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BY KATIE BECKER

In print | Published February 4, 2010

I spent the last column going on and on about exercise and how simple it can be to add to your schedule. As you may or may not have noticed, I left out a substantial chunk of the argument for exercise in that column. To be sure, it’s pretty clutch to know how and when to exercise, but that doesn’t help you much if you’re not convinced you need or want to be exercising at all. Enter this week’s column: the missing “why” of exercise.

Why exercise? Why try to cram yet another activity into an already overloaded schedule? Why brave bitterly cold weather to go for a walk or take a trip to the gym? What’s so important that exercise should get this special treatment?

I could regale you with physical health benefits, but that feels like a tired old line that no one pays much attention to, if any, at this point. We’re young, most of us don’t have heart disease or high blood pressure or diabetes yet, and so we don’t feel an urgency to keep our bodies working. An “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” attitude. Which is unfortunate, because there are substantial preventative health benefits to exercise. But again, we are already inundated with “healthy diet and exercise” blah blah blah all the time, yet exercise still doesn’t cross our minds as a priority.

So I’m not going to feed you another tired old argument that doesn’t really affect you now in the body, mind, and schedule of a college student. Forgive me if I’m generalizing too much from my own experience, but we want some more immediate, visible benefits from the precious few activities to which we devote our time. I get tired after days of class, work, and reading, which means that venturing outside my cozy room, let alone hauling my lazy butt down to the gym, is not really on my radar as a super fun activity that will make me feel better about my life. Plus, adding physical exhaustion to mental exhaustion and sleep deprivation sure as hell does not sound appealing to me most of the time. If exercise isn’t going to produce some tangible difference for me, then all those cons hold me back and I’m more likely to take a nap than go exercise.

Amazingly enough, exercise does provide some benefits that most of us would be interested in. Mood, stress, anxiety, sleep: these are some Swattie key words. We’re always talking about how stressed we are or how we’re not sleeping enough. And then there are the things that we might not be talking about, but we know are going on with us and suspect are going on with our friends, such as depressed mood and anxiety about assignments, family, money, internships, friends, grades, etc. This place can be stressful. We know that.

Luckily, exercise does more for you and your body than just helping you to lose weight or to stay in shape. Exercise:

• Causes the body to release endorphins, which in turn help to elevate mood. Even if you approach your scheduled exercise time with a sense of dread, you’ll come out of it feeling happier. I usually get an added boost of happiness during exercise because it’s an academics-free thinking zone for my brain during that time.

• Lowers stress and anxiety. You might be feeling overwhelmed by work and meetings to the point where you think you barely have time to see your friends. If you take the time to exercise and decrease your stress levels, the stress relief from exercise would more than pay off in terms of the stress incurred by having another time commitment. You could then spend less time stressing about everything you need to do and more time doing it.

• Helps with the relief of depressive symptoms. I am not suggesting that you stop a treatment regimen (therapy, medication, support group, etc.) in favor of exercise if you have a mood disorder, but exercise can be a helpful supplement to those treatments.

• Improves mental clarity. Having a hard time focusing in class or when you’re trying to study? In addition to getting more sleep, you could add exercise to your routine. The resulting boost your mental acuity would help you be more efficient in your studying, and we’re always looking for ways to be more efficient.

• Increases the amount of energy you have during the day. I always hate it when I’ve gotten tons of sleep and still feel exhausted. As it turns out, after an initial decrease in energy, regular exercise will increase the amount of energy you have. Instead of a morning coffee, try a morning jog and see how your energy levels are affected.

You may be tempted to discard all of those beautiful nuggets of information above as another mere list of health benefits that won’t really affect your life on a day-to-day basis. In actuality, all of those benefits can make you a better student and a happier person, which counteracts those pesky negative effects of too much schoolwork and an overscheduled life. In addition, those benefits of exercising dispel some of the myths that may be preventing you from exercising. No more excuses about too much work, not enough time, too tired, too depressed to exercise. You can turn those times when you feel exhausted, stressed, and overloaded into the perfect time to exercise. You’ll have more energy and focus for when you do go back to studying, and you might even feel more optimistic about your ability to get work done. Why exercise then? Because you’re a Swattie, you’re probably wracking your brain half the time to figure out how to be a better student, and even if you’re not, you could always use more happiness in your life.

Katie is a senior. She can be reached at kbecker1@swarthmore.edu.

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