The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity—A Transformative Guide to Understanding Childhood Trauma and Health

by Nadine Burke Harris

program was essential. But in an interesting twist, we found that if our goal had been simply to address ACEs instead of obesity, exercise and nutrition would still have been an important part of that. It wasn’t our initial intention to treat our patients’ toxic stress with dodgeball and cooking classes, but we were pleasantly surprised to see how much the kids improved when we added healthy diet and exercise incentives to therapy. I sat down to check in with the moms and grandmas each week, and they reported that when they changed their children’s diet and their levels of exercise went up, the kids slept better and felt healthier, and in many cases, their behavioral issues and sometimes their grades improved. We found that there was plenty of science to support what we were seeing clinically. The data showed that regular exercise helped increase the release of a protein called BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor), which basically acts like Miracle-Gro for brain and nerve cells. BDNF is active in parts of the brain important for learning and memory, like the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex. We’ve long known that exercise improves cardiovascular health, but the research is piling up in exciting new directions, showing us that moving our bodies builds our brains as well as our muscles. When it comes to combating toxic stress, addressing the dysregulated immune system is as important as supporting brain function. Regular exercise has also been shown to help regulate...