Strikingly, exercise seemed as effective as antidepressant drugs and psychological treatments. A 2013 meta-analysis cautiously reported that exercise – both aerobic and resistance – was “moderately effective” in treating depressive symptoms. In parallel with self-reported stress-reduction, brain scans showed shrinkage of part of their amygdala, a deep-brain structure strongly implicated in processing stress, fear and anxiety.Įxercise is also emerging as a promising way to overcome depression. For example, a 2010 study put participants through eight weeks of daily yoga and meditation practice. Yoga teaches the deliberate command of movement and breathing, with the aim of turning on the body’s “relaxation response”. This shift to “fight or flight” mode is automatic, but that doesn’t mean it’s wholly out of your control. What about yoga? Does it really help with stress? When anxiety levels rise, you tense up, your heart races and your attention narrows to a slit. Instead, recent evidence points to a pleasurable and pain-killing firing of the endocannabinoid system: the psychoactive receptor of cannabis. Levels of the body’s homemade opiate do rise in the bloodstream, but it’s not clear how much endorphin actually gets into the brain. It may not be due to an “endorphin rush”, though. The runner’s high – that feeling of elation that follows intense exercise – is real. Love it or hate it, bouts of physical activity can have potent effects on your mood. Just 10 minutes of playful coordination skills, like bouncing two balls at the same time, improved the attention of a large group of German teenagers. They became more adept at ignoring distractions, multitasking, and holding and manipulating information in their minds.Īnd if that all sounds like hard work, you may not have to get out of breath to reap the attention-honing effects of exercise. Less predictably, their executive control improved. Meanwhile, a large randomised controlled trial in the US looked at the effects of daily after-school sports classes over a school year. Interspersing lessons with 20-minute bouts of aerobics-style exercise improved the attention spans of Dutch school pupils. The best scientific evidence comes from testing school children, but the same most likely applies to us all. Improve your concentrationīesides making memories stickier, exercise can help you focus and stay on task. Don’t push it too hard, though: vigorous workouts can raise your stress levels, which can scupper your memory circuits. German researchers showed that walking or cycling during, but not before, learning helped new foreign language vocabulary to stick. Since the hippocampus is at the core of the brain’s learning and memory systems, this finding partly explains the memory-boosting effects of improved cardiovascular fitness.Īs well as slowly improving your memory hardware, exercise can have a more immediate impact on memory formation. Well-controlled experiments in children, adults and the elderly show that this brain structure grows as people get fitter. The part of the brain that responds strongly to aerobic exercise is the hippocampus. It can also help you choose the best ways to prepare physically for mental challenges such as exams, interviews and creative projects. This research might give you the impetus to get more active. Moreover, specific physical activities can markedly alter its structure in precise ways.Ī wave of studies exploring the unexpected links between mental and bodily fitness is emerging from labs. Scientists are showing that the runner’s high and the yogi’s tranquility have profound effects on your brain.
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