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Summary
On episode 115 of 40+ Fitness, Coach Allan sits down with Dr. Christina Hibbert, a clinical psychologist, former fitness instructor, and author of the award winning memoirs This Is How We Grow and Who Am I Without You, to talk about her book, 8 Keys to Mental Health Through Exercise.
Christy explains why mental health and physical fitness are tied together, walks through her “earthquake model” for why mental distress tends to build with age, and lays out the theories behind why exercise works as well as it does for mood and brain chemistry.
The conversation also covers her pyramid of self worth and the 6 stages of lasting change, tools she says have to come before anyone can stick with a fitness plan long term.
Links
- https://exercise4mentalhealth.com
- https://drchristinahibbert.com
Key Takeaways
- Mental illness touches most people at some point. Christy cites National Alliance on Mental Health figures: 1 in 4 American adults experience mental illness in a given year, 1 in 17 live with a serious mental illness, and 18.1 percent live with an anxiety disorder.
- Her earthquake model explains why mental health struggles tend to build with age. Life experiences and hormonal, physiological shifts change your brain chemistry the way underground pressure builds before an earthquake, often with no visible warning until one more event triggers a breaking point.
- Exercise works on the brain through at least 3 overlapping mechanisms. The endorphin hypothesis explains the mood lift after a workout, the monoamine hypothesis ties exercise to raising serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine the same way antidepressants do, and the anti inflammatory theory links exercise to lower inflammation, which is itself connected to depression.
- Self worth is different from self esteem, and it has to come first. Christy defines self esteem as how you think and feel about yourself, and self worth as who you actually are. Telling someone affirmations they do not believe rarely changes anything.
- Her pyramid of self worth has 3 layers. Self awareness (seeing your strengths and weaknesses without judgment), self acceptance (acknowledging where you are right now, not liking everything about it), and self love (kindness, compassion, letting love in, and connecting to something bigger than yourself).
- Change follows a spiral staircase, not a straight line. Using Prochaska’s Transtheoretical Model, Christy says most people cycle through the 6 stages of change roughly 6 times before a change actually lasts, and going back down the spiral is not failure as long as you keep moving.
- The 6 stages are precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, maintenance, and termination. Most people never reach termination, meaning most health changes require ongoing maintenance for life, not a one time fix.
- Mental preparation has to happen before the workouts start. Allan tells Christy that during a client’s first week, he is not really training their body yet, he is training their brain, because someone who has not done that inner work will quit within days.
“There’s no failure unless you completely quit.”
Dr. Christina Hibbert