You have ever finished your workout but you are not feeling quite as ecstatic as you usually do? Don’t get discouraged. There are a few reasons this could be! But what exactly could be responsible for this and how can we maximize your exercise high?
Overall, we tend to feel our healthiest when all our needs are met. The same counts for the exercise high that we so often get after finishing our exercise session. By properly taking care of our nutrition, sleep, and stress, we will prime our happy hormones so that they leave us with intoxicating feelings of euphoria and a state a calmness.
The Four Pillars of Health
Has your doctor ever advised you to exercise more, eat healthier, reduce your stress levels, or go to bed earlier? If so, then you are not alone. Exercise, good nutrition, relaxation, and sleep are widely regarded as essential components of healthy living by medical experts.
In fact, in my physiotherapy practice I refer to them as our four pillars of health. They are what primarily control our perceived level of health and well-being and create the perfect foundation for experiencing deeper levels of joy and happiness. By taking care of your pillars of health, you not only improve your overall health, but also create the ideal foundation for experiencing the thrilling benefits of the Exercise High.
The Sims: An Analogy
Did you ever play that video game called The Sims? It’s the one with the little digital avatars you create to test out what would happen if you did not do your dishes for a week, or how long you could survive without food, or what it would be like to kiss a neighbor who you had no romantic interest in. This may sound confusing if you’re not familiar with the game.
All you need to know is that The Sims is a life simulation video game where players organize the daily activities of their characters, which influences how they interact with the complex workings of their virtual world. The degree to which these activities are successful is dependent on the soundness of the players’ decisions.
The more successful you are at keeping your Sim happy, the fuller its status bar. If you forget to feed your Sim, leave its dirty dishes on the counter, or make its neighbor angry, the lower your Sim’s well-being status bar. This bar increases and decreases throughout the run of the day, depending on the degree of success—or failure—the player’s decision had on their Sim.
Michael’s Story
“Finally!” Michael exclaimed, as realization dawned upon him. He had at last figured out what had kept him in a miserable, stressful, zombie-like rut for so many weeks. The solution seemed so obvious! But the stressors from his daily life had prevented him from thinking clearly, and the now-obvious solution had frustratingly eluded him. But he now knew why he had been feeling so out of rhythm, so overwhelmed with his current life situation and unable to cope with his emotions.
What were previously minor annoyances were now more irritating than ever, breaking his concentration and adding to his frustrations. He felt that he had so much stuff on his plate—appointments to attend to and things to get done—yet he did not seem to be able to complete the simplest of tasks. The associated state of anxiety made him forget more, further adding to the vicious cycle that had him in its grips.
Coping through the Exercise High
The one small bright spot during this turmoil was that he had at least been able to keep up with his workout routine. Exercise was occasionally helping him to deal with stress-related problems by making him feel great afterward, but his routine was not reliable enough to make him feel this way every time following his workout.
Let me provide you with a little backstory to help you understand. Michael is a 21-year-old junior at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he is studying science. He has always placed a decent amount of effort into taking care of his body—nothing remarkable, but enough to stay in shape and feel healthy.
Michael has always been aware of the positive effects that exercise has on his body and mind. To him, taking time out of the day to exercise was never a waste. He found that it has helped him grow on a personal level, improved his self-respect, and played a role in getting him as far as he has gotten. And experiencing the occasional Exercise High did wonders for his mental health.
However, in recent weeks he had been having difficulty maintaining the routines that had kept him feeling good for years. He had his excuses, blaming his roommates for being “bad influences,” and lately having been neck-deep in schoolwork. And he had two important exams coming up which he didn’t feel prepared for in the slightest. These factors, combined with the falling off of his established healthy routines, caused him to feel increasingly more stressed and anxious.
The Problem
Michael decided that it was time to get out of his rut. Determined to make his past self proud, he placed more energy into his daily routine. Over the course of a week he paid close attention to his nutrition and followed his regular feel-good workout routine. He even added some extra body-weight exercises. These workouts helped him to feel better in the moment, but his overall mental state remained the same. Michael was perplexed. What was he doing wrong? Was he not putting enough intensity into his workouts? Did the workouts lack variety?
Frustrated with not finding the solution he was looking for, he decided to look to the internet for answers. He typed search queries into search engines, and watched a number of YouTube videos covering the topics of health and mental well-being. However, two hours later he was more confused than before. Tired of not making any progress, he decided to go to bed early that night.
Michael was a client of mine some time ago. Feeling frustrated and hopeless, he contacted me, and together we analyzed his situation. When we examined his exercise routine, dietary habits, sleep, and stress, it became clear that sleep was the area of his life that required much more attention. Michael was consistently lacking sufficient, quantity sleep. Together, we updated his sleep plan, and also practiced effective stress coping mechanisms and made some small dietary tweaks.
The Solution
Over the next few days, he started to feel fully refreshed and in a great state of mind again. Poor sleep—due mainly to staying up too late studying—had so aggravated the stresses in his life that it had kept him from experiencing the Exercise High he used to enjoy so much. But now, after a great sleep, and with his stress levels lowered by good sleep, his regular workout is once again doing the trick. He is again feeling the Exercise High.
Michael realized that by neglecting sleep, one of the pillars of what made up his general sense of positive mental well-being, he had held back his body from producing his feel-good hormones. The great results after exercise sessions performed with a well-rested body made it crystal clear that taking care of getting good sleep was crucial to keeping stress levels in check and being able to experience significant pleasure from exercise.
Now, whenever Michael does not get the same mental benefits from a workout, he knows what to analyze and what to fix, so he can continue to experience his beloved rush from exercise.
It’s All About Balance
As we’ve discussed, the four pillars of good health not only keep your bodily systems operating smoothly, they also help to optimize your overall mental well-being. The mind and body are closely intertwined. In fact, it is estimated that approximately 90% of all physical problems have emotional roots, and a growing body of research indicates that virtually every illness is influenced by how we think and feel.
A great resource if you decide to further your learning on this topic is the aforementioned book by Dr. John Ratey called “Spark”. I have included it into the resource section of this book.
Particularly strong are the effects of emotions on the body. Every emotion triggers the release of hormones, and when those hormones travel through your bloodstream and reach their destination within your body, they instruct the receptor about their next action.
This can result in a change in the way we think, or it can promote a certain behavior. Vice versa, thinking a certain way will influence what emotions get triggered, as well as the behaviors that may occur. You can think of your emotions, thoughts, and behaviors as having a tri-directional relationship. This, in a nutshell, is how our mind affects our body and our body can affect our mind.
Certain events can bring about intense emotions, which as we just learned can affect both our body and mind. A big exercise rush, for instance, can feel so satisfying and rewarding. Yet you may notice that just a few hours later it starts to gradually wear off.
Homeostasis
But why does it sometimes wear off so quickly? The answer is because your brain always wants to come back to its baseline. It is why that cup of coffee you enjoy so much in the morning does not last for the full day, and why the post-workout soreness the day after your workout vanishes just another day or two later.
The process of the systems within your body trying to bring you back into a state of balance is called homeostasis. A homeostatic body is a content body. Among other things, it means your body is at the temperature that helps it function best and that your breathing frequency has returned back to its resting rate after you run up the stairs.
No matter what state your body is in, eventually, the process of homeostasis will pull you back down from your high toward your baseline. And that is good, because this process allows the body to replenish and recuperate after exertion, will help you get better when you are sick, and will make you recover emotionally from a traumatic event. (If only it could get rid of the memory of that embarrassing incident two years ago when you tripped in front of your coworkers and banged your head on that desk!)
What is Responsible for the “Down”?
When we are under stress, our body and mind have no time for happy hormones because they have entered a sort of survival mode, and are trying to maintain the basic, proper functioning of our other bodily systems so we can get through the perceived crisis. All our reserves are focused on this and nothing else.
Now, this may not be nice to hear, as we all get busy and neglect one or more of our pillars sometimes, depending on the circumstances we find ourselves in. And that’s okay. Our amazing human body is designed to deal with occasional bouts of stress and lack of balance, at least for a short time.
The good news is that your sleep, nutrition, and relaxation do not need to be perfect in order for you to benefit from exercise. They just need to be sturdy enough to be able to keep the house stable and secure. You may not experience the Exercise High, but you’ll certainly be in better mental shape than you otherwise would be.
But if you want to feel the greatest pleasure from your exercise sessions, to experience satisfaction and vitality that will blow you away and make you wonder why you did not start your exercise journey sooner, you need to pay consistent attention to your sleep, nutrition, and stress levels. Small tweaks can make a big difference.
How to Maximize Your Exercise High
I hope that Michael’s story helps to bring an important point across. As with most things that are worth it in life, you need to properly prepare in order to be successful. You can’t serve a family of four a satisfying home-cooked meal before going grocery shopping, cutting the vegetables, and seasoning the meat.
As a physiotherapist, I cannot perform a qualitative physical assessment without reading the patient’s health history and properly listening to the patient’s concerns beforehand. You can’t build a house without first laying down a stable foundation, and the experience of the Exercise High is no exception.
To experience the Exercise High, we need to first lay down a proper foundation. If we don’t take care of the basics, it will become quite difficult for us to reap the full array of wonderful benefits. And what are those basics? They are the previously mentioned four pillars of health: sleep, exercise, nutrition, and relaxation.
An Analogy
Let’s try out a mental model I use with my clients. Visualize a simple square-shaped building, with one pillar in each of the four corners. Together the pillars support the roof. This structure represents your health, with the roof representing your optimal level of well-being. If one or more pillars are not properly taken care of, the roof will become unstable, and this will probably affect other pillars.
The end result is an unstable house. If the roof collapses, you’ll find yourself in a situation like Michael’s, where you are filled with stress and unable to achieve mental well-being.
If, for instance, you find yourself in Michael’s situation, with poor sleep quality and sleep quantity that does not meet our needs, you will likely feel rather sluggish and unmotivated throughout the day. Your mental state may then prompt less-than-optimal lifestyle choices throughout the day, which affects one of the other pillars of health. Perhaps for lunch you consume half a pizza and a can of sugary soda, instead of the healthy chicken pasta salad you had planned to eat.
Now your nutrition pillar is destabilized, and you will feel the effects of that in various ways in the hours following, as well as into the next day. Or maybe your workload has become hard to manage over the past few weeks, and now your stress levels are off the charts. As a result, your relaxation pillar is not being properly attended to, so your productivity plummets, taking with it your emotional stability and overall health.
In a nutshell, our feelings of happiness and growth are dependent on our four pillars of health. When we stop taking care of ourselves, our body stops creating the hormones that stabilize our well-being and remotivate us to handle our responsibilities.