Firstly a HUGE welcome to my website and/or blog! It has been a while since I last managed to sit…
As you may or may not be aware, this month is EDS awareness month. This blog idea has been something that’s been rattling around my brain for a while. I thought to coincide with the awareness month, I would try and get this written for you, dear reader, and myself. The reason being, I hear a lot of talk amongst the medical and health professionals about people pushing for a diagnosis. This is being portrayed as a negative thing to do. Particularly, in those individuals (like myself), where you look perfectly fine but you are suffering. Because of all this, I wanted to address, what a diagnosis meant for me.
Why can’t I cope?
A lot of people have been really struggling with the idea of lockdown, the pandemic, COVID, being ‘stuck’ indoors, ‘social’ distancing and now the anxiety surrounding emerging from lockdown. A lot of people cannot understand why they cannot cope with this when they have always ‘coped’ before. Let me stress this to you now, it is different. It is weird. It isn’t any form of ‘normal’ we have ever known before and not something we ever imagined we would need to deal with in our lifetime. It is OK that you are struggling. It is OK to cry, get angry at it for taking your freedom away, however, we do not want to stay in this state. We want to be able to function better, cope better with the whole scenario as we know it is going to remain different for quite some time to come. That is why today, I will be explaining a little about what is going on in our brains when coping with COVID, to make us feel this way and to offer some tools to help with coping better.
This month I wanted to focus on the benefits of exercise on mental health in particular. This is because a lot of us will have made new year’s resolutions and may struggle with keeping up their motivation. I wanted to give you the neuroscience behind exercise, so you understand the positive impact that physical activity has on your body and mind, and also, how it’s possible to keep motivated.