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January 20 - February 20, 2020
This phenomenon—known as attention capture—reveals a brain always looking for an opportunity to indulge a favored habit.
However, there are limits to the exercise-addiction analogy. Most exercise enthusiasts are not suffering from a dependence that interferes with their health or the rest of their lives. What they have, instead, is a relationship with exercise that involves desire, need, and commitment.
If exercise is a drug, the one it most closely resembles is an antidepressant. And for many of us—myself included—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.
Exercise physiologist Samuele Marcora
caffeine,
modafinil,
methylphe...
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All addictions start in the brain’s reward system, and every drug of abuse—alcohol, cocaine, heroin, nicotine—acts on this system in a similar way. On first use, the drug triggers a flood of dopamine, the neurotransmitter that signals the presence of a reward. Dopamine grabs your attention and commands you to approach, consume, or do whatever set off the surge.
Most drugs of abuse also increase other feel-good brain chemicals, like endorphins, serotonin, or noradrenaline. This powerful neurochemical combination is what makes a substance addicting.
One study of new members at a gym found that the minimum “exposure” required to establish a new exercise habit was four sessions per week for six weeks. This delay in habit formation suggests that something different is happening, at a molecular level, than what occurs when a drug user becomes addicted.
One man, who his entire life had believed that he hated to exercise, told me that at age fifty-three, he decided to work with a personal trainer to improve his health and support his recovery in a twelve-step program. He started with one workout a week, and within three weeks, decided that he could tolerate a second weekly session. One day he left a training session and noticed that he was smiling, something he describes as shocking. “I realized that not only was I happy, I had found actual pleasure in my training session. I hadn’t believed that kind of pleasure was possible outside of
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Nora Haefele of Stowe, Pennsylvania,
At her seventy-fifth half marathon, a race in Waterbury, Connecticut, the event director surprised her with a trophy,
the 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.
identified their own pleasure glosses.
What pleasure glosses do YOU have?
Exercisers tend to experience these conditioned responses in a very different way than drug users who are trying to stay clean, perhaps because most feel no ambivalence about their habit. They welcome the cravings set off by a pleasure gloss and relish the way familiar sensations ignite their desire.
abuse. In both animal and human studies, physical activity reduces cravings for and abuse of cannabis, nicotine, alcohol, and morphine.
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.
Our brains change as we age, and adults lose up to 13 percent of the dopamine receptors in the reward system with each passing decade.
For example, they are especially likely to show a reduced risk of depression and suicidal thinking if they exercise at least twenty minutes a day.
A 2017 meta-analysis of exercise interventions found that physical activity can be an effective treatment for anxiety disorders.
In humans, exercising three times a week for six weeks increases neural connections among areas of the brain that calm anxiety.
IN A LABORATORY EXPERIMENT at the University of Wisconsin, Madison,
The word addict comes from the Latin addictus, meaning both “devoted” and “bound to.”
In all manner of creatures, dopamine motivates behaviors that are key to survival: eating, mating, and caregiving. The reward system’s main job is not to make us dependent on things that are harmful, but to push us toward the things we actually need.
In long-term happily married couples, a dopamine surge upon seeing your spouse is linked to how much you view their well-being as integral to your own.
Maybe it is more accurate to think of commitment, not addiction, as the primary function of the reward system. Perhaps it is this capacity that exercise taps into.
It can be experienced anytime and anywhere people gather to move in unison: in marches or parades, at dance classes and nightclubs, while jumping rope on the sidewalk or practicing tai chi in the park, or when swaying and singing at church.
To explain how moving in synchrony produces this effect, Tarr likes to demonstrate a psychological trick called the rubber hand illusion. Imagine sitting at a table and resting both of your arms on the tabletop. An experimenter conceals your right arm and replaces it with a rubber arm. When you look down, you see your own left arm and the fake rubber arm where your right arm should be. The experimenter then strokes the rubber arm with a paintbrush, which you can see, while simultaneously stroking your real right arm out of view, which you can feel. Your brain simultaneously receives these two
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The more fully the brain integrates these perceptual streams, the more connected you feel to those you are moving with. Neuroscientist and dancer Asaf Bachrach calls this the kinaesthetics of togetherness. This phenomenon may even extend to the objects we move with; one kayaker described to me feeling that her kayak was an extra limb of her body. A sailor who reported a similar sensation with his sailboat concluded that is why people love their boats so much.
Anthropologists believe that this may be the most important function of collective joy: to strengthen the
Such grooming is not primarily about hygiene or appearance. It’s a way to bond. The social touch leads to an endorphin rush that strengthens the animals’ relationship and leads to real alliances. Primates who groom one another are more likely to share food and defend one another during a conflict.
We humans have our own forms of social grooming, including shared laughter, singing, dancing, and storytelling.
Across cultures, most people’s social networks can be described by five widening circles of connection. The first,
innermost circle typically has only one other person in it, a primary life partner.
The second circle contains close family and friends...
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of five m...
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The next circle is the core friendship circle. It includes, on average, fifteen people who play an important role in your life.
The next circle includes fifty or so individuals that you could describe as friends, but have less close ties to.
The outermost circle contains about one hundred and fifty people you are connected to in more casual ways at work, in your local community, through organizations you belong to, or by the activities you participate in.
For much of human history, the size and membership of your social network was limited by geography. Now family can be halfway around the world, and through technology, we can connect with strangers anywhere on the planet. As our social circles widen and disperse, it’s worth asking: Is it possible to experience collective joy at a distance—moving at the same time, if not in the same place—to create a community that is not bounded by proximity?
Cognitive scientist Mark Changizi uses the word nature-harnessing to describe any cultural invention that can “harness evolutionarily ancient brain mechanisms for a new purpose.”
Power songs tend to share certain qualities that make them stimulating: a strong beat, an energetic feel, and a tempo of around 120 to 140 beats per minute, which seems to be a universally preferred cadence for human movement.
Power songs also have strong “extramusical” associations: the positive emotions, images, and meaning the song triggers in the listener. These associations can be based on the lyrics, the performers, one’s own personal memories, or pop culture—for example, if a song was in the soundtrack to a film or if it served as an official song for a major sporting event.
Rocky theme
This is one reason Eminem’s “Till I Collapse” remains the most popular workout song of all time.
“Let’s Go” by Travis Barker, “Work” by Stella Mwangi, and “Move (Keep Walkin’)” by TobyMac.
One of Karageorghis’s studies found that listening to “Eye of the
Tiger” by Survivor (the theme song to Rocky III) helped participants work harder and enjoy themselves more during a strength challenge performed to exhaustion. No doubt part of the song’s power lies in its association with a figh...
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I was in an indoor cycling class when “Warrior” by Australian pop singer Havana Brown came on. The track has a hard-driving beat and a female vocalist singing about dancing to the beat of a drum, backed by male voices shouting what sounds like “Go!
tapped into my very identity; it wasn’t lost on me that the Gaelic meaning of my name, Kelly, is “warrior.”
Oh brother
