To experience the full range of benefits exercising can have on our bodies and brain, you only need to soldier through the first few workouts.
Not only will your metabolism get faster and your muscles bigger, but working out helps you balance out your brain-chemistry, leading to an overall increase in life satisfaction, as well.
As you work-out, your brain produces dopamine, which is solely responsible for regulating your internal pleasure-reward system.
What’s even more important, dopamine can have an impact on your ability to think clearly, pay attention for a longer period of time, and sharpen your focus – all of which a person diagnosed with ADHD medications will benefit from.
Easing stress and anxiety, improved impulsive behavioral therapy enhanced working memory, improved executive function – implementing a workout regime as part of your lifestyle will help you manage your ADHD the natural way.
But, isn’t ADHD a hereditary condition? Can a change in lifestyle really improve the dreaded attention deficit symptoms?
While it has been proven that ADHD is a hereditary condition, it appears recent findings suggest that environmental factors play a role in the development and progression of the condition – to an extent.
You can’t really change your core DNA, but you can influence and modify the way your genes express themselves through making certain lifestyle changes – proper sleep and regular fitness habits amount to having positive effects on improving ADHD symptoms.
You see, what you do in your day-to-day life, the overall quality of your habits have a massive influence on you on a molecular level. Changing and modifying your lifestyle will result in some of your genes turned off, and some other genes turned on. The very act of exercising regularly would have the effect of modifying a gene that carries a risk for developing a cardiovascular condition, for example.
Following the same line of logic, physical exercise shakes your genes up, regulating how your ADHD progresses, as well.
In fact, regular physical activity amounts to your genes changing up how your brain deals with the effects of impairments caused by ADHD, improving your attention span, working memory, and executive function.
Genetics and ADHD Explained
Your genetics aren’t set in stone.
Your genome has about 20,000 genes. Some are activated, some aren’t. While your particular hereditary DNA sequence chooses the genes that will get activated by themselves, you can still influence and modify your genome through epigenetics.
The science of epigenetics states that environment, lifestyle, nurture all have an influence over our DNA and genetics.
Mindfulness and meditation will develop your inner skills. It can modify your genetics in a way your ability to control your attention is increased through strengthening your ability to self-observe. Mindfulness can change the way you pay attention. And as you get more and more aware of your emotional state, you learn to ‘control’ the impulsive reactions ADHD comes along with.
ADHD has always been assumed a genetic disorder, but the technological advancements in the last decade brought us a lot of understanding of the condition.
What our knowledge of epigenetics shows is that while ADHD is genetic in nature, it’s also environmental. What this means is that your lifestyle plays an important role in how your ADHD genes get expressed in day-to-day life.
There’s a lot you can do to influence how well you deal with ADHD by modifying your environment and sorting out your lifestyle. Resetting those sleeping patterns and incorporating an exercise regime are all great ways to manage your ADHD the natural treatment.
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ADHD and Sleep
Long have we known that sleep is very important to our health and well-being. We’ve documented the positive connection between sleep and health over and over, yet a lot of people find it so easy to neglect including people with ADHD.
Getting continuous restorative sleep is one of the biggest tools we’ve got for regulating our mood and having optimal attention-spans throughout the day.
Know the stereotype of people with treat ADHD having difficulties learning? Getting adequate sleep can power up your learning abilities. Studies suggest repeatedly show that the brain is going high-voltage when we sleep – replaying the information we’ve collected throughout the day and storing it on our memory drives.
Getting your sleep habits back on track won’t be without difficulties, so try the following tips to help you get better sleep:
- No electronic devices in the bedroom
- Set up a sleep routine and stick to it
- Pop-out the melatonin supplements
- Call up your therapist and schedule a session
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Exercise and ADHD
Plato had the right idea from the start – engage in music for the spirit and physical activity for the mind and body.
Thousands of years later, the studies arrive at the same conclusion – a continuous workout regime can contribute to a significant decrease and even full reversal of the negative effects of trauma and stress.
Not only does physical activity promote neural growth, but it also improves how fast your brain works and strengthens your learning abilities.
The benefit of exercise for people who have ADHD, the brain changes documented as a result of an exercise regime have the most effect on impairments caused by the condition – attention, working memory, and executive function.
Following an exercise regime isn’t without failure – especially in the hectic, modern-day lives we lead. The responsibilities, the busy schedules, we often tend to feel sapped of both time and motivation. To help you stay on track with your workouts and suppress your symptoms of ADHD, we’ve got some useful tips for you below!
- Aim for at least an hour of exercise daily
- Make your exercises moderately to vigorously intense.
- Call in the cavalry. Have your family member or a friend join you for a workout. This will do wonders in holding you accountable for your exercise routine.
- Experiment with different workouts. If the one type of workout you found effective in the past doesn’t suit your needs now, try another,
- A little bit of something is better than not nothing. Reconcile with the fact that your workouts will sometimes be imperfect. If you want a little more wiggle room out of your rigid schedules, aim for having smaller exercises throughout the day.
Takeaway
Introducing a well-balanced, nutritious, elimination diet alongside exercising can improve your sleeping patterns, and you’ll get a triquetra of lifestyle changes that you can implement to manage your ADHD the natural remedies.
What we want you to keep in mind that attempting to implement all of these changes at the same time is a recipe for disaster.
Take it step-by-step, make small improvements. Focus on one lifestyle change at a time and build from there.
Finally, while all of this won’t replace medication or therapy, making the effort to go the distance and maintain holistic health will reduce the need for intensive counseling and medication.
Balance is the key to a life well-lived, be that life of an adult with ADHD, or not.
Author Bio:
Rebecca Smith is an editor at Countingsheep.net. She loves writing article related to a healthy lifestyle. Most of her articles are about the proper sleeping position, nutrition, vitamins and minerals, medical advice, and good hygiene practices. When she is not busy, she dabbles in charcoal and oil paint.