5 Ways Regular Exercise Impacts Your Work Productivity
Your level of work productivity is more important than ever. Solo entrepreneurs and the self-employed need to always boost their professional productivity to keep up with the competition, and anyone working for a company or organization needs to grow professionally to get promotions and develop their resumes. Fortunately, you can increase your work productivity simply by making exercise a regular habit.
1. Sharpen Your Memory
Exercise boosts thinking skills and memory because it grows the size of the parts of your brain related to learning. Physical fitness stimulates changes, such as minimizing resistance and inflammation. New blood vessels grow in your brain and fuel the stimulation of new brain cells. Exercise also helps memory along secondary factors by lowering stress and anxiety while enhancing mood and sleep; these are known problem areas contributing to cognitive impairment.
2. Improve Your Creativity
A short walk can do wonders for your innovation. The creative parts of your mind rely on exercise to stimulate innovation. Research has shown more than once that people are more creative if they are physically active than those who remain sedentary for most of their lifestyle.
3. Fight Fatigue
If you’re battling exhaustion and fatigue, expending energy working out might seem like a step in the wrong direction. However, routine exercise is known to boost energy levels over time. A single workout can release endorphins that improve your mood and boost oxygen levels in your blood. Even moderate aerobic exercise can increase the slow-wave deep sleep necessary for neural rejuvenation. Fitness builds your mental stamina back up and makes you more resilient to the demands that your job throws at you.
4. Manage Stress
In small doses, stress is good for tuning your brain up. Too much stress, however, takes a chronic toll on your whole body. Emotional symptoms of too much stress include moodiness, agitation, trouble relaxing, and low self-esteem, but exercise can directly counteract all of these. Physical symptoms include cognitive fog, muscle tension, headaches, digestive ailments, and low energy. Again, exercise works your body through all these and corrects things point by point.
5. Better Concentration
Exercise feeds your muscles for growth, but it also fuels your brain. Physical fitness makes it easier for your brain to keep high levels of oxygen, blood, and glucose; all three of these are crucial to your brain concentrating better over time so you can focus on tasks better. Working out your body works out your mind, and the brain can stimulate its plasticity while forming new connections inside of itself. More focus at work makes setting deadlines and sticking to them much easier, and you’ll soon find your task list is more manageable than it used to be.
Get Moving
The evidence is irrefutable in how much regular exercise can improve your productivity at work. That carries over to the rest of your life, too, so it’s worth doing. Suppose you work in a sedentary professional environment. In that case, there are many office exercises that you can do, but it’s always worth it to find a fitness center whether you do office work or something else for a living.