The numerous benefits of exercise are worth all the time and effort that’s invested in it. It’s an incredible habit to incorporate into daily life. Once you start experiencing its powerful effects, you’ll want to maintain a regular exercise routine to ensure that its benefits last.
Here’s a glimpse of the benefits of exercise as medicine and how to make it a habit.
Adopt the Habit of Exercise Through DIY Brain Surgery
Your habits have a powerful impact on your productivity levels. Our neural pathways fire automatically in response to environmental cues and are responsible for our abilities to create habits. So, our environment plays the all-important role of guiding our brains toward habit formation.
But habits are not always easy to inculcate. Forming them takes time, effort, willpower, determination, and perseverance. Nonetheless, when you finally cultivate good habits, you’ll realize that they’re worth all the time and effort.
Meditation and making incremental improvements can help you turn your exercise routine into a habit. Think of it as DIY brain surgery for implanting the habit of exercise into your brain.
Exercise and Productivity
Many of us find it difficult to improve our productivity. A key reason for it is today’s fast-paced world is changing too quickly for our bodies and brains to catch up.
We often procrastinate because our brain’s prefrontal cortexes haven’t become stronger than our limbic systems. The limbic system can easily fall prey to unproductive tasks like browsing the internet and multitasking.
Moreover, we get a low amount of physical activity nowadays which also negatively impacts our productivity.
The human brain has evolved only slightly since the Stone Age. But the human body hasn’t. Our bodies are designed to walk for miles each day so that we can hunt and gather food, not spend hours staring at screens.
These new unhealthy habits affect our work performance and productivity because we are less active than we should be. Also, we have more demands, distractions, and deadlines than ever.
Exercise is a miracle drug that offers an easy way for us to break free from this trap and reset our habits. It can also help us work on important tasks with better focus.
Other Benefits of Exercise
You may have come across a number of statistics telling you how beneficial exercise is for our body and mind. How does exercise work as a medicine and why is exercise so powerful? Also, what are the top 5 benefits of exercise?
Exercise has not five but at least seven impressive benefits. It impacts our health, energy, concentration, memory, mood, creativity, and productivity levels.
If you’re wondering why is exercise a miracle drug, it releases happy hormones like endorphins, dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine. These hormones improve our emotional and mental health. Exercise also reduces our levels of stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol.
Moreover, it stimulates our prefrontal cortex and promotes neuroplasticity which is our brain’s ability to alter its activity in response to stimuli. This makes exercise the best medicine for improving productivity, health, and other aspects of our lives.
How To Make Exercise a Habit
Make your exercise routine more realistic and fruitful by pushing yourself to exercise after work. Avoid exercising in the middle of the day as you are less likely to have the time you need for exercise.
Turn exercise into a daily habit by waking up early every morning. Try to wake up at around 5:30 am, drink a caffeine-based pre-workout drink, and walk to the gym. You can also ask a family member or friend to join you for your morning workout.
If you’re having a hard time mustering up the energy to exercise, listen to a motivating audiobook or podcast. Do cardio for about 30 minutes and lift weights for around 40 to 45 minutes.
Start by exercising for half an hour every morning. Once you feel less resistance to your exercise routine, gradually increase the time you spend working out.
As time goes by, your incremental changes will add up and you’ll slowly see an increase in muscle mass. You’ll also lose considerable weight.
Most importantly, you’ll notice a marked improvement in your productivity and focus. This will help you accomplish your tasks more efficiently and make you a more productive and successful person.
