Jog On: How Running Saved My Life

Product Information

Chapter 5 – Working out in nature offers your mental health an additional boost –a thing Bella personally felt. Also, exercise motivates anxiety sufferers to ponder on their symptoms differently. This is effective since the impacts of exercise on the body are really very related to the physical symptoms of anxiety. In both circumstances, you feel a racing heart, extreme sweating, and gushes of adrenaline. This entails that, when a person that is anxious embraces an exercise regime, he starts to have positive connections with these feelings. Afterward, when he feels anxiety symptoms, he’ll be less afraid of them and won’t panic that much. As a matter of fact, OCD begins with worrying thoughts. A mother that has OCD might unexpectedly reason, “What if I killed my daughter?” Now, though thoughts such as these are alarming, they are not abnormal. As a matter of fact, various studies reveal that every one of us experiences random negative feelings such as this occasionally.

In an effort to feel safe, she began evading areas that made her panic. However, as the years went by, this signified she couldn’t go to most of the city where she stayed, or go to her local stores, or even go to the closest park near her. When she became married, Bella was dodging from everything –such as planes, freeways, elevators, and subway. Wear something comfortable to run in: You don’t need any fancy kit, just choose something unrestrictive. Enjoy the beauty around you Your anxiety can make you introverted, forcing your brain to see negative, scary things instead of your surroundings. Nearly every time I go for a run, I stop to take a longer look at a building, a poster, a sunset. My phone is full of photos of weird street names, beautiful views, and dogs I see along the way. The big question is, who is this book for? I personally feel that if you're an anxious person (or suffer from any other mental health issues), then you'll find this insightful. It explains really well how that particular form of exercise can help you to detach from your problems (for a while); how it almost becomes a form of mindfulness and a welcome break from all the things that are dragging you down.I procrastinate for an hour, then I head out to run. I don't eat breakfast, because I've experimented with this before running and it doesn't make me run faster or longer. It just makes me hungry halfway through. I chew bubblegum throughout my runs, which are typically about 12k. I run like Forrest Gump – no planned route, just meandering through bits of London I've not seen in a while. Sometimes that means a loop, mostly it means running somewhere stupidly far away and having to get the tube home. At worst, I’ve looked in the mirror at my own face and not recognised it to be me, and not just because I had terrible hair and bad skin that morning. It’s a strange and awful experience. When I was trapped in a fug of anxiety and depression in my early 20s, disassociation made it feel as though the people around me were actors in a bad reality show. I couldn’t connect with loved ones; everything felt fake and staged. I line up a book promo and write a chunk of my novel in the afternoon. Saying ‘my novel’ is ridiculous since really only my mum has read it so far. When I get jittery from Diet Coke and sitting down for too long, I go into our junk room (the size of a toilet and filled with stuff we don't know where to put anywhere else) and retrieve some dumbbells and a CMT device, which is basically a dumbbell with handles and filled with ball bearings. I try and do three rounds of five different arm exercises and then some sporadic shaking with the CMT. Then I'll push through a run – same 12k.

Podcasts and music help They distract me when I get bored, or tired. More importantly, at the beginning, they made my brain concentrate on something other than worry. I spent my 20s enjoying journalism but also knowing ‘I have slightly stumbled into this’. I knew lots of journalists, my dad was a journalist. I did it without thinking about it. And then I thought, ‘I don’t really know where I’m gonna go with this, because I’m not my dad ...’” She left journalism aged 33, to write Jog On and says that writing the book “felt like the beginning of my life”.

Grace Bernard had taken it upon herself to exact revenge on her wealthy father’s family and committed several murders, which no one else would ever understand. She was determined to take them out one by one, no matter what the cost. But even with her successful operation, she was framed and imprisoned for a murder she did not commit. ‘How To Kill Your Family’ follows Grace’s journey as she seeks revenge and discovers the cost of her actions. Will she finally be able to get away with her crimes, or will she be forever punished for her decisions? Begin with no expectations. Start small, start slowly and walk if you need to. A minute outside can be a small win. However, what can be done if you stay in a city or town? Don’t stress–various studies have revealed that you don’t constantly have to work out in nature to get the advantages of it. Extraordinarily, research done by the University of Essex has discovered that just viewing images of lush, natural landscapes while you work out is sufficient to increase your self-esteem and decrease your blood pressure!

After a decade of settling for merely ‘managing’, I’d found the thing that broke me out of it: I’d found running. Photograph: Thomas Butler/The Guardian When she hit 30 that year, she remembers thinking everything felt different. “I started running and continued seeing the therapist … all the worries and panic and irrational thoughts and not being able to get out of bed went away. I was able to live on my own for the first time and travel and do all the things I couldn’t do in my 20s. It felt like a new lease of life. I felt like a human being and not like a sad, empty shell pretending to be a human being which is what my 20s felt like”.

All of a sudden, she didn’t just saw alone; however, she also felt the beauty of her environments– the sea, the waves, a mountain. While running, she felt little but not unimportant. She understood that she was connected to the natural world, even though her place in it was tiny. As she paused to pay attention to the waves and feel the sun on her face, she was not thinking about the past or stressing about the future. Rather, she was eventually living in the here and now. I'd recommend you give it a read, whether it's to delve into your own mental health or if you want to try to better understand the struggles of someone you know. There is no magical remedy for anxiety. There’s no medication you can use or work out you can do that will ensure that you never feel bothered or unhappy again. However, a running regime can assist you to cope with your symptoms and offer you the tools to live a more satisfying life. Therefore, tie your sneakers lace, and let go of your anxiety by allowing your body to fly down a – preferably nature-filled – path. I was about to turn 30, and terrified I would use the breakup as an excuse to retreat, to be scared of life itself. I was not ready to run across a playing field. So I put on some old leggings and a T-shirt and walked to a dark alleyway 30 seconds from my flat. It fitted two important criteria: near enough to the safety of home, and quiet enough that nobody would laugh at me. I felt absurd and slightly ashamed – as if I was doing something perverse that shouldn’t be seen.

This book was ok. I'm generally not that much of an nonfiction reader so I guess me not being the biggest fan of this memoir isn't all that surprising. I found it to be very relatable and a really honest account of Bella's journey with her mental health. I had so many 'yes that's how I've felt' moments and it made me realise that taking regular medication to keep an overthinking brain on an even keel is nothing to be ashamed of, plus I really thought about my other coping strategies and mood boosters, which, in case you're interested, for me are any of the following:- Walking my dogs, a gym workout, kitchen disco and baking. The second thing, which was even more valuable, was that I noticed I wasn’t feeling so anxious. Soon enough, I was reaching parts of the city I hadn’t been able to visit in years, especially alone. Within a month I was able to run through the markets of Camden without feeling I would faint or break down. When your brain has denied you the chance to take the mundane excursions most people do every day, being able to pass through stalls selling “Nobody knows I’m a lesbian” T-shirts suddenly feels like a red-letter day. By concentrating on the rhythm of my feet striking the pavement, I wasn’t obsessing over my breathing, or the crowds, or how far I was from home. It was miraculous to me. A photo posted by on Was it a more relaxing writing experience not having to recount your own life?I had really weird dreams about the characters who I was trying to kill. I didn’t like any of the characters but I started feeling really guilty about killing them, which was quite a strange thing. I texted my mum one morning like, ‘I can’t kill the grandparents’ and she replied: ‘Just get them murdered’. She texted me every day asking if they were dead yet. So, yes I had weird dreams. I’m also now incredibly paranoid about anything that gets sent to my house because of one of the storylines. I’m absolutely petrified about where deliveries have come from, who sent it and what it is. So I’ve actually screwed myself with that because I never considered it before and now because of something I wrote myself, I’m terrified. Let's talk naming characters...