Want to change your life? Go for a run

We live in a very busy, very chaotic, interconnected world. For most of us, it feels like we’re “on” all the time, always rushing from one thing to the next, and it’s as though there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to accomplish all that we’d like to do. We have personal and professional goals, but we also need to raise our children, nurture our marriage, and care for our ailing parents. Somewhere in that mix, supposedly we’re also mandated to eat a healthy diet regularly, more often than not, and of course, that’s in addition to exercise that we should be doing just about every single day.

Life is exhausting sometimes, isn’t it? It’s easy to feel overwhelmed, to just say forget it! and do nothing.

What if I told you that there was something that you could do, every single day if you wanted to, that would allow you to become a healthier version of yourself? Something that would make you feel good inside and out? Something that’d result in a version of you that’d likely be more caring to your children and spouse, more loving to your parents, and in general, a more well-rounded, healthy, and happier person?

If you want to change your life, starting today, do this simple task: just go for a run.

Before you scoff at this idea and insist that you’re not a runner, hear me out. Most people who run also said, at some point in their lives before they began, that they, too, weren’t runners. Most people have memories ingrained into their subconscious of being forced to run when they were younger, in PE class, and absolutely hating it. Most people, in fact, say that they’d only run if they were being chased if their lives were on the line, and even then, they probably still wouldn’t.

Sound familiar?

Here’s the thing, though. If you want to be happier and healthier, more patient with yourself and others, calmer, and in general, just to feel better, running is a great avenue. All of us have literally been running since we were children, as it’s a developmental milestone that comes not long after we figure out how to crawl and walk. Running, quite literally, is part of our DNA and is part of what makes us human.

When you go for a run, you’re relieving stress. You’re taking time for yourself, away from the never-ending cacophony of obligations, commitments, and priorities, and you’re doing something for both your physical and mental health. It feels good to sweat and to work hard, and you can do both pretty easily with running.

You don’t have to run far -- but if you want to, that’s great.

You don’t have to run very fast -- but again, if you’d like to, that’s okay.

There is so much variation, so many combinations of things you can do when you go for a run, that really, the sky is the limit. You can stick to a treadmill, go run in the mountains, run ovals around a high school track, or go run through country roads or your local neighborhood. You can go out for 10 miles, 10 minutes, or something even shorter or longer.

When you decide that enough is enough, that you want to start feeling better about your life, and you want to start improving your health, running will be there for you, waiting eagerly with open arms.

Perhaps you’re at a place in your life wherein you feel like you don’t have a lot of friends or that the friends you do have aren’t really cutting it for you anymore. Running is special in that it’s both a solitary and social endeavor, and runners, themselves, typically are very outgoing and easy-going people. If you decide you want to change the company that you keep, consider joining a local running group to meet people and make new friends. It’s highly likely that someone else present will also be new, like you, so you needn’t be intimidated. Plus -- realistically -- everyone was The New Guy at one point. It’s no big deal.

Maybe you’ve been struggling to sleep well at night. When you run, because you’re working so many muscles in your body and are typically working out pretty aerobically, your body will come to crave rest each night. It’ll be during these down periods, when you’re actually not running, that your body will reap the fitness gains and come out the other side stronger. Resting/sleeping is part of the cyclical process that running incurs, between stressing the body to make adaptations and resting to allow for the fitness gains, via the adaptations, to occur. That said, you’ll probably find that you sleep more soundly, more deeply, at night once you begin to run.

Or maybe you feel like your diet could use some work. While runners often are known for being a bit of a garbage disposal when it comes to eating -- “some eat to run, whereas I run to eat” -- once you are in the thick of running pretty regularly, you may find that your body begins to crave different foods. You will probably gravitate towards more foods that come from the earth, like fruits and vegetables, than you do heavily sugar-sweetened and manufactured foodstuffs. Your health will thank you for this transition.

Finally, maybe you just want to feel happier. Runners often are some of the happiest people you’ll meet, and even modern medicine suggests that regular runs have the same or comparable effects, for most people, as taking a pharmaceutical-grade anti-depressant or anti-anxiety medicine. For some people, running truly is therapy. For others, it helps to color their outlook on life, no doubt influenced by the enviable “runner’s high” they get, and it helps them to see the sunny side of life more often than not.

These are just a few of the ways that going out for a run, today, can begin to change your life. From the diet that you consume, how you sleep each night, the company that you keep, and the way you relieve your stress each day, running can really affect virtually every aspect of your life -- but only if you give it a chance.