Jog On: How Running Saved My Life

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As a very keen runner I was drawn to this book for that reason, however after reading it I felt it was better aimed at those struggling with their mental health than the hard core runner. I’m very fortunate to have never suffered with these issues so a lot of the text was a little wasted on me. Even while Bella was still a young child, she was very anxious. Everything scared her – from surreal pieces of art to specific songs to the noises generated from cars. Her stomach, as well as her chest, usually hurt with worry. When she attended school parties, she would get a strong sense of fear; something would just feel wrong.

Chapter 4 – Running assisted Bella to feel better – and running can do the exact same thing for you too. I’m still giving it four stars though as it was very well written, with lots of interesting statistics on how running and exercise really does improve your well being and written in a humorous way to lighten the statistics and research load. If you suffer from anxiety and are looking for something in your day to day life that will help change your mindset, then I’d strongly recommend this book. Well, it has more to do with a hormone known as cortisol. Cortisol is a stress hormone you’re your body produces when its fight or flight response is activated. Scientists have discovered that when you workout, your cortisol levels reduce, making you feel less stressed later.Share how you’re feeling with friends and family, and seek professional advice. Visit your GP who may suggest medication and/or psychological therapies such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). Exercise, meditation and stepping away from social media can sometimes help reduce anxiety levels. But everyone is different. Anxiety is complex and affects people in different ways, so it’s important to get professional help. There’s also too much politics and talk of privilege that I didn’t really come to the book to read, and to be honest… a skinny white middle class woman writing a book about exercise complaining that most of the representation of exercise from online content comes from skinny middle class women I found a bit irritating. I didn’t mind the recounting my own life so much as I just had this desperate need to get the facts right for Jog On. With mental health you obviously feel a huge responsibility to get it right and I didn’t want to misrepresent anything or offer bad advice. I also wanted it to be inclusive and not just about me. To do that justice took a lot of research which I found quite daunting, whereas with this I could basically just write from my head. At first it felt really unnerving - I was like, ‘Is this ok? Do I have to research this?’ But after a while, it actually felt like a bit of a weight off and much more freeing than non-fiction where you’ve got to get it right. Did How To Kill Your Family involve any research? I procrastinate for an hour, then I head out to run. I don't eat breakfast, because I've experimented with this before running and it doesn't make me run faster or longer. It just makes me hungry halfway through. I chew bubblegum throughout my runs, which are typically about 12k. I run like Forrest Gump – no planned route, just meandering through bits of London I've not seen in a while. Sometimes that means a loop, mostly it means running somewhere stupidly far away and having to get the tube home.

Friday! I stupidly invited eleven people over for dinner when we don't even have eleven chairs or even forks. I got over excited about adult entertaining (not that kind of entertaining, settle down) and forgot that I can't really cook, only bake, which I do with wildly over enthusiastic gusto. So I've made three desserts and not thought about the main course. I run blindly towards Islington, assuming everyone has dinner parties there every night and hope that I can end my jog there and buy overpriced cauliflower and some seed bread, which I do. At home, I make enough vegetable lasagne to feed every New Labour plotter circa 1997 and offer up enough of the weird bread and good wine that the dessert is only half heartedly eaten. The garden chairs came in very handy.” Saturday However, what can be done if you stay in a city or town? Don’t stress–various studies have revealed that you don’t constantly have to work out in nature to get the advantages of it. Extraordinarily, research done by the University of Essex has discovered that just viewing images of lush, natural landscapes while you work out is sufficient to increase your self-esteem and decrease your blood pressure! After a couple of days of crying and drinking lots of wine, she chose to do a different thing. Rather than using the evening slumped in front of the television, she decided to go for a jog. She still doesn’t actually understand how she came to this choice– it only seemed like the appropriate thing to do. The big question is, who is this book for? I personally feel that if you're an anxious person (or suffer from any other mental health issues), then you'll find this insightful. It explains really well how that particular form of exercise can help you to detach from your problems (for a while); how it almost becomes a form of mindfulness and a welcome break from all the things that are dragging you down. There is no magical remedy for anxiety. There’s no medication you can use or work out you can do that will ensure that you never feel bothered or unhappy again. However, a running regime can assist you to cope with your symptoms and offer you the tools to live a more satisfying life. Therefore, tie your sneakers lace, and let go of your anxiety by allowing your body to fly down a – preferably nature-filled – path.Chapter 5 – Working out in nature offers your mental health an additional boost –a thing Bella personally felt.

When she discusses how jogging transformed her life, some individuals are cynical. Some people mention that she might have gotten better notwithstanding. However, science claims that workout does have an actual and useful effect on mental health. The stories of Bella and Sara’s are inspirational; however, they bring about a disturbing question as well: If running is really great, then what is the reason why more of us aren’t doing it? A photo posted by on Was it a more relaxing writing experience not having to recount your own life?When she hit 30 that year, she remembers thinking everything felt different. “I started running and continued seeing the therapist … all the worries and panic and irrational thoughts and not being able to get out of bed went away. I was able to live on my own for the first time and travel and do all the things I couldn’t do in my 20s. It felt like a new lease of life. I felt like a human being and not like a sad, empty shell pretending to be a human being which is what my 20s felt like”.

She had an insight during those early jogs. Whenever she ran, she became less sad, and her mind got quieter. For those few minutes of physical workout, she wasn’t thinking about her divorce or her husband dating other people. As a matter of fact, she wasn’t thinking about it that much at all. After years of her brain tying itself up in knots with frightening, intrusive feelings, this quietness was a big relief. However, the sedentary group hadn’t formed these connections. This shows that, at a neurological level, exercise prepares us to deal with stress better. It definitely assisted Bella. I line up a book promo and write a chunk of my novel in the afternoon. Saying ‘my novel’ is ridiculous since really only my mum has read it so far. When I get jittery from Diet Coke and sitting down for too long, I go into our junk room (the size of a toilet and filled with stuff we don't know where to put anywhere else) and retrieve some dumbbells and a CMT device, which is basically a dumbbell with handles and filled with ball bearings. I try and do three rounds of five different arm exercises and then some sporadic shaking with the CMT. Then I'll push through a run – same 12k. All of a sudden, she didn’t just saw alone; however, she also felt the beauty of her environments– the sea, the waves, a mountain. While running, she felt little but not unimportant. She understood that she was connected to the natural world, even though her place in it was tiny. As she paused to pay attention to the waves and feel the sun on her face, she was not thinking about the past or stressing about the future. Rather, she was eventually living in the here and now.

Thursday

Frequently, this female reluctance to sports begins young; a lot of teenage girls state feeling uncomfortable during mixed-gender gym sessions. One of the reasons is as a result of the comments that boys make during these classes. Sadly, these feelings of discomfort go with women into adulthood. When Cosmopolitan magazine conducted a survey, they discovered that most women felt threatened by gyms and that some were afraid of being criticized by men. I spent my 20s enjoying journalism but also knowing ‘I have slightly stumbled into this’. I knew lots of journalists, my dad was a journalist. I did it without thinking about it. And then I thought, ‘I don’t really know where I’m gonna go with this, because I’m not my dad ...’” She left journalism aged 33, to write Jog On and says that writing the book “felt like the beginning of my life”. I got shin splints, which hurt like hell. I ran too fast and had to stop after wheezing uncontrollably. Photograph: Thomas Butler/The Guardian Bella’s anxiety intensified at university at the age of 19, eventually forcing her to drop out. “I wasn’t suicidal, but I had thoughts in my head that I didn’t want to go on. I took meds, had therapy. Obviously, mental health issues don’t tend to get better on their own,” she says.