We address exercise regularly when we talk about overall health, health trends, talking about obesity, diabetes management, we bring up exercise quite a bit here when we discuss these things between us here on the Nursing Show and as nurses in general but there are so many other benefits to people getting even moderate or low levels of exercise on a regular basis and one of them is that is such a positive way to manage overall stress.
For people that have a high stress factors in their lives and stress affects us in so many ways, it lowers our immune response, it causes us to just deal with so many things, have the tension dealing with hypertension causing high blood pressure and other issues associated with job related stress, work related stress and increased cardiac problems, all of these things associated with stress can be better managed for people that exercise more. There was a study that looked at vigorous exercise putting the brakes on stress related aging.
Yeah, if you exercise, you’ll actually look younger, stay younger longer. We work out some of these things through vigorous exercise, the body helps us relax better at the other side and we are able to sleep better, we are able to better deal with stress the next time it comes along because we’re not as stressed to start with, our base level of stress is lower, we have a little bit farther to go before we reach that high stress point. So all of these things really help us age better, not just deal with all of the other factors of stress.
So maybe you can use that as an opportunity to bring up exercise when maybe one of your patients is talking about getting older and wrinkles and all of the other things that go along with getting a little bit older every year. Exercise will help you stay younger, look younger, longer, and maybe that’ll be the thing that helps your patient decide to begin engaging in a regular exercise program.
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This article has been featured in the news segment of the Nursing Show podcast episode Immune System Review and Episode 139.
