All year long you make and break promises to yourself: I’ll start going to the gym, I’ll stop saving my essays until the night before, I’ll finally eat healthy.
On New Year’s, though, these aren’t just promises, they are dedications to improve yourself, resolutions to be better. That is, until February rolls around.
This year, make a resolution worth keeping: start working out, and not just to look good.
While getting a gym membership is one of the most common New Year’s resolutions, many don’t realize that the effects are far more than simply physical.
When you think about going to the gym, losing weight and adding pounds of muscle are the first things that come to your mind, and rightly so. Working out is an effective way to control your weight, whether increasing or decreasing. Adding or dropping a few pounds can be an excellent motivator and it’s often the main reason why people start going to the gym.
That being said, whether you’re walking a mile on the treadmill or lifting weights, working out also has a slew of mental benefits as well. First and foremost, it can help battle depression.
“Aerobic exercises, including jogging, swimming, cycling, walking, gardening, and dancing, have been proved to reduce anxiety and depression,” a study in The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry stated.
Perhaps even more significant, a Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health study found that “running for 15 minutes a day or walking for an hour reduces the risk of major depression by 26%.” More than 20% of teens in the U.S. will have some level of depression before they hit adulthood, even just a short run can drastically drop those chances.
A study conducted by doctors in Norway’s Department of Public Health concluded that “given the demonstrated dose-response association between inactivity and both poor mental health, self-harm, and suicidal attempt, there is a need to facilitate college students to become more physically active.”
Anxiety, commonly coupled with depression, can also be treated, in part, though working out, a study by the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke claims.
The endorphins, or hormones, released during physical exercise can boost your concentration and memory, and they can even stimulate the growth of new brain cells. A study at the National Taiwan University and Hospital also linked benefits in sleep to regular exercise. A decline in symptoms of ADHD and PTSD is also associated with working out.
In addition, one must not overlook the physical benefits of exercise, as they stretch to far more than simply what the scale reads. Though I am quite far from a bodybuilder, I have added more than 20 healthy pounds in my time since taking up working out on campus, and liking what you see on the scale or in the mirror is far from a fringe reward.
For many, the main drawback to these positive effects is simple: going to the gym is hard. This, I won’t argue against, in fact, difficulty is such an inherent part of exercise that it, in itself, is a benefit.
Not only that, but to me, many of the mental benefits come from embracing the difficulty inherent in a trip to the gym. Whether you’re running a new personal best mile time or hitting a new one-rep max on bench press, these successes came along with prior failures. Having, in just the past month, alerted the entire gym to my presence by loudly sliding the weights off the side of the barbell after failing a max attempt on the bench without a spotter, I can attest to that as well as anyone.
They may not always be visible to the naked eye, but the gym helps everyone who sets foot in it, in more ways than one. This year, set a resolution that will improve your well-being, both physically and emotionally. And who knows, maybe this one will last until March.
