How Anxiety and Stress Can Affect Your Fitness Journey?
While you are on a journey to improve your physical fitness, it is also important to pay attention to your mental health. A holistic approach can help you gain more from your fitness journey and help you achieve a greater sense of well-being.
With today’s hectic lifestyle, anxiety and stress are common among people of all backgrounds. For those of you who are following a strict exercise routine, you may find that these can hinder your progress and your exercise recovery, which is why it is so important to take care of your mental health too.
A study has found that as many as 77 percent of American adults report that stress is impacting their physical well-being. While it is perfectly normal to experience mild stress from time to time, excessive worrying is not normal and can have damaging effects on your physical and mental health. Chronic stress is very common today, and it is important that you address it if you struggle with it.
Stress affects your recovery
Not only does stress and anxiety affect your performance in the gym, they can affect your post-workout recovery too. Many people who work out while under stress often report that they feel more sore, tired, and very low on energy for about 24 hours post-exercise.
This should be a cause for concern because poor recovery not only hinders your overall performance, it means that your risk of injury is increased too.
Researchers believe that when you are under stress, you use up a large chunk of your energy reservoir to meet the mental demands that come along, which then affects your ability to perform physical tasks. As such, it is extremely important to make sure you have recovered enough after an intense workout session before you carry on to another session.
Studies have also shown that working out with mental stress negatively affects your fitness gains. In other words, you will see low improvements if you work out under stress. Your body takes much longer to adapt so you can become fitter and stronger. It has also been found that it’s much more difficult to lose weight when you are stressed, but easy to gain several pounds.
While stress can make your workouts more challenging, there are products such as CBD , which has been shown to help people lower their anxiety and stress levels significantly. Moreover, it can help with post-workout recovery as well.