How to Manage Your Mental Health With Movement (Leon Taylor’s Simple Idea)

As stress accumulates and impacts one’s mental health, it can feel as if your mind is turning against you. Managing your mental health becomes crucial as your mind races and your body tenses, and the slightest thing feels leaden. The former Olympic diver Leon Taylor argues the case for one simple and practical way to cope: move your body. Not as a punishment, and not as a fitness regime, but rather in an attempt to bring body and mind back into equilibrium for greater overall well-being.

From “problem child” to Olympic athlete

For this episode, Leon Taylor begins with a childhood tale. He was that boy, always churning. He didn’t sleep well, required nonstop attention, and exhausted his parents. These behavioral health problems wore down his family.

When his parents took him to the family doctor, the message was clear: he was declared a “problem child” and offered sedation as an answer.

His parents weren’t having that route. They attempted to ask friends and family members to help care for him, but that arrangement frayed as people’s obligations piled up. So his parents tried something else: early intervention to wear him out with activities.

So movement became part of daily life, long before Leon could even remember it.

• Swimming from “day dot”
• Mother-and-baby gymnastics before age 1
• Tumble Tots
• Any sport he was old enough to try

And something changed. He became more biddable, more relaxed, and steadier in his work. Physical activity was not simply “burning energy.” It helped him function.

That early start also sowed a dream. At age 6, Leon watched the 1984 Olympics on television and declared to his dad that he was going to compete there one day. He placed himself from childhood next to world-record holders, using the Guinness Book of World Records to list each gap he had to bridge between his own times and theirs.

A few months before his ninth birthday, he took a stab at diving. It was one sport among others at first, but it soon became the one.

It took him to three Olympic Games, and in 2004 he won an Olympic medal. In his account, that journey was built on a single crucial decision made by his parents: to treat physical movement as his “medicine.”

Why mental health and movement belong in the same conversation

The dangers of being physically inactive are no mystery to anyone. Leon is worried about how sedentary behavior poses a risk to mental health.

In the speech, he asks how many people know someone who has had to deal with mental health. Nearly every hand goes up. That spark is the sound of it all adding up: this is universal, and this is local, and this does not belong to just a few people.

He also cites the size of the problem at a population level. A high proportion of adults in the UK are experiencing symptoms of mental illness, including depression and anxiety. And even outside of a diagnosis, many are all too aware of how tired they feel, feeling stressed and frazzled.

If the default setting is stress, that’s a major risk factor that can quietly wear mental health down over a lifespan. Leon is not saying stress means mental ill health. It’s that usually stress is a starting point.

To ground that broader picture, readers who want official context can look at the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey 2014 (published for NHS Digital) and the UK Parliament’s overview of mental health statistics in England, data vital for mental health services.

“We spend too much time in our heads.”

Leon’s core idea is simple: many of us live in our thoughts all day, and thinking is not always the fix.

Overthinking more than thinking creates psychological duress and disrupts our mental health. That stress, a sign of an incipient mental health condition, physically manifests itself as well. The tensed shoulders, constricted breath, lockjaw, and that wired feeling that makes rest elusive.

So what changes the cycle?

Leon’s answer is physical movement. It’s not that it performs magic things, but it moves you into a different mode. It changes what your body is doing, which shifts what your mind feels.

What happens in your brain when you move

Leon explains movement like this: when you start moving, your nervous system reads it as stress. It’s as if your body thinks you might need to fight or run. In response, the brain releases certain chemicals that affect how you feel.

Two key ones he mentions:

BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor)

This is a protein your brain releases when you move. Leon describes it as protective and supportive for the brain, and connected to cognitive functioning through the creation of new neurons in the hippocampus.

Endorphins

Most people recognize endorphins as the “feel-good” chemicals. Leon frames them in a slightly different way: they dull discomfort, the same way your body might numb pain if you had to fight or flee.

Put together, this mix helps explain a common experience: after a walk, a swim, or a workout, things often feel clearer. You are still you, and your problems may still be there, but you can breathe again.

The short-term benefits vs. the long-term changes

Leon separates movement into two timelines.

What movement can do right now

In the moment, physical movement can:

• Change your state quickly
• Lift mood and support well-being
• Release built-up stress in the nervous system

This is why a short walk can feel like a reset. It’s not dramatic, but it’s real.

What movement can change over time

When movement is consistent, you can also observe long-term changes serving as protective: Fentanyl cellForRowAtSoftenrepresentedecabelsclassSoften and wasn’t a true freshman to get worked over by All-SEC pass rusher Cariolla.

Evolution of brain structure over time

Higher self-esteem

A reduced biological response to psychological stress, which enhances resilience

They reflect a move toward the ultimate aim for mental health care.

He names psychological stress “the enemy” of mental health and physical movement a potent way to respond.

He even quotes an old quote as evidence that this is not new. Cicero, over 2,000 years ago, wrote, “It is exercise alone that supports the spirits and keeps the mind in vigor.”

Movement as support for depression, anxiety, PTSD, and ADHD

Leon points to several research studies that show movement is not only about the usual response to day-to-day stress but also provides effective treatment for depression and anxiety and supports work with PTSD and ADHD (mental health issues that are often chronic in their presentations).

A 2013 depression study reported that “meditative movement” practices, like yoga, qigong, and tai chi, reduced symptoms in the participants.

In another study, regular participation in yoga minimized the severity of PTSD to an extent that led to the loss of a PTSD diagnosis in several cases.

We know that aerobic exercise and other forms of physical activity can significantly improve recovery among people with anxiety disorders by making the body’s fight-or-flight response less reactive over time. Maintaining a safe level of higher heart rate through exercise can help increase tolerance and minimize fear of those sensations, Butler said.

A study by Fritz and O’Connor (2016) determined that symptoms of people with ADHD were decreased when they were asked to exercise moderately for 20 minutes.

The key word running through his examples is not “intensity.” It’s consistency.

Two practical actions Leon recommends

Leon offers one short-term move you can do today and one long-term challenge that changes how you think about exercise.

1) Interrupt stress with movement for mental health

When you are stressed, Leon says your body is flooded with chemicals like cortisol and adrenaline. If you stay locked in that state for hours, it’s not neutral.

His suggestion is direct: get up and go for a walk, if you can.

If a walk is not possible, even small shifts help:

• Change your posture
• Change the rhythm of your breathing

The goal is disruption. Break the pattern, release some of the buildup, and move yourself back toward emotional well-being.

2) Find “your movement,” the one you enjoy

This is where Leon gets specific: movement has to include enjoyment.

• Walk
• Run
• Swim
• Play tennis
• Kick a football (soccer ball)
• Try an early-morning sober rave

The details matter less than the feeling. Enjoyment is the ingredient that keeps you coming back.

Why enjoyment matters (even for an Olympian)

Leon’s most intimate tale isn’t about victory. It’s about losing control of himself while doing the one thing at which he appeared to be best.

He placed fourth after the Sydney Olympics in 2000. That’s the one that stung because he was so close to his dream. The following year, he underwent reconstructive shoulder surgery and seven months of rehabilitation, only to require a second reconstruction on the same shoulder.

Then he fell into what he called a depression. He trained incessantly, he concentrated on every fine point, yet the pressure and societal judgment of acknowledging his difficulties as an Olympian drew him into a vortex.

He recounts what was one of his lowest points: by the side of the pool, alone, shoulders rounded, tears streaming down his face, and ready to quit.

A mentor, part of his support systems, approached him, put a hand on his shoulder, and asked one question: “Leon, remind me, why do you do this sport?”

Leon answered, “Because I enjoy it.”

His mentor pointed out he had not smiled in eight months.

The next day, Leon returned to training and forced himself to smile, even if it felt fake at first. That one change helped shift the spiral in the other direction. He refound joy in the movement, in each training session, each dive, each lift.

His point lands hard because it’s unexpected: even seven hours a day of training did not protect him from poor mental health when the joy was gone.

A real-world example: running as a turning point

Leon tells us one of his coaching stories. One success on his resume was a rapid ascent through the ranks of a big company by a young executive in London. In fact, he was battling bipolar disorder with all his might. The symptoms worsened, and the medication increased over five or six years of mental health services. It was taking a toll on his family, and he had almost reached his limit.

Leon asked him which movement he excelled at. The man, he said, used to love running.

They built habits around running. He started running more frequently and eventually became a member of a local running club. Six months later, a half marathon for him and his wife, with his children, friends, and family cheering.

In that time, Leon says the man’s symptom severity had decreased so much with treatment—running in conjunction with medication changes—that he was taken off most of his medications. The side effects subsided, his quality of life soared, and he never felt mentally sharper in over a decade.

In Leon’s framing, running was not a random hobby. It was his movement.

What it could look like if more people moved

Leon closes with a warning and a hope.

Adults who remain mired in stress and lack of activity—children will mimic those behaviors, especially in the teenage years. The next generation may face the same cycles of feeling overwhelmed at work, disconnected, and not moving enough.

But there’s another option. A “movement for movement,” in which people reduce promotion and prevention to simple physical activity, reclaiming mental health, one choice at a time. This approach could create a culture that makes movement and mental care a priority, which can grant suicide prevention.

He ends with a Thomas Jefferson quote:

“Exercise and application produce order in our affairs, health of body, and cheerfulness of mind, and those make us precious to our friends.”

Conclusion: reclaim your mental health by finding your movement

Stress often begins in the mind, but it doesn’t stay there. It seeps into the body and molds your mood, your patience, and your energy. The message of Leon Taylor is that simple: move more, interrupt stress earlier, and ensure well-being as the kind of movement you actually like—using positive psychology to make joy a priority in your activity.

Choose something small you can do over and over this week, even if it’s just a short walk and some deeper breaths as an alternative to using substances. Then find your movement, maybe one that fosters social connection by making community-based care accessible, the one that takes you back to yourself and supports your mental health.