How to deal with stress through exercise

Stress is a major public health issue in modern times, and the continued cost of living crisis hasn't helped. A 2024 survey found that 4 in 10 people feel more stressed or anxious due to rising costs, and 2 in 10 had experienced mental health problems as a result.¹

While stress might manifest as anger, irritability, or feeling overwhelmed, it might also leave you feeling unable to enjoy yourself, worried you've lost your sense of humour, or even lonely.

Physical symptoms of stress

Physical symptoms can also signal high stress levels.

How does exercise aid stress relief?

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), the UK body for health guidance and advice, recommends that adults should do 150 minutes of moderate exercise a week, such as brisk walking, or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise a week, such as running. You can do a mix of both, or more.

Managing stress, improved sleep, and better social interaction are all key benefits of exercise. Even small amounts of physical activity can provide overall health benefits.

Stress is a form of threat, and under threat the body releases cortisol and adrenaline to prepare to react. Exercise interrupts this process.

Dr Josephine Perry, a chartered psychologist and co-writer of the audiobook 'Power Down to Power Up', explains that adrenaline and cortisol make us feel really rubbish.

"Heart rate goes up, breathing rate goes up, we get stomach issues, we get very tight shoulders and back muscles, and we may even lose some of our peripheral vision - the things you see outside your direct line of vision," she says.

But when we're exercising, the exercise effectively takes over from this reaction in our body, so we might then start to relax a little bit. We'll start to notice what's going on around us and our hearing will pick up. Heart rate and breathing rate will be up, but they'll be up because we're exercising. So, it feels like it gets rid of some of those chemicals that are unhelpfully flooding our body.

In ''Power Up to Power Down', Perry recommends that listeners 'identify their threat zone'.

"When we feel under threat, and those chemicals flood our body, each of us tends to have one area of our body where we feel it most," she says.

"Mine is the bottom right-hand corner of my stomach, it will literally start throbbing. Often when it starts throbbing, I'm not really aware what I'm anxious about. I'll look at my diary and notice I've got a really big speech to give, but I won't have practised properly."

Perry adds: "It's like a nice early warning system that the body's giving us. Identifying where in the body you feel stress gives us a good opportunity to realise, 'I need to get some exercise, think through this problem and get on top of it before it becomes actually stressful.'"

Sleep can make a huge difference to stress, but naturally it's one of the first things we lose. A systematic review found 29 studies that showed exercise improves sleep quality or duration, although four found no difference and one reported a negative impact - authors suggested that the relationship might not be so strong for younger people.²

Breathing techniques are a common approach to stressful thoughts at night-time and Perry's audio book includes one called colourful breathing, which she sometimes uses with her five-year-old. Other techniques such as breathing with counting or box breathing may also be worth a try.

Although burnout has been recognised by the World Health Organization (WHO) and is classed as a major issue for professions such as healthcare, it's still viewed with cynicism.

"Burnout doesn't sound like a real thing," Perry says. "It sounds a bit like one of those middle-class diseases that we hear people kind of joking about, but it's horrible when you're in the middle of it. It is really tricky because it is felt by high achievers, who are used to doing more and working harder in order to find their way out of problems.

"Unfortunately, when you've got burnout, doing that is like digging yourself into a deeper and deeper hole. Techniques you would often use to handle stress, such as exercise or seeing people, are also digging deeper and deeper.

"People with burnout really struggle to stop and recover, so they sometimes get to a point where they have no choice. I've spoken to people in the past who've not been able to get out of bed for weeks at a time. Your body just shuts down when you have done too much for too long. The earlier you can notice and deal with it, the more important that can be."

Perry warns that techniques people would often use to handle stress, including exercise, tend not to work on their own. In her experience, whether because of financial, professional, or personal reasons, people with burnout might also struggle to stop work and make time to relax and recover.

In this respect, it's important not to rely on exercise on its own to resolve chronic stress, burnout or moderate to severe mental health problems.

Stress can have a corrosive effect on our ability to concentrate, think clearly, regulate our feelings, and enjoy ourselves. By contrast, Perry says, exercise reminds us of our competencies.

"It shows we are capable of things," she says. "When we pick the right exercise for us - something we feel good at, something we feel masterful at - then it reminds us we are capable. It gives us that perspective again, to see that we can tackle other things."