Serenity: Methods to Lower Stress at Home

By Matt McDowell, CSCS

Personal Trainer & Group Exercise Instructor at Harvard Recreation

Controlling your stress may seem like an impossible task, but the body has many ways to regulate its tension if you can tap into its systems.

To start, where does stress come from? There is a substance that builds up in your body to make you feel anxious. Cortisol, or the “Stress Hormone,” is secreted by your adrenal glands to control mood, motivation, and fear. While it has its uses, it becomes a problem when you are under constant emotional, mental, or physiological pressure. Under the current climate we all have a good excuse to feel stressed. So how do we attenuate our cortisol and reduce stress?

There are many avenues to relieve tension. You can try a short-term solution to boost your mood, such as sweet foods or distractions, but those will not last long. There are mental exercises such as meditation, mindfulness training, or breathing exercises. These target the autoregulatory system and help to get your body in the habit of relaxing, rather than tensing, which can drive and increase the feeling of stress (for an article on how and why take a look at https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/exercising-to-relax). As a trainer and group exercise instructor I want to highlight physical exercise as a means to combat stress.

Physical Exercise

The mental benefits of exercise are starting to become common knowledge. I know from personal experience, as well as anecdotally from friends, family, and acquaintances, that there are stress-relieving qualities of ample physical activity. We know it works, so let’s skip ahead to how much exercise is needed to get the stress reducing benefit.

A recent study (Kim et. al. 2020) found that the relationship between physical activity and anxiety symptoms was curvilinear: both not getting enough exercise and getting too much exercise were associated with higher likelihood of anxiety. The researchers investigated the amount of “MET” minutes a week versus likelihood to be diagnosed with anxiety. METs, which stands for metabolic equivalents, are a way to measure exercise intensity. The researchers defined:

“moderate intensity of physical activity as 4 METs, meaning activities such as carrying light loads, cycling at a regular pace, or tennis doubles that somewhat increased adults’ breathing rate compared to their normal rate. Vigorous intensity of physical activity was defined as 8 METs, meaning activities such as heavy lifting, digging, aerobics, and fast cycling that significantly increased adults’ breathing rate compared to their normal rate.”

They found a wide range of effective amounts (i.e. significantly better than a sedentary individual) of exercise per week for both men and women as follows:

Intensity	Women (hours per week)	Men (hours per week)
Moderate Exercise	6 - 15	3 – 45.5
Vigorous Exercise	2.5 – 6.5	1.25 – 18.75

As you can see, men had a very wide range of exercise times for both moderate and vigorous exercise: from as low as 1.25 hours of vigorous exercise to the extreme of over 45 hours of moderate exercise. Women had a narrower effective range needing either more at the lower end with a minimum of 2.5 hours of vigorous exercise to reduce anxiety, or less at the higher end with 15 hours of moderate exercise.

The study also identified an ideal range (i.e. least likelihood of anxiety) of 1,800 to 3,000 MET-minutes per week for women, and 6,000–9,000 MET-minutes per week for men. This translates to the number of hours of exercise per week in the moderate and vigorous exercise categories as shown below.

Most Effective Intensity	Women (hours per week)	Men (hours per week)
Moderate Exercise	9 - 15	30 – 45
Vigorous Exercise	3.75 – 6.5	12.5 – 18.75

Note the differences between this table and the previous table: this change to ideal exercise ranges to reduce anxiety only increased the minimum number of hours of exercise needed per week.

Take note, what works for the general populous may not be what is best for you. With over 120,000 people in this study, there is a general sense of what is the “average” ideal amount of exercise. But if you find a little more or a little less makes you feel better, do that! It does give a great target to reach if you are already feeling stressed. Getting even just a little exercise can help, and it can go a long way to making you feel less stressed!

There are many ways to achieve this amount of physical activity. At the lowest level of moderate exercise, one hour walks over six days a week would check the box. If you are trying to spend more time inside, or would simply like to get the necessary amount of exercise quickly, indoor training can be the vigorous intensity workout that you need. For ideas on how to get this training at home, check out Harvard Recreation’s Virtual Workout page at https://recreation.gocrimson.com/fitness/Virtual_Workouts! There are daily live classes and YouTube videos you can follow along at your convenience. We also have trainers who offer online 1-1 training via Zoom. We are here to help you, and we will get through this together!

Sources: Kim, S. Y., Jeon, S. W., Lee, M. Y., Shin, D. W., Lim, W. J., Shin, Y. C., & Oh, K. S. (2020). The Association between Physical Activity and Anxiety Symptoms for General Adult Populations: An Analysis of the Dose-Response Relationship. Psychiatry investigation, 17(1), 29–36. https://doi.org/10.30773/pi.2019.0078