Some days, moving is the last thing on earth I want to do. It’s that deep, leaden exhaustion where you sleep for eight hours and wake up feeling like you haven’t rested in weeks. Between the kids, perimenopause swinging my mood all over the place, and just feeling flat, my instinct is to stay on the couch. But I’ve noticed a pattern: half the time I’m not actually depleted, I’m just stuck. Forcing myself to lace up my shoes and walk around the block doesn’t give me a sudden rush of energy, but it knocks the cobwebs out of my head so I can at least function.
Why Movement Changes Everything
You don’t need an intense workout to change. Just getting off the couch and walking down the block gets blood moving again and breaks the mental freeze. I stopped worrying about “routines” a long time ago. Now I just move based on what’s broken that day. If I’m in a foul, edgy mood, I walk fast. If my brain is completely overwhelmed, I do something mindless like spinning on an exercise bike, and if I feel hollowed out, I just lie on the floor.
It really does come down to paying attention.
If you look at this through a Chinese medicine lens, it makes total sense. They see movement as the gas pedal for your energy. When your Qi gets backed up, it bleeds right into your mental state. That nagging irritability, the haze you can’t shake, feeling completely uninspired…that’s classic stagnation. It’s not in your head; things have just been sitting still for too long, and you need to get your blood and energy moving. Moving around, even for five minutes, gets the current running again so you can stop feeling so stuck.
Honestly, you can feel it in your bones when things are stagnant without needing the theory behind it, and breaking that up doesn’t take much. If you’re feeling sluggish, irritable, or run down by hormone shifts, don’t overthink it. Take five or ten minutes to step outside, stretch out, or walk around the house. It really doesn’t take more than that to get things flowing again.
Instead of asking, “What should I do?” try asking, “What would feel supportive right now?” and start there. That small shift in how you approach it can change everything. Sometimes it’s just enough to feel a little lighter, a little steadier… and a bit more like yourself again.
Simply Salt & Soul
The Salt (The Science): Your body isn’t built to park in one spot for hours on end. When you don’t move, blood flow drops off, your nervous system gets stuck in a low, sluggish gear, and that heavy feeling creeps in before you even realize it. Just getting up and walking around flips the switch back on. It pushes fresh blood through your body, helps calm your nervous system, and breaks you out of that brain fog.
The Soul (The Wellness): The biggest lesson for me has been realizing I don’t need to do more. I just need to stop ignoring what I actually feel. Pushing through an intense workout when you’re completely drained just digs the hole deeper. But getting up for a slow, five-minute walk might be the exact thing that pulls you out of a funk. Figuring that out takes time, but once you ditch the “shoulds” and just give your body what it’s actually asking for, everything gets a whole lot easier.