| > Heavy exercising, especially aerobic exercising. Possibly all this activity means hour(s) of not-stressor focus is calming you down. All your "free" time is exercise instead of stewing. To rule out the time, swap these high time consumption activities for 4 minutes of HIIT (high intensity interval training) bookended by 2 mins warmup and 2 mins cooldown, which is proven to have even better metabolic benefits due to the 4 minutes of anaerobic intervals (sprints). It's a shame more people don't know "this one trick". Few of us have extra hours a day to gambol about. Most people can find 8 minutes. > I think that at the heart, anxiety is born out of insecurity Maybe exactly at the heart. As noted in a discussion here last week, there's a heart-brain link for anxiety, heart can cause the brain to feel anxious. HIIT improves heart better than, say, beta blockers, so it could be the mechanism is something like exercise is improving heart which signals less anxiety to brain. |
I've also don HIIT and I can confirm that 15-20 minutes of HIIT (maybe 5-7 intervals with a bit of warmup) provides the same results as one hour of more moderate form of aerobic exercising. However, HIIT, when done properly, is fucking horrible (several times I've been very close to puking afterwards). I still do it maybe once every two weeks, but I think I would die if I tried to do a proper HIIT workout every day.