors temporarily give us a sense of pleasure or control, they aren’t healthy and they don’t address the root problem: our unresolved trauma. When the distractions end, the bad feelings return, often more intensely. This is intentional — our animal brain thinks we are cave people lounging around while a tiger stalks us, and it uses increasing levels of intensity to make us stop what we’re doing and address the threat. This can easily spiral into addiction, burnout, or mental illness.
How Exercise Helps
Exercise changes this dynamic. Many of us avoid it because it is strenuous and uncomfortable, but therein lies its value. The “pain” of physical exertion signals to our animal brain that we are actively fighting for our survival. This aligns with what it wants, so it rewards us by bathing our brains in uplifting neurotransmitters such as dopamine. This makes us feel positive, productive, and confident, with effects that last far longer than those from unhealthy coping behaviors.
Regular vigorous exercise sends a clear message to your animal brain that you’re staying ahead of threats. Over time, this reduces the urgency of the brain’s alarm signals, making it easier to manage daily life. This creates a feedback loop where you can make other changes to reduce how often your trauma gets triggered, such as moving to a less stressful or more lucrative job, avoiding exposure to harmful advertising and content, or restructuring your finances, relationships, or living situation, leading to greater peace of mind.
Beyond Coping: Fixing the Leak
While exercise is powerful, it’s based on the idea that compensating for trauma is the best we can do. This is like pumping up a leaky car tire every morning so you can drive during the day. Wouldn’t it be better to fix the leak?
Healing trauma is like removing the tiger altogether. When the animal brain no longer perceives threats, it naturally becomes peaceful and calm. The urge to engage in unhealthy coping behaviors reduces because there’s no underlying discomfort to escape from. Exercise, then, becomes a way to feel even more amazing—not just a means of staying functional.
If this resonates with you and you’d like to explore how to resolve trauma at its root, contact me. Let’s work together to create lasting peace of mind.
