Move Your Body To Move Your Mind

Written By: Maryam Adhyan Shafeeq

We often hear about how exercise and moving our bodies benefit our health. From a healthier heart and stronger muscles to a longer lifespan, incorporating exercise into our daily lives can have endless impacts on our overall quality of life. Although we are already familiar with the changes exercise can bring to our health in general, let’s focus more on how exercise can impact our mental health. From a neurological perspective, mental health goes hand in hand with exercise. Exercise releases happy hormones, right? It can do so much more than simply give you a rush of satisfaction right after. Regular exercise and prioritising moving your body can directly lift mood, reduce stress levels, and boost self-confidence so that you are able to perform at your best at all times.

Physical activities can have multiple physiological effects on an individual, whether it is the moment right after working out or a consistent good mood afterwards. Studies show that participating in regular exercise can enhance the mood of an individual, reduce their stress levels, as well as reduce anxiety and depressive symptoms (Liu, et al., 2025). Moreover, the study also highlights that taking part in at least two hours of moderate to vigorous exercise per week can not only reduce but also prevent anxiety and depressive symptoms, increase self-confidence, and improve the quality of life of the individual (Liu, et al., 2025). When you take the time to include working out in your daily life, spending even half an hour every day focusing on moving your body everyday, you are able to achieve the two-hour-per-week goal easily. It only takes a small step to start with.

So, how does this work? When it comes down to how moving your body can bring about these amazing changes in you, there are various studies that claim that regular exercise can boost the production of endorphins, also known as a happy hormone (Ernandini & Trinita, 2026). This boost has a positive impact on one’s mood and also works to decrease the level of stress an individual is experiencing. This specific study also looks into how intense exercise is related to a decrease in depressive symptoms, as the effects of exercise have a positive reaction on the central nervous system, which is what controls and regulates the amount of stress an individual experiences, in turn giving individuals an effect akin to the effect antidepressants normally have (Ernandini & Trinita, 2026).

When someone is constantly in a good mood, able to overcome the challenges they face, and handle the mental load with resilience, naturally, the way they function and do their work improves. Regular exercise, while not directly related to one’s productivity, is observed to be a mediating factor in the relationship, as physical activity brings about various biological changes. Studies show that factors such as better sleep due to reduced stress, an adrenaline-positive increase, and improved overall mood can have a large positive impact on productivity in a workplace (Rossi, et al., 2025). In addition, this study also noted that improved physical perception and having a positive body image are also related to better productivity. Overall, feeling good about themselves as well as being able to work at their best levels suggests that engaging in regular exercise could predict lower levels of burnout as well (Rossi, et al., 2025).

Although we’re all very aware of how incorporating regular exercise into our daily lives can help improve it for the better, sometimes it takes a little bit of a push to actually implement it. Whenever you try to set time aside for a workout, remind yourself of how good you would feel after, and how big of an impact it will make in your life in the long run. Build yourself step by step, making yourself stronger and, in turn, making your mind more resilient to overcome anything.

References

Ernandini, E., & Trinita, D. C. (2026). Balance of Life: Exercise as a Vehicle for the Soul and Mind. In The Psychological Effects of Exercise [Working Title]. IntechOpen. https://doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.1017545

Liu L, Xin X, Wang H and Zhang Y (2025) Effectiveness of physical exercise on mental health among university students: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Front. Psychol. 16:1612408. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1612408

Rossi, C., Giustino, V., Patti, A. et al. (2025). The role of physical activity in workplace well-being: impacts on stress, productivity, and health: a narrative review. Sport Sci Health 21, 1431–1445 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11332-025-01460-4