What does your workout schedule look like? Are you a morning person or an evening exerciser? What happens to your schedule if you have a long and stressful work day? It’s pretty common for people to skip their workouts after a stressful day. Many of us just want to get on the couch and just veg out. It’s easy to want to just shut down if your day sucked. But, is that the right move? New research suggests sticking to that stressful day workout might be the better thing to do.
Exercise Improves Your Next Day
As you likely already know, the benefits of exercise are vast. Exercise is important for your physical health and mental health. We know it can be a method of recovery from work and can even improve work-life balance. A recent study also shows that it can also help improve your mood the next morning and boost your engagement at work the next day. These next day benefits actually lead to less fatigue and better performance at work too! Overall, if you can get in a little exercise, you will be feeling better the next day and your health will likely improve too.
Workouts on Stressful Days Helps You Tomorrow
While we know that exercise is great for us, we aren’t always good at doing what’s healthiest. This is especially true when things aren’t going so well. If we are tired or frustrated, stressed or emotional, we are much more likely to skip out on the things that benefit us in the long-term. Yet, a stressful day workout can actually be helpful.
Hindrance Demands
Specifically, new research shows that exercising on days that you face a lot of hindrance demands can be particularly helpful for feeling good the next day. Hindrance demands are basically the things at work that make it hard to get your job done. These are things like politics and drama between coworkers, not having the system you need and having to deal with manual tasks, and needing to go through eighteen different approvals to get a decision made. On days where you face these types of frustrations, getting some exercise can help you wake up in a better mood and re-engage with work.
Why do stressful day workouts help? Researchers believe it helps you disconnect from that awful stress. A good workout can get your mind off of the frustrations and make you feel accomplished in another part of your life. You wake up refreshed because you haven’t been dwelling on the hindrance demands that kept you down the day before.
Challenge Demands
Interestingly, the same isn’t true if you face challenge demands. Challenge demands are the things at work that are hard but can help you learn and grow. For example, a challenge demand might be building a presentation for a group of leaders you’ve never presented to before. It might be hard but it’s also an opportunity for growth. It’s more of the ‘good’ stress versus ‘bad’. The research actually finds that workouts don’t matter on days that you have a lot of challenge demands. But, they do matter on days that you have very few challenge demands – or days where you might be a bit bored.
Why does exercise look different for challenge demands? When you’ve had a lot of learning and growth, you likely feel some sense of accomplishment at the end of that day. That can buffer the negatives of a long day and the exercise is less important in helping you feel good. However, on days when you are super bored at work and not learning anything useful, you may actually feel frustration or a lack of accomplishment. Thus, exercise can help boost your mood through helping you feel successful that day outside of work.
So, in some ways, low challenge demand days are similar to high hindrance demand days. Now imagine if you experience little challenge and lots of roadblocks in one day? That would definitely be a day to not skip your workout!
What Can You Do?
In short, don’t skip your workouts on stressful days! And, if you are a leader, support employees by ensuring they take time away from work each day to care for themselves. This matters for a variety of reasons but may be particularly important on those tough and/or boring days!
