By Amy Moore, Content Team Contributor

 For a long time, exercise was always something that I shied away from doing. It was never something that I enjoyed, and it constantly felt like a chore that I had to participate in. I was always the slowest in school PE classes and swimming, the one sport I could do, unfortunately, became something that felt impossible to do when I began having daily panic attacks. Swimming pools felt so claustrophobic, and my biggest fear was having a panic attack in the centre of a pool and being unable to get out. So I simply stopped doing it. As soon as PE became optional instead of compulsory at school, I stopped doing that, too, and suddenly exercise became virtually non-existent in my life.

 So many people told me that exercise would help me feel better. They said that it would give me something to get up for on days when I refused to get out of bed. At the time, it was hard enough to even go downstairs in my house, so the idea of exercise was the last thing I wanted to think about. And I also just did not want to believe it because it was always something that I had struggled with and had never typically enjoyed. It was actually lockdown which changed my mindset drastically. Suddenly the hour walk we were allowed each day was my saving grace and it became the best part of my day.

 I am here to tell you that actually, those people were correct, and actually, exercise has greatly reduced my daily anxiety. Walking, in particular, is something that I try to make sure I do every day now. There is just something about walking in the fresh air, even if it’s just for twenty minutes, which immediately calms me. I tend to walk at my own pace, often with my dog, in the morning before my day starts and it’s safe to say that I have noticed a huge decrease in my own stress and anxiety.

 I am a person who also gets very anxious about social events, and so I have incorporated walking into my way of dealing with this anxiety, too. I will now purposely park at least ten minutes away from where I need to be so that I can take that time to walk and calm myself down before having to be sociable. I always found that if my anxiety levels were high when entering somewhere busy, then it would be much harder to try and calm down, often leading to panic attacks where I would feel like I needed to leave early. Incorporating a walk into these things has become a way of me taking back control of my own emotions before having to enter a potentially uncomfortable situation.

 I have also found that walking can also be a sociable occasion. Throughout my teenage years, I held a lot of guilt and anger over how I felt anxiety was holding me back from seeing my friends, and I truly felt as though there was no way of getting out of the hold that it had on me. But, as my friends and I have got older and our lives have become busier, walking together has become our way of catching up (it also helps that we forget we’re also doing exercise!) and we usually incorporate a coffee stop somewhere on route, too.

 Within a couple of years, I have gone from someone who despised any form of exercise, overthinking the way that I walk or worried that people would be judging me for walking too slowly, to someone who genuinely credits walking as a crucial aspect of decreasing panic attacks, anxiety, and stress. It has become something that I genuinely enjoy, and I really wish that I had listened to those people who told me years ago that exercise would help my mental health. Every person has different ways of coping with anxiety and panic attacks, but exercise has truly been something that has helped me immensely.