My supervisor from work sent this in an email to me a couple days ago. The nature of our job is pretty stressful, and she will send emails like this to help us separate work from life. I thought our readers would benefit from reading this too. Enjoy.
-Amos
Exercise: Improve Your Mood and Help Repair the Effects of Stress
By Karyn Hall, PhD
Emotionally sensitive people are often advised to exercise to calm
their anxiety or to help overcome depression. Grandmothers,
psychiatrists, friends and even strangers often suggest, “Exercise.
You’ll feel better.”
In our recent survey, 71.4% of the emotionally sensitive have found
exercise helpful in managing their mood. Turns out the research, as
reported by John Ratey, MD in his book Spark, shows exercise has a
strong effect on mood as well as other important functions of the
brain.
Exercise is effective in treating anxiety and panic. Getting active
provides a distraction, reduces muscle tension, builds brain resources
(increases and balances serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine, all
important neurotransmitters involved in mood), improves resilience by
showing you that you can be effective in controlling anxiety, and
breaks the feeling of being trapped and immobilized.
The effects can be equal or even better than medication. The problem
is that when people are upset or depressed, they don’t want to
exercise.
Establishing a regular exercise program, one that you could maintain
when your mood was unpleasant, may be part of the answer. Continuing a
routine when you are emotionally dysregulated is easier than starting
a new activity. Regular exercise would also help prevent relapse.
In addition to helping regulate your mood, exercise offers other
advantages that make it well worth the time invested. Only recently
are scientists realizing how extensive the effects of exercise truly
are.
Exercise improves the ability to learn. When you are working on
learning new coping skills, new ways of responding, the ability to
take in information is obviously important. Dr. Ratey describes an
American high school whose students participated in a physical fitness
program. They finished first in the world on science and sixth on an
international test to compare science and math abilities. As a whole,
US students ranked 18th in science and 19th in math.
Studies have shown that better fitness means improved attention and
improved ability to adjust their cognitive performance following a
mistake.
How does that happen? Exercise reportedly spurs the development of new
nerve cells from stem cells in the hippocampus. Perhaps most
importantly, exercise is believed to increase BDNF (brain-derived
neurotrophic factor), the master molecule of the learning process. Low
levels of BDNF are associated with depression.
Exercise increases cognitive flexibility. Ratey defines cognitive
flexibility as being able to shift your thiking and to be creative.
Cognitive flexibility would be to apply new strategies to solve
problems and use information in creative ways rather than rote
memorization of facts. Memorizing coping skills may will not be as
helpful as being able to able the information in different situations.
Exercise helps relieve and repair the effects of stress on the body.
When stressed, the body releases cortisol. Ratey notes that high
levels of cortisol make it difficult for the prefrontal cortex to
direct the hippocampus to compare memories, like to determine that a
stick is not a snake. Thus when cortisol is high it’s difficult to
decide what is a threat and what isn’t a threat, so just about
everything seems scary. You can’t think clearly.
In addition, high levels of cortisol kill neurons in the hippocampus
(where memories are stored), causing a communication breakdown. This
result could partially explain why people get locked into negative
thoughts–the hippocampus keeps recycling a negative memory.
Stress overload also creates more connections in the amygdala. The
more the amgydala fires the stronger the stress and the sooner the
stress becomes generalized, as if everything is a stressor.
Exercise helps prevent the damaging effects of stress and can reverse
damage that has been done. Exercise protects neurons against cortisol
in the areas that control mood, including the hippocampus and in that
way helps prevent relapse and evens out up and down moods.
All with very few side effects.
Reference
Ratey, J.( 2008). Spark. New York: Little, Brown and Company.
