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I hope I don’t sound preachy when it comes to the importance of exercise. If I ever sound that way to any of you who read this blog, please be assured that I am preaching to myself more often than not. I really fell off the wagon with my routine when I broke my foot last year, but I am slowly making my come back and I can already feel the difference. My energy level is getting better and the stress I am feeling toward this upcoming deployment is abating some. I know it won’t fully go away, but exercise does take the edge off of my anxiety. It also helps me to sleep better at night.

If you don’t know where to start, just make a commitment to take a 10-minute walk each day. Find some interesting routes, but don’t go too far out of your way. Make it easy, comfortable and only a little challenging in the beginning. When that becomes a habit and feels easier than it was your first day, increase your time, distance or speed. Don’t do all three at once. Increase one until it’s easier and then increase another. For example if you increase from half-a-mile to a full-mile, don’t increase your speed unitl that mile feels less challenging. Then increase your vigor and decrease your time, but only by a little. Keep challenging yourself. If you have access to a gym, I highly recommend doing at least some light weight lifting. Research shows that good muscle tone gained through resistance training can help prevent osteporasis later in life. It also helps with a lot of problems known to plague us later in life, such as back problems.

If that doesn’t convince you, then read the article below that I found at the APA Help Center. Research is showing that exercise really does benefit us greatly during times of stress. If your spouse, child, sibling or friend is deployed, then now is the time for you to take control of the stress that is inherent with deployment. I have never met a single person who loves a deployed military member who would say “Gee! I wish I worried more!” or “All that worrying and stressing really helped me out a lot!”

Now is the time to do something good for yourself, and in the long run you are doing something good for all those in your family who depend on you and your well-being. Military spouses and family members are a vital part of a soldier’s well being when he comes home.

I will post some resource links in the next day or two to various online help aids. For now, read this great article:

Exercise Fuels the Brain’s Stress Buffers

APA Help Center

Exercise may improve mental health by helping the brain cope better with stress, according to research into the effect of exercise on neurochemicals involved in the body’s stress response.

Preliminary evidence suggests that physically active people have lower rates of anxiety and depression than sedentary people. But little work has focused on why that should be. So to determine how exercise might bring about its mental health benefits, some researchers are looking at possible links between exercise and brain chemicals associated with stress, anxiety, and depression.

So far there’s little evidence for the popular theory that exercise causes a rush of endorphins. Rather, one line of research points to the less familiar neuromodulator norepinephrine, which may help the brain deal with stress more efficiently.

Work in animals since the late 1980s has found that exercise increases brain concentrations of norepinephrine in brain regions involved in the body’s stress response.

Norepinephrine is particularly interesting to researchers because 50 percent of the brain’s supply is produced in the locus coeruleus, a brain area that connects most of the brain regions involved in emotional and stress responses. The chemical is thought to play a major role in modulating the action of other, more prevalent neurotransmitters that play a direct role in the stress response. And although researchers are unsure of exactly how most antidepressants work, they know that some increase brain concentrations of norepinephrine.

But some psychologists don’t think it’s a simple matter of more norepinephrine equals less stress and anxiety and therefore less depression. Instead, they think exercise thwarts depression and anxiety by enhancing the body’s ability to respond to stress.

Biologically, exercise seems to give the body a chance to practice dealing with stress. It forces the body’s physiological systems - all of which are involved in the stress response - to communicate much more closely than usual: The cardiovascular system communicates with the renal system, which communicates with the muscular system. And all of these are controlled by the central and sympathetic nervous systems, which also must communicate with each other. This workout of the body’s communication system may be the true value of exercise; the more sedentary we get, the less efficient our bodies in responding to stress.

Thanks to Rod K. Dishman, PhD, of the University of Georgia, and Mark Sothmann, PhD, of Indiana University’s School of Medicine and School of Allied Health Sciences.