Top Mental Health Benefits of Walking 30 Min A Day
You might have often heard about including walking half an hour a day to improve your physical health and fitness. But did you know walking from home can also give you lots of mental health benefits as well? Research indicates walking for half an hour a day leads to lowered symptoms of depression. As you include this activity in your daily fitness regime, you are able to procure its benefits not only to the body but to the mind as well.
This is especially true for women; with age, you can decrease your risks of getting stress and depression by including a low-impact exercise such as walking in your daily life.
Walking, as simple and enjoyable as it is, is one of the most effective ways to give you health benefits, including improving your mental health. It does so by activating your breathing and cardiovascular systems, decreasing the stress hormones of your body, improving good hormones in your body, and improving the growth rate of new brain cells. Also, it helps you to improve your mental health indirectly by improving your self-confidence as you begin to get in better shape than before. You also feel more achievement in yourself as you follow your fitness regime routinely. Some of the benefits of walking from home include the following:
1. Prevention against Memory Loss
Dementia and Alzheimer’s disease are some of the concerns that often pop up as you age. However, it is proven that even doing light physical activities such as walking can help to improve neurocognitive function. When you breathe in and out, and your circulatory system gets more activated than before, you get a better stimulation of your brain system, which results in the growth of new brain cells. This is especially important if you want to prevent decline related to age. What’s more, you will also note your focus and concentration are getting sharper as you turn this activity into a habit.
2. Better Self-Esteem
Regular physical activity is an important investment in your body, soul, and mind. When you turn your activity into a habit, you can see yourself getting powerful and stronger with time. Also, your self-esteem will get better as you lose fat from your body. Your picture for self-image, for example, will get improved as you include physical activity to be a routine part of your lifestyle. You will feel more powerful and impactful regarding your appearance. This is possible by even the slightest of exercise goals as you would get a sense of achievement.
3. Improved Sleeping
You need to have proper REM sleep to get your mental health improved, and that is possible when you include some healthy modifications in your lifestyle. Short bursts of exercise included in women’s workouts, such as brisk walking, can help you regulate your sleeping pattern. When you prefer exercising at night time, you can go for a stretch and then walk after meals to promote a night of healthy sleep for yourself. This is what an improved sleeping will do for you. You get a better balance in your routine and get the results you want to be given. You make walking a habit. Walking even as little as half an hour a day can help you get the best results you want.
4. Increased Mental Agility
Do you feel your productivity getting low? Do you think that you are not able to complete your tasks with the best attention because of brain fog? Do you have to repeat something again and again to absorb a task? Well, it might be possible that you require more mental energy than usual. By increasing your breathing rate and activating your muscles, you will be able to get a fresher mind. A sedentary lifestyle can put you at the risk of getting a jam in the brain that stops you from doing the things you do best. This is why you need to focus on including some kind of physical activity, such as walking, in your daily routine.
5. Improved Emotional Resilience
We all face some kind of emotional and mental challenges in our life, and for that order, exercise can improve your emotional resilience and help you cope in a better way. So, instead of settling for a negative coping mechanism such as drugs, alcohol, and another kind of negative behaviors which ultimately work to worsen your symptoms, you can focus on improving your emotional resilience better. Doing regular exercise will help to improve your body immunity and help you to reduce the overall impact of stress on your body. People who are looking to improve their emotional resilience can do walking from home to make it better.
6. Improvement in Stress Response
PTSD or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder activates a stress response in our bodies that make the body feel “stuck” in an uneventful happening taking place. We tend to stay in a sedentary environment, which damages our mental health. To pace things up, include exercises such as walking in your daily regime, even if for half an hour a day. You will note that as you move your body more and more every day, your muscles will get stimulated, your cardiovascular and breathing response will speed up, and you will attain better mental agility. This can help people with PTSD to improve their symptoms eventually. The stress response gets alleviated with time, and you feel a good improvement in your symptoms related to PTSD.
Final Word
These are some of the ways through which walking can help you attain better mental health. The key is to practice walking as an essential part of your everyday routine. You don’t have to join a gym or run a marathon to pace up your physical activity level for this. Small steps, such as walking from home even for half an hour a day, can help you attain numerous benefits that are not only beneficial for the body but also for your brain as well.
