Exercise and Happiness

By Michael Gibbons

Dan Taylor can remember the exact moment when he knew he had to make a change in his life.

“I was actually working in a school at the time and there was a gym class coming in,” he said. “I saw this little itty-bitty kid do 50 chin-ups and I thought, ‘Man, I’m a big guy and I should be able to do that, but I can’t.’ So that’s when I started going to the gym.”

Taylor, 24, works as an electrician with the Toronto District School Board.

At his heaviest, he weighed 310 pounds. Once he started exercising regularly, he lost almost 70 pounds.

Now Taylor feels healthier and happier, which he attributes to his new look, but also his newfound sense of determination, which has bled over into other areas in his life.

“It’s this knowledge that I can go out and do this stuff and it’s not hard to do it,” he said.

Taylor’s story is indicative of the effect that exercise can have on a person’s mood and happiness. The happiness that comes from his sense of accomplishment is not unusual.

Angela Pereira, president of First Line Kinesiologists, has seen it in many of her clients.

“They like that they’re doing something good for themselves,” she said.

Pereira finds that a lot of her clients become much happier because they feel better about themselves.

“We find that they have a lot more self-esteem and self-confidence,” she said.

For some people, happiness comes from the fact that they wouldn’t be alive today if not for choosing to live a healthier life through exercise.

Hanif Mark Sheikh once believed he had a promising basketball career ahead of him. As a youth, he played on Canada’s national junior team. He planned to play professionally in Europe.

But Sheikh’s dream came to an abrupt end when he tore his anterior cruciate ligament (ACL), a debilitating musculoskeletal injury to the knee. Because of his injury, he couldn’t get a tryout with any team. Sheikh’s life went into a tailspin.

“It was to the point where I didn’t even want to get out of bed. I was that depressed,” he said. “I thought my life was over. There was nothing else I was going to be able to do… From the time I was three years old, that’s all I did. You train since you were that young and you train to play basketball.”

Sheikh’s depression led to extreme inactivity.

“One day, after about five years, I ended up in the hospital and I almost ended up in a coma because I had let my physical state get so bad,” he said.

Sheikh began to turn his life around when he started to exercise again. For him, simply making an effort to be active had an immediate positive effect on his psyche.

Today, Sheikh is in good shape and he is no longer depressed. He works at Frog’s Gym as a personal trainer and nutrition and wellness specialist, helping others achieve the same happiness that he has found through physical fitness.

Happiness can be derived from exercise physiologically as well. Pereira says that there is often a “multi-pronged” effect when one exercises. Increased levels of morphine-like endorphins produce a feeling of well-being, while levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, are reduced. Exercise also reduces blood pressure, making you feel calmer.

As a personal trainer at Frog’s Gym, Vito Marchese is well-acquainted with the rush of endorphins generated from a good workout. He likens the feeling he gets from exercise to getting a shot of vitamin D.

“When you work out, it feels like it’s sunny all the time,” he said.

Personal trainers and fitness experts aside, the average person can benefit from making the change to live a more active lifestyle.

For Taylor, it’s a matter of being able to enjoy the simple things that his new lifestyle has afforded him.

“At work, there was one time where I had to hang over a railing to do some work and in the middle of doing that, holding one foot on and one arm on, stretching out, I realized that I never would have been able to do that before,” he said. “Once I finished the work I thought, ‘I’m proud of myself now.’”

Photo by maHidoodi, available under a Creative Commons Attributions 2.0 Generic License.