Speaker A: Hi everyone. I'm Ben Johnson, mental health and exercise coach, private gym owner from Newcastle Online, coach of the Revival program, and outnumbered dad of two strong independent daughters just like my wife and I can't get a word in with them at home. Here's my chance. Welcome to my podcast. This short is a combination of my own personal growth, life experiences and experiences of coaching people for over a decade to help improve their health, happiness and life fulfillment. There's a lot of people struggling to find sustainable physical and mental health solutions, so I want to provide you with some key insights and key tools to help. If you find this information useful or even just enjoyable, it will be absolutely amazing. If you hit the Share button or leave a comment, you can also follow me on any of my social media platforms that can be found in the description of this show. Episode Four welcome back. Today I'm talking mental health. Now, I've been a mental health and exercise course for around about 18 months now. And before you sit there and think or see Ben, you can't talk about mental health. You're just a PT or coach or whatever you think I am. Well, that's where the big problem lies, because everybody has mental health and everyone can and more importantly should be talking about mental health. Unfortunately, it's most often talked about in a negative manner. Here's an example. If I said to you I run for my mental health, what would you immediately think? You'd probably think, oh, he's got a problem, he's got an illness, he's unwell or mentally unstable. Actually, when I say that I run for my mental health, I'm saying that I run to promote positive mental health, which fortunately for me at this moment in time, without any problems or illnesses. We need to start understanding mental health and the benefits of exercise to it in a much better way. First of all, if you don't already, mental health is the sum of our thoughts, feelings and emotions. And as I said, everybody has mental health. There's two sides to the coin. We're going to have positive mental health and we're going to have poor mental health, which will all experience and interchange at different parts of our lives. And we will do and will continue to do so. Some examples of positive mental health are things like confidence, happiness, resilience, optimism, and some examples on the flip side of that of poor mental health are things like worry, stress, guilt, anger, all of those things, both positive and poor. I'm sure that you can all relate to all of those at some stages of your lives or currently. Right now, the big misconception is that when somebody mentions mental health, they automatically think mental illness, when in fact mental illness is more of a clinically diagnosed condition, one that's going to alter the way in which people think, involving more long term changes to the brain therefore impacting the emotions, the thinking, and the behaviors. The neurological pathways in the brain have been altered. Important to point out, though, that mental illnesses, yes, change these neurological pathways, but they don't necessarily mean permanent alterations. And through things like therapy, medication, and exercise, new pathways can be made and things can be improved. I don't want to talk too much about mental illnesses today, but just so you get the gist of it, this can include the likes of things like generalized anxiety disorder, bipolar disorder, body dysmorphic disorder, things like eating disorders, PTSD, chronic stress, and chronic depression. That list isn't exhausted, by the way. If you're listening to this, and you currently are, unfortunately struggling with one of those conditions, please don't feel like the info that I'm going to share can't help you. It 100% can't help. It's just another form of treatment alongside things like medication and therapy. Actually, adding exercise is a fantastic way of adding another element of treatment going back to mental health. Mental health, on the flip side, is things that can be seen as more temporary, more circumstantial, both poor and positive. This mental health, either poor or positive, can be seen as a result of things like your lifestyle choices. So your diet choices, for instance, your activity level choices. Also things like your relationships, your comparisons, how this impacts your self worth, how you try and conform to societal norms, or these expectations of what you should have as these societal norms. How you look, how should you act. All of these things impact your mental health, poor or positive. So this brings me on to my role as a mental health and exercise coach. My aim is to level up people's knowledge and understanding of exercise and how this positively impacts mental health. First of all, there's absolutely ******* loads of positive impacts from exercise and mental health. I could be here all day, trust me. But I'm just going to look at just four examples of positive mental health. For instance, the ones that I gave earlier confidence, happiness, resilience, and optimism. How can exercise impact and play a massive part in those confidence? First of all, confidence is basically learning how to tolerate fear. How do you tolerate fear? You get used to stepping out of your comfort zone over and over and over again when you're working on developing physical strength and overall fitness. This is going to require you to constantly step out of your comfort zone, and it's going to help your body and your mind to adapt to that feeling of stepping out of the comfort zone and tolerate and fear, all of which can then be transferred in your everyday life and all of the tasks that are included. Let's look at happiness. It's more than likely that you've heard that exercise releases these feel good hormones, in particular, something called serotonin. Serotonin is a hormone that improves mood, productivity, and focus. And it gives you a sense of, wellbeing, a little task that I get all of our members to do, both online and face to face, is just before you exercise, do this little test. Mark your energy levels and your mood. On a scale of one to 1010 being highest, absolutely. Flying, amazing. One being terrible, flat as a pancake. Do this before you start your workout exercise. And then repeat this immediately after you've finished. Well, maybe five minutes after you finished, after you've recovered a little bit. But I can guarantee that these scores are going to improve. And when you do this little task over and over again, this is going to help you reinforce the immediate improvements to your mental health that exercise gives. We touched on in a previous podcast of the absolutely shocking statistics of people in the UK who consistently exercise year round when we're trying to overcome that. This is something that's so important. If you can start to reinforce the immediate improvements, the mental health after exercise, rather than enforcing, you need to exercise for a long period of time just to change your body shape. This means that you're going to be less likely to sack off any planned exercise, sticking with happiness on a more scientific level over a long period of time. With consistent exercise routines, exercise can change these neurological pathways in your brain. And this is something called neuroplasticity. I'm not going to go into it in too much depth, but in particular a molecule called BDNF. This is linked to depression. A lack of this molecule is linked to depression and this molecule is improved by exercise. So a huge impact on your happiness or the flip side of reducing your depression, sticking with positive mental health. How does exercise impact resilience? Resilience is needed in all walks and areas of our lives. I need **** tons, just as in my role as a parent, never mind anything else in my life. When exercising and enduring, challenging workouts, guess what? You build resilience again, which can then be transferred into other areas of your life. Finally, optimism is a positive form of mental health through exercise. If you're building greater strength, you're improving your cordial, you become more mobile. This is going to breed more independence in your life. You're going to start to do more of the things that you enjoy, or you might do something that you always wanted to do that you previously couldn't. This is going to help improve your aspirations and you're going to start to look at things with a more positive light, ie. Improved optimism. Like I said, that's just four examples of the power of exercise and positive mental health. We're going to have a quick look through and flip that coin to have a look at the poor side of mental health and how exercise can impact that. The four that I shared earlier. Worry, stress, guilt, anger. Starting with worry. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that after a certain age or if you've had certain life experiences, we're all going to worry about our mortality at some point. Exercise, as we all know, improves our physical health, improves our overall fitness, which in turn can help, or at least help ease our worries or our concerns over our risks of illnesses and diseases. That's just one example. If we look at stress coming away from the more well known physiological benefits of exercise and stress and lower and blood pressure improving heart function, let's look at the psychological benefits. When you exercise, you can create space between the stresses by forgetting about what they were and just focusing on certain exercises. When you exercise you can also, as we know now, improve productivity and focus from those hormones that have been released. If you're improving your productivity and improving your focus, this means that you're going to get more time back because you're being more productive, you're being more focused. And stress and time management are clearly linked. And then again, certain types of exercises such as yoga, they're going to promote calm. Or on the flip side of that, certain types of exercise like boxing, can help you release aggression and controlled anger. If we look at guilt, guilt a bit more of a complex type of poor mental health when it comes to how exercise can help and improve it basically because it can stem from so many different things varying from person to person. But I'll give you one example of how exercise can improve guilt. This could be that you feel guilty because you're not able to play with your kids due to lack of energy, health and overall fitness. You improve that through exercise, you have less limitations from your physical side of things. This is going to mean that you've got less guilt because you're able to play with your kids. There's absolutely loads more examples around guilt and I'd be happy to discuss them on a more onetoone basis. And then lastly, anger. We touched on this a little bit with the stress, but exercise can be used as a bit of a safe place to reduce release anger and tension temporarily. Also, exercise can help people find and live what's classed as their true identity. Identity things like living in line with your values of who you really want to be and who you are, what you want to do, which, when these things aren't aligned, can cause greater levels of anger. If you've got limitations from your lack of physical and mental health and wellbeing, that's going to impact how you're going to live to your true identity. So we're going to overcome this. As you know, I like to keep these short as possible so that they're to the point and they're effective. But hopefully you get the gist of just how powerful exercises as a tool to promote positive mental health and also to reduce or change poor mental health and also as a form, not the only one, but a form of treatment for people with mental illnesses as well. I've got to make, and I must make reference to the award in mental Health and exercise coaching and in particularly Dan Hancock, also known as the Mental Health PT, who designed the course and program. When I first started out as a PT, I wanted to make fitness fun. I wanted to make fitness more inclusive and more enjoyable. I think making fitness fun was my first slogan, actually, as a business slogan. But as the years went on, I feel like I've been led astray by the majority of the health and fitness industry. Something started to feel like it was missing and I just felt like I wasn't impact on how I wanted to. I started feeling unfulfilled and I was going through the motions. I really, really wanted to serve and impact people in a better way, more longterm. And since the award in mental health and exercise coaching, I feel like I've got back to my true self of what I want to do. I feel like I've done a full circle over the past decade in the industry, but now I've got absolutely loads more knowledge and loads more experience. So a huge thanks to Dan and everybody at Mhek. If anybody's interested in learning about this more, the details are in the description. You can head there. I'm a course mentor and tutor for this now. And we're not just helping Pts and coaches, we're helping teachers, sports coaches and the general public as well. Thanks for listening. Please keep sharing these. It's amazing. If you do little thought, imagine that you share this and then you're the to drastically improve or even save somebody's life who's really, really struggling mentally. Just by sharing this info, you could give them warp, you could give them a little bit of direction. Thanks very much. Take care.
