Move Your Body, Tone Your Mood

Book excerpt: Research shows that physical exercise can be a powerful and creative tool for changing the way we feel. Different kinds of exercises can be useful for easing anxiety, lifting depression or managing stress. In fact, studies have shown that exercise can be just as effective for treating depression in the long term as cognitive behavioural therapy. In Move Your Body, Tone Your Mood, sports psychologist Kate Hays gives readers the tools they need to put together their own therapeutic exercise routine. Hays offers strategies to help readers discover what kind of exercise schedule will work best for them, provides tips for setting goals to help establish a routine they will enjoy and inspires them to feel an invigorating enthusiasm about using exercise as a form of emotional healing. Readers learn how to use cognitive exercises and behaviour modification to transform resistance and apathy, and discover how exercise can allow them to think through situations in ways that offer a very different perspective from that offered by more introspective and intellectual styles of processing emotions.