Ep #67: The Healing Power of Exercise

You are listening to the Strong as a Working Mom podcast, Episode #67. If you think exercise is good for your body, that’s only part of the story. Let me tell you what else it can do for you.

Welcome to the Strong as a Working Mom podcast. If you’re balancing career, family, wellness, and some days sanity, you are in the right place. This is where high-achieving, busy, working moms get the tools they need to eat, move, and think. I’m your host, physician, personal trainer, and Certified Life Coach, Carrie Holland. Let’s do this.

Hey, how are you? What’s new, what’s good? So, what’s good here, well, it’s Friday. I had an idea in mind for what this podcast was going to be when I woke up this morning. But then, I went for a run. By the time I finished my run this morning, I decided to shake that up entirely.

I hope that my pivot today will help you. So, it’s fall here. School has been back in session for a few solid weeks now. Our family is once again getting into that routine. We had a summer routine full of camps, and now we’ve got our fall school year routine.

What that amounts to, is two boys playing football; one doing tackle, the other is doing flag football. They’re both doing swimming. They’ve got homework and spelling test to study for, math packets to finish, a baritone to practice, and all the things. It’s busy.

I’m guessing, for many of you, the school year looks like that too. While I recognize that the busyness we created in our home is most definitely our choice, sometimes it gets a little harried. What that means, is that we are essentially shuffling our kids to and fro to get them wherever they need to be, and Adam and I become like two chauffeurs crossing paths.

This week has been especially taxing. I found myself in a pretty solid funk by yesterday. Just irritated at nothing in particular other than the situation. But I reminded myself that I chose it, I created it. I reminded myself that it’s important to me that my kids have the opportunity to try whatever interests them. So, they can use those experiences to decide what kind of people they want to be as adults.

Beyond that, I reminded myself that everything I do at work, for our kids, for myself, for my family, it’s all my choice. While I chose all of this, sometimes life just gets busy.

But what I know about myself is that often my brain doesn’t stop there. My brain, when left to its own devices, goes down a very dark but familiar pathway that leads me to think of all kinds of negative things about my life and my relationships. Those thoughts do not help me.

In the past, being too busy and becoming disconnected has caused major snarls in my life and in my relationships. When that happens, my brain gets loaded with anxiety, fear and doubt. It doesn’t get me anywhere. It feels insanely heavy because it’s colored with stories from my upbringing and my parents’ dysfunction.

Sometimes I let it carry over into my adult life, and the end result is that it becomes this dark swirl that feels straight up awful. It’s a habit, I fully recognize that. In my case, the cue for this habit loop is busyness and not having time for real connection with anyone at home. It triggers the routine of shutting down and getting irritated.

The reward I get from that, is that I feel safe and protected from getting hurt. That is my well-worn habit loop. It’s how I managed in the past. I’ve recognized it’s not healthy, but I’ve done my work. I’ve looked at it from a number of vantage points, and I see the habit loop I’ve created. It’s just another example of how thoughts are habit, too, right? Thoughts are habit.

While most times I can get a handle on it and see that this is an old, familiar, unhelpful routine and redirect myself, this week, I wasn’t doing my best at refocusing. So, this morning when I woke up, I just wasn’t feeling it. I could still feel the swirl and heaviness of the week sitting on me. I felt withdrawn. I felt alone. I felt frustrated.

On top of that, I knew I was starting my morning with a back workout, which meant pull ups, which are hard for me. There were a few minutes after I turned my alarm off… It goes off at 4:45am, but I often get up a few minutes beforehand. So, laying there at 4:42am this morning, I considered saying forget it and going back to sleep.

But I didn’t. I slogged myself out of bed and I got going. I was still feeling yucky about the week and still getting irritated, but I got my workout done. Once I finished hitting my back and biceps, there was one, maybe two, neurons firing that said, “Hey, go for a run.”

I had been considering just getting on the bike and doing an easy ride. But in my brain, I could sense the hint that maybe I should go for a run. So, I’ll admit it to you, and this may be crazy, but I’ve made a sort of guideline for myself that if I ever hear that voice, if I ever hear that faint sentence in my brain that says go for a run, I do it. Even if it’s painful, and I’m plodding along slower than stink, I listen to that voice and I go for a run.

Because I know there’s a reason my brain is considering a run. So, I listen. I get my running gear on, and I just go before I can talk myself out of it. So, a little after six this morning, while it was still pitch-black outside, I put on my super fashionable neon yellow running straps, complete with blinking red lights, and I headed outside.

I didn’t bring my headphones; I left my headphones at home. Normally, I listen to a book while I’m out running, or a podcast. Or sometimes I’ll just turn on my workout mix and rock out to Britney Spears. But today, I went with nothing, just me.

As I was running through my neighborhood, trying to dodge the sprinklers, I started thinking about where my brain was. As I ran, I let it all boil over in my head. I was thinking about my work and my business. Where am I going with that? How I love what I do, but it’s scary and uncertain. Am I doing the right thing? What if I’m not good enough at this? What if this is all a fluke?

I was thinking about the conferences coming up, that I still need to prepare slides for. I was thinking about Adam working all weekend, and how am I going to keep the boys entertained and quiet and out of the house so he can sleep? We have two football games this weekend, and it’s going to take most of Saturday, and then the weekend is going to race by. And, on and on and on.

There were loads of other thoughts spilling out that were making me feel just irritated. Then, I stopped. I landed on a quote that I read in Brianna Weist’s amazing book 101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think. Her quote was, “The world whispers until it screams.”

That sentence kept playing over and over again in my brain. I kept thinking to myself, “What is it? What is it the world is trying to say to me? What is it? What am I missing?” Then, as I was running up the cul-de-sac in my neighborhood, I saw the biggest, greatest shooting star I’ve ever seen in my life.

I’m not even kidding, this thing was huge. It was so bright in the sky; it stopped me in my tracks. Literally, I stopped running. I never do that. But I stopped running and just watched this enormous ball stream downward through the sky until it fizzled out. I felt like I was in a movie. that shooting star could not have been any better timed.

I decided that star was for me. Now, I’m sure I’m not the only person on earth who saw that shooting star. But I decided, right then and there, that in that moment, that was for me. I would have missed all of it if I had not dragged myself out of bed at 4:42am to get a move on.

After I saw that, I just felt better. I felt really small and insignificant and silly. All of the junk that was rolling around in my brain, all of the problems that I thought were problems, I decided those aren’t really a big deal. I watched the star and I did a zoom out, kind of like when you go to Google Earth and you search up a place and you zoom out. Then you see the Earth from above, only to zoom in on the destination that you entered.

That’s what I did. In that moment, I realized it’s just me, plodding along in my running shoes, trying to make sense of my life. But really, all I’m doing is thinking too hard. I realized in that moment, and in this week that has been crazy busy, I didn’t have to do anything other than to keep moving.

I realized I don’t have to have all the answers about my business, or about our calendar, or about this weekend. I don’t have to go down the ugly road I’ve traveled so many times before. Instead, I could just be. I could just move. So, that’s what I did. I kept running, but I felt so much better.

When I started out the run totally dragging my feet, after seeing that shooting star I picked it up. I like running in the dark anyway, but after that I just felt lighter, and I moved faster. In the silence of the early morning, I listened to my feet pounding on the sidewalk, I listened to my breath, and I just moved.

I let all of those negative thoughts that were with me, I let them be there. But I could feel them evaporating as I kept moving my legs. Before I knew it, I got four miles in much faster than I anticipated. It was time to go inside and shower, and get ready to take the boys to school.

I did all of that, and decided for myself, “Hey, Carrie, you are just fine.” And, I was. I am I just fine. So, on a side note, when I was driving the boys to school this morning, feeling all enlightened and peaceful after my run, I told them about how I saw the biggest shooting star I’ve ever seen and it was super cool.

My oldest, he had his nose buried in a book and did not respond. Then, my youngest did not let me go one breath further until he informed me, “Hey, you know it’s not actually a shooting star, right? It’s just a meteor burning up in the earth’s atmosphere. Shooting Star is just a fancy name for it.” I’m not even kidding.

So, apparently I was moved by a blazing meteor, fine. All the same, that blazing meteor provided an ethereal experience this morning that totally woke me up. I was so deep into my brain overthinking, but at the same time, I was moving my legs and breathing hard and sweating and feeling everything that was coming up from the week.

Then the star, or blazing meteor, showed up at just the right time to help me shake out the junk that was sitting like a storm cloud over my head. and I just felt better.

My point in sharing this very long story is this, movement can be therapeutic. It can be healing, if you allow it. Movement and exercise are powerful. Movement can transform you; it can change you. It can make you see things about yourself, and about your life, that you would not otherwise see.

Now, no, I’m not saying that it should replace therapy or anything like that. Okay? I want to make that clear. But what I want to press upon you today, is that exercise and moving your body is about so much more than what it does for your heart, or your lungs, or your booty, or your abs or biceps, okay? It is so much more than that.

And if you know, you know. But if you don’t, and if you’re wondering what exercise can do for you beyond the physical benefits, let me lay it out for you. When I say this, I’m going beyond the medical literature here. I’m going beyond what you’ll find in the scholarly texts.

You can look it up on Google and find scientific articles about how exercise will boost your endorphins and raise your serotonin and make you feel good. You can find all kinds of data about how exercise has been shown to decrease your symptoms of anxiety and depression. We know that to be true. We may not understand all the neurophysiological mechanisms responsible for it. But it’s accepted that exercise improves your mood.

But I’m taking it beyond literature. We’re going beyond biology class, because I’m encouraging you to see exercise in a different way entirely. Go with me, and imagine exercise as a safe space where you can manage what’s going on in your brain while you process it with your body.

So, really think about that for a minute. You can use exercise as a protected, free, open space, to get into your brain and see what’s there and let it all out. When you find things you don’t love, when you find all kinds of negative thoughts and all of the junk clouding your brain, you can use exercise to work through it.

You can work through and process your emotions with your body, while you move it during exercise. If you’ve ever been in a bad mood, but then you went for a walk or a run, only to come back feeling lighter and more at ease, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

In some of the most stressful times of my life, exercise has been the conduit through which I have processed my thoughts, made decisions, and found clarity that I’m not sure I would have found otherwise. Exercise has, in some ways, been a form of therapy. For me, it’s a protected time where it’s nothing more than me, my brain and my body. That’s all you need to do the work.

So, I’m going to give you another example. I can clearly remember, around the time that the pandemic was just starting, I was going through probably the absolute worst phase of my adult life. This is before the world even shut down, mind you. Work stress was through the roof. I was preparing to leave clinical medicine and I was not at all confident that I could pull it off.

On top of that, there was serious dysfunction between my parents, and it had reached a level I had never seen before. Things in my own home were just not good. That was the breaking point. I very clearly remember, after one particularly horrible day, I remember being at the gym because I was training for a bodybuilding show. It was leg day, and I was supposed to go for broke. So, I did.

I went to the squat rack, loaded the barbell, and kept going until I got to my max. It was a point of pride for me to get to 225 pounds, because that means two plates on either side of the barbell. As a 40-something wife and mom from the burbs, there is sheer pride in that. But I wasn’t done, I kept going.

I can remember adding more and more weight to the barbell, all the while thinking about the rage I had inside me. It was rage, mixed with disappointment, fear and total uncertainty. I remember having all of these feelings coursing through my body, but I kept going. I literally could feel the blood running through my muscles like I was on fire, and I let it, I let it burn.

I kept putting more and more weight on the barbell until I finally hit my max, 265. Now, for some of you that may be no big deal, but for me, with my short stubby legs, hitting that max on the barbell, I felt like Superwoman.

While I was going through this process, totally sweating, red faced, squatting that barbell up and down, going through the range of motion of the squats, I remember thinking to myself, “What am I doing? How am I going to do this? How am I going to get through this and move forward? How can I handle all of this?”

But I kept going. I kept moving my legs and racking the barbell, taking off the plates and replacing the plates until I just couldn’t go anymore. My brain was going all over the place with all of these thoughts and questions, what ifs and worst-case scenarios, and what would I do.

As I did this the whole time, I kept coming back to myself, saying, “Carrie, you got this. You are strong as hell. No one and nothing is going to tear you down, because you have to let them tear you down. You’re stronger than that.”

I remember the feeling of my legs and booty totally on fire. The sheer weight of the barbell and all the plates on my back, sitting into those squats, wondering if I had bitten off more than I could chew. I felt all of that pain, and I just let it wash over me.

So, I have most definitely used rage in the past, if you will, in my workouts. But this was different. This was very different. This was more than just physical. This was more than exercise. In that moment, it was just all of me.

You know what I did at the bottom of that squat, when I thought I was going to fall flat on my butt? I stood back up, because that’s what you do when you squat. You lower the bar, and just when you think you can’t go any lower you get to the bottom of the squat, and you push through all four corners of your feet, you feel the pure fire in your legs, and you get back up. You get back up, and you finish standing.

After that was done, and after I had just lifted more weight than I had ever lifted in my entire life, I peeled off some of the weight and did another set of 10 reps that felt like nothing. It felt like the barbell and the plates weren’t even there. That is the best part about going super heavy and then coming back down, by the way.

When you get to your highest weight, or you get to the place where you cannot add on any more plates, and then you peel back the weight, it feels easier, it feels lighter. Not because it is easy, but because you are so stinking strong. And that, in my opinion, is one of the best feelings you can have while lifting weights.

While it felt absolutely amazing to have lifted like that, on that particular day, what happened in my brain was even better. Even though it didn’t feel good in that moment, I got in there. I went into the deep recesses of my brain and felt all of it. I let it all out of my brain and let it take over.

I felt what rage and disappointment felt like in my body. It felt like pure, deep hell. It felt like something burning and rupturing inside me. It felt like everything was coming apart inside of me. I didn’t find it; I let it all come out. I let it be there in my body and I walked straight into it. I walked through it.

In that moment, in that sleepy YMCA, on that freezing morning in March of 2020, I finally experienced what it felt like to walk through my feelings. I felt what it was like to not shove my feelings away, like I had been conditioned to since I was a kid. Even as I’m sitting here describing this to you, I know it may sound crazy, but it was life changing.

I went inside myself, after years and years and years of doing exactly the opposite. After years of smashing down any negative feelings, after years of telling myself ‘just go numb,’ because that’s what keeps you safe. After years of pretending that I’m fine, and trying to fake myself out. In that moment, I said no. Everything is not fine. But that’s okay, because I’m strong, and I can figure this out.

So, looking back on it, I can only imagine what the other people at the gym must have been thinking at the time, as I’m sure I looked like a total mess. But in that moment I didn’t care. What was going on in my little corner of the gym, with me and squat rack and the barbell and the plates, what was happening there was much more than me growing my quads.

There was so much more happening there than a new one-rep max; that was all secondary. What was happening under that barbell, was the discovery that even in my very worst moment, I could handle it.

I could feel all of the awful feelings and I could allow them to take up space in my body. I could allow those feelings to be there with me as I went through my workout, all the while with that pit in my stomach you only get when something is really wrong.

I didn’t fight it. I went with it, and I allowed it to be there. I felt safe because I knew I wasn’t going to get in trouble. I knew nothing terrible was going to happen by feeling what was there and what was real. At the end of it, I felt better. I felt capable. I felt strong, mentally and physically strong.

I credit exercise with helping me through that extremely painful period of my life. I don’t know what kind of endorphins or serotonin was flowing through my veins. I don’t know what physiologic response was happening in that moment. I don’t really care. All I know, is that in that space I got into my brain, opened it up, or more like ripped it open, it got into my body, and actually felt all of it. Like, really felt it.

It hurt like hell, not going to lie. When I finally allowed myself to feel all of the junk that I was holding on to, it hurts in ways I had never heard before. The heaviness of that barbell was really nothing in comparison to the heaviness of the emotions I was feeling. In hindsight, I don’t think I had ever allowed myself to do that before, because I was afraid of falling apart. I didn’t think I could handle it.

But now, I know better. By moving my body, I had a way to deal with that hurt. I had a way to reconnect to my whole self. I did it with a barbell and heavy iron on my back. Not your typical sad song and candles, but it worked for me. Because even though lifting heavy stuff isn’t traditionally associated with processing emotions, it helped me do the job.

Instead of turning my brain and my feelings off, and pretending to be okay, I got very intentional and deliberate, and decided to walk into that hurt face on. It wasn’t like falling apart, it was like rebuilding. In that process I found a level of clarity I had never seen in myself before.

Slowly, like super slowly, like over a month, I felt better. Just like I felt better after my run this morning. I don’t know that any legal drug can do that for you. Really, I have no idea. But in that moment, in the squat rack, I used exercise to zone in, get into my head, and go to the deepest, darkest places of my brain. Let it all spill out, and feel all of the feelings that came along with it.

Was it pretty? God, no, it was ugly. But I didn’t walk away from it. I didn’t walk away from any of the negative, awful thoughts that were in there. I didn’t turn away from the feelings those thoughts were creating. I walked straight into it. It felt like walking into a storm face on, and then, I worked it out under the barbell.

I was only recently able to put this all together and make sense of what was going on at that time. So, earlier this week, I learned from a fellow coach that you don’t process emotions with your brain. I’m not sure why it has taken me 45 years to figure that out, but for some reason, when she put it that way, a light bulb went off.

It makes sense, your brain is for thinking. So, you can use your brain and you can think and think and think. But that’s not all of it, you’re not done. You cannot follow a stepwise checkbox list and process an emotion with your brain. You don’t think an emotion, you feel an emotion. And, that concept entirely blew my mind.

Emotions are not for thinking; emotions are for feeling. Emotions are for feeling. That’s a really big, important concept I want you to walk away with. For some of you, if you are super smart and like to use your powerful brain to think through problems and be logical and be analytical about things… Or if you can get very cerebral about things, like I do, then it might be more difficult for you to process an emotion because you don’t feel an emotion with your brain.

You feel an emotion from the neck down. You feel it in your body. You feel it in your soul. But it means you have to be willing to connect to it. You have to be willing to drop into that. It can be super uncomfortable to do because it means letting go of the logic and the analytical, ABC thinking, of your brain.

Instead, you release yourself. I don’t know how else to describe it. You have to release yourself and let go. You have to take the lid off the jar, and let go of the reasoning and the problem solving and the math formulas and connecting the dots and making sense.

Instead, just feel. You let the emotion take up space in your body. Even just as I’m saying these words, admittedly, it makes me feel kind of cringy. But I’m working on it. I’m letting it be less cringy, because I realize that was what got me in trouble in the first place.

To add to that, if you are someone who grew up not being able to process or feel emotion safely, then it makes sense that processing emotion can be a real challenge. That was most definitely the case in our house. I can still hear the tone in my mom’s voice when she would ask ‘what is your problem’ whenever I was upset. I can still feel it, and how it made my face burn and the hair on my neck stand up.

I learned really fast that it was not okay to feel anything other than fine in front of her. I learned to shove any negative emotion away and forget about it, otherwise I would get in trouble.

If this was the case for you, understand it can be really hard to reconnect and learn how to process emotion, because you’ve been conditioned not to. But it’s so worth it to do this work and change how you approach it.

Here’s where this all comes together. This is how I was able to connect exercise and emotions. Think about it, when you take on the physical work of exercise, what are you doing? You’re using your body to transform physical energy into a force that creates movement.

As you move your body, you’re creating a force, you’re creating motion, and it’s productive. While you have to use your brain a little bit, obviously, in order to do the physical work, the majority of the work is done by your body. To take it a step further, exercise is a physical challenge that you take on willingly.

When you choose exercise, depending on what you do, you’re choosing to feel some discomfort. I’m not talking about torture here, of course, but sometimes when you exercise and you push yourself, it kind of hurts. It doesn’t always feel good. You feel sore afterwards, as a reminder of the work you did.

If you want to see the benefit of exercise and get strong, you have to do your own work. I say it all the time, when it comes to exercise, it’s your work, your results. No one can squat the barbell for you. No one can run the miles for you. No one can swim the laps for you, right? This is the work that no one else can do for you.

Like, when you’re trying to hit a certain pace on your run and you feel the burn and your legs. Or when you’re trying to pull yourself up and do a pull up, and you notice every muscle fiber in your back screaming at you to stop but you pull yourself up over the bar anyway. Or when your low back starts to have that dull but noticeable ache at mile nine in your triathlon, just like it did during every single one of your training rides.

But then, just when you think you can’t do anymore, you’re done. You finish your run. You push yourself up from your squat. You bust out your 10th pull up. You finished mile 12 of your ride and you unclip. What happens? You come out stronger on the other side.

Now, take everything I just said about exercise and apply it to processing your emotions. It all applies, the skills transfer and that’s where exercise and processing your emotions intersect. So, go with me on this. When you knowingly choose to walk into your negative emotion and feel it all the way through, instead of shoving it away, you are knowingly taking on some pain. You are taking on discomfort willingly.

Just like that run, or the squats or the swim, when you feel out of breath, you reach that point, you reach that point of doubt where you’re just not sure if you can handle it. You start to wonder if this is all too much, if you can really deal with the pain.

But then, you do. You deal with it, you walk into it, and you handle it. You allow that pain to be there with you, and you don’t judge it. You don’t beat yourself up about it. You don’t tell yourself you shouldn’t be feeling it. You don’t overthink it; you just feel it.

You let the emotion wash over you and feel what it does to your body. You feel the sensations in your bones, your muscles, in your skin, wherever that feeling decides to settle into your body, and you don’t fight it. You let it all be there. You allow it and you just feel it, because emotions are feeling and sometimes it burns.

But that’s okay. Just like the squats, let it burn. Because remember, no emotion can harm you, right? No emotion can harm you. So, when you allow your emotions and actually feel them instead of avoiding them, and realize that you are okay on the other side of it, what happens? You come out stronger.

In order to get stronger, both mentally and physically, you have to do your own work. I will be the first to admit this is hard. But when you trust yourself to do the work, whether that’s in your gym, or in your brain, or in your life, or preferably all of the above, you will realize that you are stronger than you think you are.

So, I know I’m taking a risk and maybe getting just a little woo woo today by sharing all this with you. But I will take that risk if it means I can help one of you listening see exercise as more than a way of fitting into your pants. Okay?

I have said it before, but I would not be where I am today, nor would I be the person I am today, if it wasn’t for exercise. In the process of learning to trust myself, to carry serious, legit, heavy weight at the gym, I also learned to trust myself with some serious, legit, heavy adult emotions.

The parallels are striking. Exercise was the safe space to not only get into my head and pull out the junk, but it also allowed me to get out of my head once I unearthed all of that junk so I could process it. It will do the same for you.

Exercise will teach you that you can tolerate discomfort, both physical and mental. More importantly, it will teach you to do something with that discomfort. You can take that discomfort, walk headfirst into it, feel it all the way through, and prove to yourself that you can not only tolerate the pain, you can use that pain and come out okay on the other side.

In fact, you will come out more than okay, you will come out stronger. Exercise really can do that for you. It can change your life. If you want to learn more about how this works, let’s talk. If you want to understand how to process your emotions, and if you want to be able to reconnect with your feelings, let’s go.

This is not woo; there are no crystals, there are no chants. Instead, we do the hard work of getting into your brain, processing what’s there, and moving your body so you can feel stronger, both mentally and physically. Check out my website. Go to www.CarrieHollandMD.com/contact, send me a message, and let’s get started.

All right, thank you for hanging out with me, and I’ll catch you again next week.

If you like what you’ve been hearing, please review the show. I would love to get your feedback and ideas. Your suggestions have inspired episodes and will help me make the show better for you. Share this podcast with a friend, text a show link, share a screenshot, or post a link to the show on your social media. Be sure to tag me @CarrieHollandMD on either Instagram or Facebook, so I can follow along and engage with you.

This is how we get the word out to other working moms who want to feel strong, inside and out. If you know someone who wants to feel better or eat and move differently but she is too tired or too busy, it is time to change things up. You know making that change starts with how you think, and that is what we do here on the Strong as a Working Mom podcast. I’ll see you next week.

Thanks for listening to Strong as a Working Mom. If you want more information on how to eat, move, and think, so you can live in the body you want, with the mind to match, visit me at CarrieHollandMD.com.