Quick snippets from our morning read on Wednesday, 03rd January 2021
Moving your body is one of the most beneficial things you can do for your mind. Today’s morning read by Kelly Mcgonigal focuses on exercise and it’s effects on the brain.
Five Surprising Ways Exercise Changes Your Brain
We’ve all heard that exercise is good for us—how it strengthens our hearts and lungs, and helps us prevent diseases like diabetes. That’s why so many of us like to make New Year’s resolutions to move more, knowing it will make us healthier and live longer. But many people don’t know about the other important benefits of exercise—how it can help us find happiness, hope, connection, and courage.
Why is movement linked to such a wide range of psychological benefits? One reason is its powerful and profound effects on the brain. Here are five surprising ways that being active is good for your brain—and how you can harness these benefits yourself.
1. The exercise “high” primes you to connect with others
Although typically described as a runner’s high, an exercise-induced mood boost is not exclusive to running. A similar bliss can be found in any sustained physical activity.
Scientists have long speculated that endorphins are behind the high, but research shows the high is linked to another class of brain chemicals: endocannabinoids (the same chemicals mimicked by cannabis)—what neuroscientists describe as “don’t worry, be happy” chemicals.
This exercise high also primes us to connect with others, by increasing the pleasure we derive from being around other people, which can strengthen relationships. Many people use exercise as an opportunity to connect with friends or loved ones. Among married couples, when spouses exercise together, both partners report more closeness later that day, including feeling loved and supported.
Another study found that on days when people exercise, they report more positive interactions with friends and family. As one runner said to me, “My family will sometimes send me out running, as they know that I will come back a much better person.”
2. Exercise can make your brain more sensitive to joy
When you exercise, you provide a low-dose jolt to the brain’s reward centers—the system of the brain that helps you anticipate pleasure, feel motivated, and maintain hope. Over time, regular exercise remodels the reward system, leading to higher circulating levels of dopamine and more available dopamine receptors. In this way, exercise can both relieve depression and expand your capacity for joy.
These changes can also repair the neurological havoc wreaked by substance abuse. Substance abuse lowers the level of dopamine in your brain and reduces the availability of dopamine receptors in the reward system. As result, people struggling with addiction can feel unmotivated, depressed, antisocial, and unable to enjoy ordinary pleasures. Exercise can reverse this.
3. Exercise makes you brave
Courage is another side effect of physical activity on the brain. At the very same time that a new exercise habit is enhancing the reward system, it also increases neural connections among areas of the brain that calm anxiety. Regular physical activity can also modify the default state of the nervous system so that it becomes more balanced and less prone to fight, flight, or fright.
The latest research even suggests that lactate—the metabolic by-product of exercise that is commonly, but erroneously, blamed for muscle soreness—has positive effects on mental health. After lactate is released by muscles, it travels through the bloodstream to the brain, where it alters your neurochemistry in a way that can reduce anxiety and protect against depression.
4. Moving with others builds trust and belonging
In 1912, French sociologist Émile Durkheim coined the term collective effervescence to describe the euphoric self-transcendence individuals feel when they move together in ritual, prayer, or work. Moving with others—for example, in group exercise, yoga, or dance classes—is one of the most powerful ways to experience joy.
Psychologists believe the key to producing collective joy is synchrony—moving in the same way, and at the same time, as others—because it triggers a release of endorphins. This is why dancers and rowers who move in synch show an increase in pain tolerance.
You can read the full article here.
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