As a budding Personal Development author (check back soon for more details), I am always curious about how different activities affect us - our moods, our thoughts, our physical condition. Having completed a grueling long-run on Sunday, when this exact topic was occupying my mind, I have been gathering my ideas and thought I’d post a summary.

Understanding your Dominant State
Before I get on to exercise, it’s important to understand an important metric in evaluating how different activities and relationsips can affect us - it’s called State.

Simply put, your state at any given time is the sum total of all your thoughts, all your feelings and the physical condition of your body. It’s never fixed - your state is constantly changing, depending on the situations you are moving between, the people you’re with and the different actions you’re undertaking.

All of us, no matter what the specifics of our life situation are, have a dominant state - the state which we normally occupy for most of the day. This might be high-energy, very positive and optimistic at one end of the spectrum and at the other, a dominant state might be lethargic, bloated, negative and stressed.

How would you describe your dominant state? Remember to examine your thoughts, your feelings and how your body seems…

How exercise affects your Dominant State
From my own research, as well as having read a lot of exercise books and articles, I believe that the initial few minutes of any exercise routine induce a spike towards your dominant state - If you’re quite a positive, healthy person you’ll get a positive energy boost - If you’re quite a negative person, or are feeling tired, lethargic or stressed in any way, you’ll get a boost of negative energy (which may spur you to give up).

However, after the initial few minutes (as long as you’re not pushing yourself too hard), the energy will continue to build, but only in a positive direction - To again compare the two ends of the spectrum, the positive person would continue to feel good as they stick with it; the negative person would feel a lessening of their negativity and would feel better.

In the case of the negative person, the eventual state they reach might not be completely positive, but would be a marked improvement on where they were when they started. By continuing to exercise, they would gradually improve their dominant state towards a more positive level.

None of this is new information - many of us know that exercise will be of benefit to us, either physically or mentally, but I think this is a good way of looking at how exercise can affect our moods and attitude.

For myself, I know that a run before work - no matter how hard it is to get up and go - will always result in a positive improvement in state, giving me more energy, more patience and a boost in productivity that easily outstrips the days when I don’t run.

The next time you’re about to exercise, or are feeling unmotivated to exercise, have a think about your state - Decide whether you want to continue to feel the same way, or whether you want to do something about it…

I’d love any feedback on this concept, so please email me, or leave your view in the comments.