Exercise. The best medicine for stress relief.

Exercise. The best medicine for stress relief.

In today’s hectic world we are constantly using some sort of high tech gadget from the time we get up to the time we turn out the lights. This could be anything from our television or DVR box to our cellphones or computers. We have all learned to used these technologies and most of us have a “Love/Hate” relationship with many of them. The problems we all have run into not only cause temporary frustration but also unwanted stress. It is this stress that we submit our selves to that can cause the most damage.

Take for instance those lost files on your computer. You know, the ones you thought you wouldn’t need or you thought you had backed up. It’s only now that you have deleted them that you realize you still need them. So now you have come to the conclusion that you will never delete anything ever again. And all of those external hard drives that you have been storing your “never to be deleted again” data on don’t want to spin up any more.

Then again, you could be waiting on that important email only to notice that your Internet connection is no longer working and the meeting that you are presenting in starts in 5 minutes.

You could be waiting for a phone call but for some reason your cell phone just doesn’t want to get reception anymore.

Maybe you finally have everything ready to start working on a project and your hard drive crashes.

Of course you could have waited to do those updates from Microsoft but they said they were important. So now that you have all the updates done your programs don’t seem to run as fast and your connection to your company server seems to be broken.

Stress, frustration. Can you feel the tension in the back or your neck? The dull ache in your wrist from typing all day.

As an IT person and a developer, I can not only relate to all of these but many many more. As my stress built I started to notice problems with my sleep, my back, my neck, my eyes and eating habits which lead to weight gain. I knew I had to do something about it so I decided to hit the gym during the day to decompress. Blow off some steam if you will. The results were not only noticeable from a visual perspective but also from an overall sense of well-being. I started to loose the weight I had gained from sitting in my chair all day. I noticed that my back which had given me problems for so many years no longer hurt each and every night. My sleep habits were not only changing but starting to find a rhythm that I hadn’t had since I was about 13. I knew I was heading in the right direction now and things not only got easier but I started to have more drive then I had felt in years. Long story short, I’m eight years in and I have never felt better.

Exercise. The best medicine for stress relief? I think so.