The Best Exercise for Stress Management
How to find what will support you
While I often talk about exercise as a form of stress management, it’s not usually the focus of my work, but lately it has been taking center stage.
In April, I did five speaking engagements for a variety of audiences. I spoke to high school students, fitness professionals, folks who work with animals, corporate professionals, and narcissistic abuse survivors. In each workshop, I talked about trauma (which is to be expected from a trauma practitioner) and spoke a lot about managing stress though exercise. In order to understand how exercise can be used to manage stress, we first have neutralize the charge on the word “stress.” That’s fairly easy to do if you look at its definition: stress is how the brain and body respond to any type of challenge.
Stress is how the brain and body respond to any type of challenge.
That’s it. Stress is neither good, nor bad — it just is.
When we talk about stress, we tend to say things like “I’m so stressed out,” but rarely when those words pass our lips do we think about what they mean. Our words imply that at present things are bad, because we think of stress as bad.
