Online Therapy for Depression: Motion Moves Emotion
Tips from an Online Therapist for Depression and Anxiety
Hello Ladies and Gentlemen!
This is Ryan Joseph Kopyar. So super excited to connect with you for another episode of reconnect to your greatness. today. It’s going to be just me, no interview, I want to hop on here and share with you a little bit about the importance of exercise as it relates to our mental health. So for those of you who may be newer to my channel or newer to my podcast and some of my content.
I worked in the fitness industry for just about a decade and in that time I worked in a lot of different roles, right all the way from working as a personal trainer, to working as a membership sales consultant, eventually working my way up to General Manager and then being in charge of running multiple different locations and their personal training departments and doing a whole bunch of training along the way sales, training and leadership training.
Here’s what I came to understand in all of that is that I was blessed to have the opportunity to interact with a tremendous amount of individuals that were looking to make a change in their life, not only the workers that I had the opportunity to have an impact on but also all of the people that they had the opportunity to work with, right and that doesn’t necessarily mean just somebody that was a personal training client. It could be somebody that was coming into the gym, maybe just for the first time, or somebody that perhaps had been into exercise at one point in their life and fell out of it and decided, hey, you know what, it’s been too long. And I’m looking to make a change.
I say all that to say that across the wide range of individuals that were looking to make a physical transformation in their life, I uncovered that there was also a mental and emotional component to wanting to make that change. And so let’s say an individual would come in they may be feeling a little bit you know, depressed or anxious or low self-esteem, low self-confidence. What I came to realize was that through consistent exercise and healthy eating, and I say consistently because we can’t just do it for a couple of times. This is something that needs to be consistent. It needs to be regular; it needs to become a part of our life. But for those individuals that stayed consistent with it would say after about anywhere from 30 to 45, maybe 60 days, sometimes it was even shorter than that, but in that time period if they stayed consistent with it for that, for that long. Many obviously stay consistent with for far longer, but for those individuals that stayed consistent, there was an incredible shift not only in the transformation of their bodies but in the transformation of their minds, and the transformation of their emotions, and the transformation of their view about themselves.
I can say humbly and with excitement that I helped people to make some pretty radical changes in some pretty short periods of time healthy changes, but pretty impressive changes as far as transforming their body particularly when it comes to you know, dropping weight on the scale right so there were quite often noticeable visual changes in an individual and hey, listen, if somebody loses seven pounds in a month or 10 pounds in a month or 15 pounds over the course of you know, two months, right? Hey, you’re going to notice a difference in the way that your clothes are fitting. You’re going to notice a difference when you look in the mirror. Especially if we also helped to eliminate kind of some of that bloating and inflammation, which may have been expressing itself either in the face or in the stomach area. Right? So there was no doubt that there was in some cases, some profound physical changes.
However, what I came to realize is that to whatever degree the physical changes occurred, often times there was an even greater mental and emotional shift for them an even greater mental and emotional transformation. And that’s what really got me hooked and when I really started to identify that that’s what was going on, and I would have people coming up to me saying, oh my god, Ryan, you helped to change my life. Right? I said, there’s some kind of change that’s happening inside of this individual, not just with their body fat, not just with their body weight right, not just with their muscle tone. Okay, there is a deeper change. That has been facilitated in this individual’s presence or up soul beam, whatever you want to call it.
I share this because there is now clinical literature coming out and I’m referencing a study here from Netz in 2017 from the frontiers in pharmacology, okay, where there is now scientific proof to say that exercise is as effective as formal logical treatment of depression. Now, this is not conjecture. This is not my opinion, although I’m sharing with you kind of some of the validation of that from my own experience over the past decade. But we now have scientific proof that shows us that proves to us the science, letting us know that exercise can be just as effective as pharmacological treatment of depression.
Now, this is not to say that this is a recommendation. I’m not a medical doctor. So, I need to clarify that. This is just to equip and empower you with different resources. different tools, different levels of understanding to know that just like everybody’s body is different in the way that it may react to certain medicines and the way that it may react to certain foods, etc, right. There are many different options that may be available to you. If you are struggling with different mental or emotional patterns, anxiety, depression, just general feeling stuck in life maybe you’re feeling you know, low self-esteem or low self-confidence. Exercise is a tremendous option. It’s a tremendous modality. It’s a tremendous pathway through which you can make an investment in yourself and make some really positive changes and transformations in your life. In what it means to be you what it means and how you feel about yourself and about life. And so in the shownotes here, I’m going to leave a link to this particular study and there are many others but this is just the one that you know, I think really kind of summarizes it in a very concise way. There are so many different options out there and there are different combinations of options out there of what we can do to help improve not only our physical health, but also our mental and emotional health. So I hope that this adds some value into your life. I hope that this helps to empower you and just let you know Hey, going out there and doing some exercise, even if it means starting small at first. Going out there and doing some exercise can really make a tremendous impact on not only your physical well-being but your emotional and mental well-being as well. Thank you so much for tuning in for another episode of reconnect for your greatness. I send you all so much love and light and I empower you to reconnect to the greatness which exists inside of you.
Love and Light.
Ryan Joseph Kopyar
If you live in Washington State, Oregon, or British Columbia and you would like a FREE Counseling Session to help you release your anxiety, heal from your trauma, or take that leap of faith for the next step in your life. Schedule a FREE ONLINE Counseling Session with me today. Just click the link below:
References:
“Based on this reassessment, RCTs comparing exercise to antidepressants reported that exercise and antidepressants were equally effective. RCTs comparing exercise combined with antidepressants to antidepressants only reported a significant improvement in depression following exercise as an adjunctive treatment” (Netz, 2017)
