The link between anxiety and sweating – Part 4

Sweating comes from stress, either from physical or emotional anxiety. When it is physical, it is because you’re exercising thoroughly, and the body’s natural response is to give off moisture through your sweat glands. It is usually good for your health, because the liquid contains amounts of excess salt and other chemicals your body needs to eliminate. Sweat from steady exercise also helps condition the body’s other normal functions, reduce fat and keep muscles flexible.

Do you want to know how this 82-year-old welcomes physical stress? I drag myself out of bed each morning and run … all right, trot … to the community pool some 15 minutes away from my house. Because I live right next to the Saguaro National Park in southern Arizona, by the time I get to the pool, the temperature may be as high as 100, with humidity of less than ten percent. That combination can produce lots and lots of sweat. Fortunately for other swimmers, I take my profusely sweaty body into the shower stall before I begin my 20 laps in the Olympic-sized pool.

When I retired 15 years ago, after 30 years of sedentary sitting in an office, I weighed 195 pounds on a pudgy five-foot-eight body. Yesterday, in the doc’s office for a bit of bronchitis medication, I weighed in at 160. I attribute much of my weight loss on exercise. Of course, the swimming is very important for overall flexibility, and so is sensible diet for old former fatty food lovers. However, I believe the good kind of physical stress you get from jogging and brisk walking in the sun for at least two miles a day, and the profuse sweating it brings, is most important. I must confess that I get very anxious if I can’t do my daily exercises, but that’s a whole ‘nother part of the story.

Have I ever experienced sweating in another context, such as during some extremely anxious moments? Of course. I sweated plenty when our Navy troop ship was taking fire from enemy artillery less than two hundred yards from the Iwo Jima beach, as we lowered our Marines into their assault boats? There was a familiar term among service people then, called sweating out the end of the war, so that we could get home and resume our lives.

Later, my face and clothing were damp with sweat when I scanned the college hall bulletin board to see if I had passed the last final exam which assured my BFA, and the minimum GPA of 3.3 to be selected for a grad school internship? Or, the anxiety when I tried to work up the courage to ask a successful