The Scientifically Proven Exercise to Reduce Anxiety

Is there one exercise that can significantly help your anxiety and propel you forward in recovery? I believe there is. So, today, let’s talk about the one exercise that I recommend most and explain how it’s going to help alleviate some of your anxiety symptoms.

Alright, first off, if you’re suffering from severe anxiety and you’re in a state of pure exhaustion, I don’t want you doing any real exercising. As we’re going to talk about, exercising can be great for releasing anxious energy and helping to decrease your anxiety symptoms a bit. But when you have ongoing anxiety that has made you exhausted – and just getting through the day seems like a monumental task – exercising can do more harm than good. So, if you are in an exhausted and worn down state, listen closely: I do not want you to do the exercise that I’m recommending today. Instead, the only exercise I want you to do is to go for a 1-mile walk, 4-5 times per week. That’s it, and there will be plenty of benefits from that. 

For me, during my own recovery from anxiety, I was one to two months into my recovery before I began doing any real exercising. The reason I started exercising was because I had all of this terribly uncomfortable anxious energy bottled up inside of me. I mean, even when my anxiety was at its baseline, it felt like this anxious energy just sat like a ball in the pit of my stomach and this energy coursed throughout my body. Well, I realized that I needed a release valve for all this nervous energy, and that exercise could be that release valve. So, at first, I began to go for short jogs and bike rides 3 to 4 times per week. But I started to have pain in my right knee when running and biking. So, suddenly I was forced to look for a new way to exercise and I knew it could require only minimal knee movement. The best option that I found was swimming. And at that point, I knew how to swim, but I’d never done it for exercise. So, what I did was I went out and bought a pair of goggles, I watched a few instructional YouTube videos on correct form, and went to the local pool.

I’ll be honest – the first day was probably quite a spectacle. My arms and legs were crashing into the water, and I weaved all over my swim lane like someone who couldn’t pass a sobriety test. But when I stepped out of the pool after twenty minutes, I felt better than I had in the last couple of weeks. It was as if the dial on my anxiety had just been turned down a notch or two. At first, I wrote it off as a coincidence. But it happened again the next time. And the time after that. Each time I climbed out of the pool, I felt better than when I climbed in. So, what I realized is that swimming had this ability to take the "edge" off my anxiety better than any other form of exercise I had tried.

Now, why is that? Well, what I discovered is that swimming is a very unique exercise because it is both a full-body workout and a low-impact exercise. This means you exercise nearly every part of your body without putting much stress on it. Those two qualities make it an ideal exercise for anxiety.

But, swimming sets itself even farther apart from other exercises with its meditative component. When you swim, there is none of the noise and distractions that tend to be present with other exercises. There are no cars or bicycles like when you’re outside on a walk or run, and you’re not surrounded by people, televisions, and loud music like when you’re on the elliptical at the local gym. Swimming removes all these peripheral distractions. It’s just you and the water, nothing else. What this does is it allows your focus to narrow to just two things – your breath and your next stroke. So, everything else is drowned out as you perform this rhythmic breathing exercise:

Breathe in – hold – breathe out.

Breathe in – hold – breathe out.

This same rhythmic breathing pattern is an effective relaxation exercise that has been around for centuries, and it’s a built-in part of swimming. 

Alright, all aspects of swimming – when combined – are what make it one of the best exercises for anxiety. But don’t just take my word for it, there have actually been studies that have proven this. For instance, a study published in the Frontiers of Psychiatry found that swimming produced “a statistically significant reduction in anxiety symptoms.”

Even so, I do want you to keep in mind that swimming, as with any other form of exercise, is not by any means an anxiety cure. I want you to approach it with reasonable expectations for what it is – another tool in your toolbox that can help take the edge off your anxiety and propel you forward in recovery.

If you decide to try swimming, here are some final tips:

1. Invest in a swim cap and a good pair of swim goggles. Leaky goggles will ruin a swim workout in just a couple of laps, trust me. 
2. Watch a few short YouTube videos on the proper mechanics of swimming before climbing into the pool. 
3. Do not do any “open water” swimming. The danger of boats, a strong current, and/or changing tide are unnecessary stressors. Stick to a lifeguarded pool during recovery. 
4. Lastly, do not attempt to learn to swim during recovery. If you don’t know how to swim, select a different exercise. Focus on conquering your fear of anxiety. Conquer the fear of water later. 

Alright, what I want you to do is use swimming to help you move faster through the recovery process. If you haven’t already, download the 5-Step Cure to Anxiety & Panic Attacks you need to have the right framework in place. You need to have a system that you implement each and every time that you experience anxiety. For that, I have put the 5-Step Cure to Anxiety and Panic Attacks in the link below. It’s free and it’s going to show you the step-by-step framework that I use with my clients to get them to a full recovery.