Mental Health and Movement - Anji's story
How moving with others supports Anji's mental health
April 25, 2024
Anji is the AA for Newcastle. Ahead of mental health awareness week 13th - 19th May, she speaks about the importance of movement and how this helped her when she suddenly lost her mother to Cancer
My name is...
Hi, I'm Anji. I've been the Area Activator of GoodGym Newcastle for six years. Our group has a strong core, a brilliant task force and the best city in the UK as our playground. But maybe I am biased.
In my ‘real life’ day job I work for a children’s mental health charity, Stormbreak. We work with trusted adults in schools, at home, in healthcare to offer support for children’s emotional and mental wellbeing through movement. I spend all day, every day talking and writing about how movement supports mental wellbeing, and how ‘doing’ movement alongside others can be game changing. We aim to instill healthy habits in children as young as four, setting them up for life. I really believe in what we do and I see every day what a difference we make.
You don't need Strava to tell you how to feel better
This year the theme of Mental Health Awareness Week is ‘Movement: Moving more for our mental health’. Movement and all the goodness it brings is finally something we all recognise, the accidental bi-product of keeping ourselves physically active and healthy too. But what if we move that around, bring it front and centre instead of by accident? Do we recognise that often we intentionally move to feel better too?
Many people have complicated relationships with movement. Perhaps an instilled dislike of formal sport from school days, an uncomfortable relationship with their bodies or a belief that they just can’t. But how many of that same group also ‘do’ movement to feel better: a walk around the block when a family situation leads us to want to let off steam, pottering in the garden, taking the dog for a walk before the world wakes up. This is what GoodGym does really, really well. For my group, and for me, the movement part of GoodGym is the bit we sometimes forget to celebrate when we leave a session feeling fulfilled. We have caught up with friends, we have talked about and offloaded our days, we have been outdoors when we otherwise wouldn’t, we have laughed and celebrated and helped, and explored, and yes- all of that was done while we were moving.
The Mental Health Foundation has stacks of resources online. You can find data and percentages and lots of scientific evidence about why movement and exercise helps us to chemically feel better (there is some fascinating stuff out there too, about why that’s all boosted further if we do it outside, again a GoodGym bonus!) without running a marathon or climbing a mountain. You don’t need your fancy watch or your Strava data to tell you what makes you feel better, but the data backs up what we all know or suspect: moving is good for your brain.
Movement kept me going through the toughest challenges
At the end of last summer into autumn, I was faced with one of the toughest challenges I have ever faced from a mental health point of view as my beloved mother Meg was diagnosed with advanced cancer and died, all within 11 weeks. Naturally I was incredibly anxious and stressed before being met with the inevitable beast that is the grief of the loss of a parent. I still managed to ‘exercise’ during this period despite frustratingly also picking up a stress fracture, bookending my days with gym rehab trips and cycling. I also managed to work for the majority of the time before caring for my mother at home. The movement stuff was what kept me going, my chance to work off the stress, think things through, help to support sleep and to be the routine in the chaos. What I was severely lacking though was any kind of connection to others as I simply didn’t have time in my life or space in my brain to get to GoodGym sessions, too. I don’t think until this point I had actually realised the difference that made. Working remotely and alone, with a partner who works full time in a hospital, GoodGym breaks up the monotony of being by myself (I think this is why I talk so much at our sessions, apologies) and even during Covid I had managed to regularly get to sessions to connect to others and do good. My moving outside with others to support my emotional wellbeing was basically gone, replaced instead by daily long drives to the hospital to have scary conversations with doctors that I never wanted to hear.
I got back to GoodGym just a week after my mother’s funeral and -again this was probably heightened by the grief- relished the connections and escape it gave me. Whether we were putting up a Christmas tree (terrible timing for a grieving person), digging up weeds, sorting foodbank parcels, delivering leaflets or picking up litter, mentally I gradually started to feel better. I don’t think I had ever truly waited so keenly for Monday to roll around so I could get out and connect with my group, especially during the dark winter weeks. It was so abundantly clear to me that moving with others outside was key to feeling more like myself, even at times I didn’t feel like it. It was never about a step count or how many good deeds I was counting, it was just the doing of the thing and being with whoever showed up.
I was avoiding what I needed most
I am fortunate that the charity I work for has Paul Sinton-Hewitt, founder of parkrun, on the board and regularly shares wisdom and insight. When we were together as a team in January, Paul spoke about how the three things we tend to avoid when our mental health is at a low are getting outdoors, being with others and moving, and yet these three things are actually how we can often improve how we feel and lift our mood. It can sometimes feel like the last thing we want to do - especially to combine all three - and yet it’s often the best medicine.
I think we are really seeing a shift in mental health in post-pandemic times. More of us talk about how we feel, and many of us have a personal toolkit of ways to feel better, too. My hope is that in years to come we will all see movement in its many wonderful forms as the first thing we get out of our toolkits, positioning it intentionally as a key way to enhance our mental and emotional health.
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