Jog On: How Running Saved My Life

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As a very keen runner I was drawn to this book for that reason, however after reading it I felt it was better aimed at those struggling with their mental health than the hard core runner. I’m very fortunate to have never suffered with these issues so a lot of the text was a little wasted on me. Bella’s brilliant love letter to running turns into an extraordinarily brave and frank account of her battle with anxiety. A compassionate and important book’ Joe Lycett

However, the sedentary group hadn’t formed these connections. This shows that, at a neurological level, exercise prepares us to deal with stress better. It definitely assisted Bella. When she hit 30 that year, she remembers thinking everything felt different. “I started running and continued seeing the therapist … all the worries and panic and irrational thoughts and not being able to get out of bed went away. I was able to live on my own for the first time and travel and do all the things I couldn’t do in my 20s. It felt like a new lease of life. I felt like a human being and not like a sad, empty shell pretending to be a human being which is what my 20s felt like”. I listened to the audiobook of this, which is narrated by the author, and really enjoyed this format. It was engaging, interesting, educational, honest and at times, quite funny. The author has been through a lot and she never sugar coated things or pretended they were easier than they were. But, it also wasn’t a sob story. She found the perfect balance between talking about challenges and hard times, and giving hope for the future.

Monday

In the years that followed, Bella’s anxiety escalated and she became bound by rituals; avoiding particular letters, numbers, colours and songs, and only travelling to self-designated ‘safe’ places. “There were loads of places I couldn’t go because I would panic on my own. You then become slightly agoraphobic – the world outside feels scary-unsafe,” she explains. Together with the hormonal as well as cognitive advantages, there’s also proof that exercise transforms us on a much deeper, neurological level. A current study examined mice that lived in a stressful surrounding. So, some of these mice were permitted to exercise regularly, whereas the other mice were not allowed to exercise at all. Later, the researchers found out that, the active stressed mice had formed new connections in their hippocampus – the part of the brain in charge of emotions. There’s also too much politics and talk of privilege that I didn’t really come to the book to read, and to be honest… a skinny white middle class woman writing a book about exercise complaining that most of the representation of exercise from online content comes from skinny middle class women I found a bit irritating. It’s a sad reality that 26% of the entire adults in England do lesser than 30 minutes of exercise per week. Also, the data reveal that women work out less than men. The cause for this gender imbalance may be seen in the preconceived notions we have about working out. Research has revealed that a lot of women and girls see sports as competitive, aggressive, and incompatible with being feminine. I've forgotten to drink water so I drink about eight glasses and then wonder why I need to pee so much during the night' Friday

Frequently, this female reluctance to sports begins young; a lot of teenage girls state feeling uncomfortable during mixed-gender gym sessions. One of the reasons is as a result of the comments that boys make during these classes. Sadly, these feelings of discomfort go with women into adulthood. When Cosmopolitan magazine conducted a survey, they discovered that most women felt threatened by gyms and that some were afraid of being criticized by men. She had an insight during those early jogs. Whenever she ran, she became less sad, and her mind got quieter. For those few minutes of physical workout, she wasn’t thinking about her divorce or her husband dating other people. As a matter of fact, she wasn’t thinking about it that much at all. After years of her brain tying itself up in knots with frightening, intrusive feelings, this quietness was a big relief.The second thing, which was even more valuable, was that I noticed I wasn’t feeling so anxious. Soon enough, I was reaching parts of the city I hadn’t been able to visit in years, especially alone. Within a month I was able to run through the markets of Camden without feeling I would faint or break down. When your brain has denied you the chance to take the mundane excursions most people do every day, being able to pass through stalls selling “Nobody knows I’m a lesbian” T-shirts suddenly feels like a red-letter day. By concentrating on the rhythm of my feet striking the pavement, I wasn’t obsessing over my breathing, or the crowds, or how far I was from home. It was miraculous to me. She did this whole thing to try and handle her extreme anxiety. However, unsurprisingly, these coping methods were not effective. Rather, things got worse. She began going through disassociation – a frightening symptom of anxiety that makes sufferers feel disconnected from their environments. As someone who has grappled with anxiety for several years, and has found running to be a really effective way of managing the symptoms, I was naturally drawn to this book. And indeed, though the author's experiences of anxiety differ from my own, there was so much that I found myself agreeing with (and thinking 'thank goodness someone else knows how it feels!'). Well, it has more to do with a hormone known as cortisol. Cortisol is a stress hormone you’re your body produces when its fight or flight response is activated. Scientists have discovered that when you workout, your cortisol levels reduce, making you feel less stressed later.

Bella’s anxiety intensified at university at the age of 19, eventually forcing her to drop out. “I wasn’t suicidal, but I had thoughts in my head that I didn’t want to go on. I took meds, had therapy. Obviously, mental health issues don’t tend to get better on their own,” she says.Even while Bella was still a young child, she was very anxious. Everything scared her – from surreal pieces of art to specific songs to the noises generated from cars. Her stomach, as well as her chest, usually hurt with worry. When she attended school parties, she would get a strong sense of fear; something would just feel wrong. We go to a Yoga class given by a family friend. My mum, sister, Greg and I hurtle there late, feeling very frazzled and are taken into a dark room to stretch. I've never done Yoga because I have the attention span of a much younger millennial, but two hours without my phone doing deep breathing is actually quite nice, though I insist on running home because I'm still unsure if what I did would count as exercise. I am a brainwashed running idiot. At home, I eat pitta and hummus and imbibe my life-giving Diet Coke before we go out for dinner, where I eat so much truffle pasta and tiramisu that I fall into an uncomfortable indigestion sleep where I dream about moving to Richmond. I have never wanted to move to Richmond. It probably means I want a baby. I assume every dream post-35 means I subconsciously want a baby.” Sunday The big question is, who is this book for? I personally feel that if you're an anxious person (or suffer from any other mental health issues), then you'll find this insightful. It explains really well how that particular form of exercise can help you to detach from your problems (for a while); how it almost becomes a form of mindfulness and a welcome break from all the things that are dragging you down. However, what can be done if you stay in a city or town? Don’t stress–various studies have revealed that you don’t constantly have to work out in nature to get the advantages of it. Extraordinarily, research done by the University of Essex has discovered that just viewing images of lush, natural landscapes while you work out is sufficient to increase your self-esteem and decrease your blood pressure! I found this book so helpful! As someone who suffers from anxiety and is a (very) amateur runner, this book helped me better understand how running can help quiet my brain chatter. I found the honesty about mental health really refreshing and learned a lot about other forms of anxiety. It also inspired me to get out and run on days when I really didn’t want to!

Start small If leaving your safe places makes you feel vulnerable, do a loop of your road. Run that road until you feel confident you can go to the next one. It all counts, and it’s important you don’t push yourself too fast. Listen to your body. Podcasts and music help They distract me when I get bored, or tired. More importantly, at the beginning, they made my brain concentrate on something other than worry.

Wednesday

I spent my 20s enjoying journalism but also knowing ‘I have slightly stumbled into this’. I knew lots of journalists, my dad was a journalist. I did it without thinking about it. And then I thought, ‘I don’t really know where I’m gonna go with this, because I’m not my dad ...’” She left journalism aged 33, to write Jog On and says that writing the book “felt like the beginning of my life”. After a decade of settling for merely ‘managing’, I’d found the thing that broke me out of it: I’d found running. Photograph: Thomas Butler/The Guardian