BYOH: Exercise To Improve Your Mood

BYOH: Build Your Own Happiness or How to hack your own happiness buttons.

Today: Pump yourself up!

You don’t need money or fancy gadgets to improve your mood or hack your own happiness buttons. All you need is about 15-minutes a day.

Exercise is not just good for help in weight loss or improving outcomes when it comes to heart disease and diabetes. Exercise can improve your mood.

You don’t need a fancy gym membership or expensive workout gadgets, either, although some inexpensive dumbbells wouldn’t hurt. All you need it the desire to change your mood and get up and move.

From personal experience, I can tell you that I was good at finding excuses why I couldn’t workout. For instance, I don’t like working out with an audience, so I can’t workout when my family is around the house. I get up before dawn to do my regular daily routine, there was no way that I could get up any earlier than I already do. Because I am up so early, by the time it starts to get dark, I’m out of steam, so working out before bed was not as motivating as I thought it would be (when I tried, I kept being interrupted by my kids!), so that didn’t work for me. The time in between is full of family, work, and craft projects, so no time to workout there, either.

I’m a stay-at-home mom, right now, and even being home all day did not stop the excuses. Of course, my excuses were worse when I was working outside of the home. I completely understand that there are things that would keep someone from finding just a few minutes to workout. I had to give up another morning pastime to do it, but I finally figured out a trick to get me moving and it’s going to make you laugh.

I workout in the bathroom (Yes, the bathroom), right before I take my morning shower. That’s also the time of day I’m most likely to be listening to my mood music, so I am combining two happiness hacks into one practice.

The bathroom is perfect, despite mine being kind of small, because since I have arthritis, I don’t do floor work (getting up and down from the floor is a pain and makes working out unappealing to me), so I only do exercises that I can do standing or sitting on a seat (thank goodness my bathroom is generally sparkling). I keep a small dumbbell stashed in among the lotions and oils near the bathroom sink. It’s also perfect because the rest of my family is in bed and not underfoot. Since I am in the bathroom, nobody bothers me, even if they do wake up. Win-Win.

After I workout and I’m a little sweaty, I can jump in the shower and get on with the rest of my day and I still maintain my regular morning schedule. Another win.

I workout 7 days a week (15-min/day low cardio plus alternating body work for 6 days. On Sundays I do seated or standing yoga moves). Going through the motions, themselves, makes me feel good and doing it to my favorite music is exhilarating. I believe that another reason that exercise pushes my happiness buttons is for the simple fact that I am pleased with myself that I took the time to workout; it’s a source of daily pride, now.

I am never going to be that 112 lbs, 40-something mom. Heck, I haven’t been that size since I was 9 yrs old and I don’t intend to be, either. I get myself pumped up because it makes me feel good about myself, personally, and it makes my body feel less arthritic, physically. All the wins to go around!

What are your favorite exercises you like to do that make you feel good?

Feel free, to visit my Facebook page and tell me what kind of things that you do to push your own happiness buttons or drop a line in the comments section. I would really love to hear from you.