January is well underway and no doubt many of you out there have put exercise at the very top of your new year’s resolution lists for 2024.
While it is, of course, necessary to prioritise your physical health, it’s important to make sure that your mental health is the focus as well… which is why the results of a new study may be of particular interest, allowing you to combine the two, with potentially exciting results.
Conducted by the University of Bath, the paper – published in the Mental Health and Physical Activity journal – suggested that combining mindfulness with physical activity is one of the most effective ways of lifting your mood and improving your overall health and wellbeing.
The findings indicate that mindfulness can be beneficial by helping you to feel more motivated to get started with exercise in the first place, while also helping to reduce pain and discomfort, as well as feelings of failure, when physical exertion is tough going.
There’s a growing body of research showing that mindfulness practices such as breathwork are very effective indeed at reducing feelings like anxiety and stress, improving people’s lives by making them healthier and happier.
To help promote this idea of exercise and mindfulness working symbiotically, the university has teamed up with mindfulness non-profit organisation the Medito Foundation to create two mindfulness audio courses to encourage people to build and sustain exercise-related habits.
Lead author of the study Masha Remskar – psychologist with the university’s Department of Health – said: “Mindfulness is an approach that can help us train up the psychological strengths we need to exercise and be more in tune with our bodies, as well as make exercising more interesting and help us recognise its benefits.
“This may be because becoming more mindful prompts us to think differently about our lifestyle, makes us more accepting and less judgemental of our own shortcomings, which can help to build healthy habits. There is a huge potential to use mindfulness to unlock the positive benefits exercise can bring.”
It’s also certainly worth noting that exercise itself can be an incredibly mindful pursuit, helping to support your mental health while improving strength and mobility.
When you’re training in the gym or playing your favourite sport, you inevitably have to concentrate hard on the task at hand to ensure that you maintain proper form to prevent injuries.
This naturally means that your mind is anchored in the present, focusing on what you’re doing to such an extent that everything else fades into the background… which is ultimately the main goal of mindfulness exercises.
Staying present in the moment is key to mindfulness success and this can be achieved through exercise, helping to cement the relationship between the two even further. As such, if you’re keen to boost your mental and physical health this year, this could well be the way to go about it.