If you want to lose weight and boost your fitness, a large part of the battle is not with your body, but with your mind. Your wellness and wellbeing is linked to the way you think in a much stronger way than you may understand. If you really want to get in shape, it’s time to change the way that you think about your everyday chores. When you stop thinking about them as daily activities and start thinking about them as ways to burn calories.
The truth is, exercise has a powerful effect on your mental health, and not just because of the serotonin (happy hormones) that it releases. Just by thinking you are doing something good for your health, a sort of ‘placebo effect’ occurs, where your mind is lifted and real physiological effects occur like lower blood pressure and weight loss. The trick is, then, to find a way of training your brain to believe that when you are doing daily activities, you are actually exercising.
A recent study backs up this theory. Researchers divided a group into two sections. The first section were given daily household chores to do, but they were not told that these chores were exercise. The second section were given the same chores, but they were told that these chores qualified as exercise. At the end of the four week trial period, the two groups had a medical test. The results showed that the group who believed that they had done exercise for the past four weeks had lower blood pressure and a lower BMI than the group that believed they had done no exercise.
This proves that when people think that their daily chores, such as hoovering, dusting and cleaning the floors count as exercise, these chores then actually make them healthier – so change the way you think about your daily routine!
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