Why a Sedentary Lifestyle is Bad for Your Mental Health

A sedentary lifestyle is a type of lifestyle where an individual participates in little to no physical activities. The person living in such a way is colloquially referred to as a couch potato, and they may normally find themselves feeling lethargic even having done nothing much for the day. The individual is also often characterized by sitting or lying down for long periods of time, playing video games obsessively, overusing mobile phones and computers, or excessively watching television for hours on end. The lazy lifestyle can contribute to a lot of health hazards including mental illnesses, obesity, heart conditions, and even cancer.

Despite the wellestablished emotional and physical benefits related to participation of moderate physical activities, most people are not utilizing these valuable lifesustaining opportunities that reduce various illnesses.

Major Cause of Sedentary Activities

As compared to 50 years ago, there has now been an increase in sedentary jobs. The major contributing factor is technological advancement, which has paved the way for the sedentary lifestyle. Technology has brought about a significant number of changes in the work place, with an increase in desk jobs where most of the activities can be done while seated.

Health Effects of Sedentary Activities on Mental Health

According to research done by an Australian University, it was found that a sedentary lifestyle can not only cause somatic effects but may also severely impair mental health. Another research done by Deakin University Center for Nutrition Research proved that a sedentary lifestyle could exacerbate anxiety in a person.

• Spending too much time seated is associated with a high risk of psychological distress and schizophrenia.

However, among obese adults, participating in moderate to vigorous activities has been associated with minimal risk of depression.

• Adults over 60 years old who avoid sedentary behaviors have a reduced risk of dementia.

• Studies also prove that there is a 31% increase in development of bipolar mental disorder among the adults who engaged in more than 42 hours of TV watching or computer use in a week.

Although other factors such as pollution and technology do contribute to poor mental health, medical scientists have managed to establish a direct link between anxiety and increase in sedentary behaviors.

In summary, one of the solutions to better mental health is obvious: we should start moving more often! Therefore, take the stairs whenever you can. Stand up and take a brisk walk around the office every hour if you have a sedentary desk job. Seek opportunities that will add more movements and physical activities into your day.

How to Bust Past a Fitness Plateau

A plateau is a stall in whatever you are trying to do. If you are trying to lose weight, you aren’t; if trying to build muscle, you can’t. You have reached a point where what you are doing is not working anymore. The reason?

Most likely your body has become accustomed to what you are asking it to do. In short, if you are not challenging it to do better, it won’t. If you keep doing what you have always done, you’ll keep getting the same results, which in this case is no progress.

So the key is to challenge your body – give it a kick in the butt – try something different. But what do you need to change?

Actually, there are several things you can change, including: Intensity Varying how hard you exercise can sometimes kick your body into action. For example, if you typically run, try running on a treadmill so you can change the incline, thus making your body work harder. Order of exercise Sometimes just changing the order in which you exercise can spur some reaction. For example, do your pushups towards the end of your workout instead of at the beginning. Number of repetitions In the case of strength training, if you always lift the same amount of weight for the same number of reps for a particular move, change to more weight and drop the number of reps. Your body doesn’t like to be stressed, so it accustomed itself to a particular load by building muscle so it can handle that load. But if you load it more, buy increasing the weight, but lowering the number of reps, it will respond by building muscle so that it doesn’t have to repeat that stress again. It is called progressive overload.

Rest between sets Mix things up by shortening the amount of rest between sets or between different exercises. Or try doing a superset where you don’t rest between sets, but instead rest after all the sets of a particular exercise are finished.

One more reason

One more reason why you might not be showing any progress is overtraining. Contrary to popular belief, muscle growth doesn’t occur while training; it occurs during rest and recovery. However, if you are training those muscles too frequently, they might not have enough time to fully recover. That is why fitness experts say to take a week off of training every six to eight weeks to give your body a week of rest and time to grow muscles, in addition to your normal one day of rest per week. Because everyone is different, you may have to try a few of these suggestions before you hit on one that works for you. But work it will and it will get you back on the road to progress again.

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