What is your favorite wellness activity?
Mountain Biking with friends.
How long have you been doing it?
I started in medical school, about 15 years now.
How did you get started?
A friend invited me to go. He showed me the trails and I immediately loved it.
How does this activity impact your mental, physical, and / or emotional well-being?
Mental – It allows me get away from daily challenges and reflect in nature.
Physical – It’s a great workout. One that I don’t get to do all of the time. You have the beauty of nature combined with the physicality of mountain biking.
Emotional – Similar to the mental impact, it allows me to reflect and center myself.
How does this activity bring wellness to your life when other activities have not?
It’s a form of exercise that I still love to do even when I’m tired. It forces me to get outside and socially engage with close friends that matter to me the most.
Getting outdoors and unplugging from our devices with a small group of buddies – it’s a great time to release and reflect in nature. You get to catch up with close friends or even coworkers.
Our lives are all so chaotic, tightly wound and “on” that we need something like this to be successful. Our nervous systems are overworked and I think that is resulting in the degradation of our mental, physical, and emotional well-being. We are all victims of high stress environments. When we start to develop and maintain activities to help us unwind and recover, then we’ll start to reverse an ugly trend.