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January 14 - February 16, 2022
Around the world, people who are physically active are happier and more satisfied with their lives. This is true whether their preferred activity is walking, running, swimming, dancing, biking, playing sports, lifting weights, or practicing yoga. People who are regularly active have a stronger sense of purpose, and they experience more gratitude, love, and hope. They feel more connected to their communities, and are less likely to suffer from loneliness or become depressed.
Physical activity influences many other brain chemicals, including those that give you energy, alleviate worry, and help you bond with others. It reduces inflammation in the brain, which over time can protect against depression, anxiety, and loneliness. Regular exercise also remodels the physical structure of your brain to make you more receptive to joy and social connection.
During physical activity, muscles secrete hormones into your bloodstream that make your brain more resilient to stress. Scientists call them “hope molecules.”
our entire physiology was engineered to reward us for moving.
At the most fundamental level, rewarding movement is how your brain and body encourage you to participate in life. If you are willing to move, your muscles will give you hope. Your brain will orchestrate pleasure. And your entire physiology will adjust to help you find the energy, purpose, and courage you need to keep going.
Human beings are hardwired to take pleasure in the activities, experiences, and mental states that help us survive.
Movement can also fulfill core human needs, such as the desires to connect with nature or to feel a part of something bigger than yourself.
Throughout human history, movement—whether labor, ritual, or play—has helped us to connect, collaborate, and celebrate.
In our evolutionary past, humans may have survived in part because physical activity was pleasurable.
Real-time tracking also shows that people are happier during moments when they are physically active than when they are sedentary.
And on days when people are more active than their usual, they report greater satisfaction with their lives.
The average daily step count required to induce feelings of anxiety and depression and decrease satisfaction with life is 5,649. The typical American takes 4,774 steps per day. Across the globe, the average is 4,961.
key to unlocking the runner’s high is not the physical action of running itself, but its continuous moderate intensity.
Anything that keeps you moving and increases your heart rate is enough to trigger nature’s reward for not giving up. There’s no objective measure of performance you must achieve, no pace or distance you need to reach,
that determines whether you experience an exercise-induced euphoria. You just have to do something that is moderately difficult for you and stick with it for at least twenty minutes. That’s because the runner’s high isn’t a running high. It’s a persistence high.
Persistence is key to experiencing a high while exercising,
We don’t persist so we can get some neurochemical reward; the high is built into our biology so that we can persist.
Neuroscientists describe endocannabinoids as the “don’t worry, be happy” chemical, which gives us our first clue about what exactly an exercise high does to your brain.
amygdala and prefrontal cortex, are rich in receptors for endocannabinoids.
endocannabinoids make running rewarding.
Physical activity can counteract anxiety that has literally been injected into your bloodstream.
Social confidence may seem like a surprising side effect of breaking a sweat, but the chemistry of a runner’s high primes us to connect.
Endocannabinoids aren’t just about not worrying and being happy; they are also about feeling close to others.
Mutual cooperation activates brain regions linked to reward, releasing a feel-good chemical cocktail of dopamine, endorphins, and endocannabinoids.
It feels good to work with others toward a shared goal.
one of the ways that regular exercise changes your brain is by increasing the density of binding sites for endocannabinoids.
brain becomes more sensitive to any pleasure that activates the endocannabinoid system; it can take in more joy.
regular exercise may lower your threshold for feeling connected to others—allowing for more spontaneous
feelings of closeness, companionship, and belonging, whether with family, friends, or strangers.
The link between physical activity and social connection offers a compelling reason to be active.
reminder that we humans need one another to thrive.
numerous studies have shown that for regular exercisers, missing a single workout can lead to anxiety and irritability. Three days without exercise induces symptoms of depression, and one week of abstinence can produce severe mood disturbances and insomnia.
Physical activity can be mind-altering, affecting the same neurotransmitter systems as drugs like cannabis and cocaine.
getting hooked on exercise points not to its inherently addictive nature, but to our brain’s capacity to latch onto a relationship that is good for us.
regular exposure to exercise will over time teach the brain to like, want, and need it.
pleasure gloss. When you repeatedly experience a smell, sound, taste, sight, or touch in a context that is highly enjoyable, that sensation gets encoded in your memory of the pleasant experience.
Once this association is formed, ordinary sensory stimuli become pleasure bombs, setting off explosions of endorphins and dopamine.
capacities to keep a beat and mirror other people’s movements are both related to empathy.
Exercise produces a less extreme spike in dopamine, endorphins, and other feel-good chemicals. Drugs like cocaine or heroin wallop the system, but exercise merely stimulates it, leading to very different long-term adaptations.
The brain reacts to regular exercise not by suppressing activity in the reward system, but by facilitating it.
exercise leads to higher circulating levels of dopamine and more available dopamine receptors. Instead of annihilating your capaci...
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A meta-analysis of twenty-five randomized clinical trials concluded that exercise has a large and significant antidepressant effect among people diagnosed with major depressive disorder.
When you exercise, you provide a low-dose jolt to the brain’s reward centers.
adults lose up to 13 percent of the dopamine receptors in the reward system with each passing decade. This loss leads to less enjoyment of everyday pleasures, but physical activity can prevent the decline.
genetic predisposition to experience the mental health benefits of physical activity.
Scientists have identified several strands of DNA, on multiple genes, that are linked to the antidepressant and anxiety-reducing effects of exercise.
There is a possibility that our genes are peppered with nucleotides that make physical activity especially important for our mental well-being.
In humans, exercising three times a week for six weeks increases neural connections among areas of the brain that calm anxiety. Regular physical activity also modifies the default state of the nervous system so that it becomes more balanced and less prone to fight, flight, or fright.
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.
Maybe it is more accurate to think of commitment, not addiction, as the primary function of the reward system.
