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July 5 - July 12, 2023
It’s a puzzling marriage, running and belonging. Why do our brains so readily link physical activity and social connection? And why does the biology of the runner’s high coincide so closely with the neurochemistry of cooperation? Whatever the reason, this is how we evolved. We are able to persist, for ourselves and for one another. Whether chasing down dinner, pushing a stroller up a hill, or running errands for a neighbor, we can take joy in the effort. And the more physically active you are, the more rewarding these experiences become. That’s because one of the ways that regular exercise
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The link between physical activity and social connection offers a compelling reason to be active. It also serves as an important reminder that we humans need one another to thrive.
This study, published in 1970, is widely considered the first scientific report of exercise dependence. Since then, 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. Hungarian exercise scientist Attila Szabo declared longer experiments in exercise deprivation “hopeless.” Even if you could recruit participants, he argued, dedicated exercisers would, like addicts, cheat and lie about it.
when self-proclaimed exercise addicts view images of people working out, their brains’ craving circuitry fires up in a manner identical to what happens when you show cigarettes to a smoker.
Considering the similarities between exercise and addiction can help us understand how physical activity changes the brain. It also helps explain why physical activity becomes more rewarding the more you do it. 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. When it comes to the passion people profess for their favorite physical activity, there may be better
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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.
How you feel the first time you try a new form of exercise is not necessarily how you’ll feel after you gain more experience. For many, exercise is an acquired pleasure. The joys of an activity reveal themselves slowly as the body and brain adapt.
As she puts it, “I know I’m in freedom when I move.”
Many people believe they don’t enjoy exercise in any form, but I’d bet that most of them aren’t immune to its rewards. It’s possible that they just haven’t exposed themselves to the dose, type, or community that would transform them into an “exercise person.” When the right dose, type, place, and time come together, even lifelong abstainers can get hooked.
When I asked Haefele if the races reminded her of anything, she instantly said, “Church. It’s my way of celebrating the world. We’re all out there celebrating, and sort of worshiping what’s been given to us, and we’re all grateful. It reminds me of a church service.” After a pause, she added, “It’s also like going to a rave. After a race, I’m in love with everybody, and sometimes it lasts the whole day. The person who’s selling me a coffee at the convenience store on the way home, I’m like, ‘I love that guy.’ I’ve never done ecstasy, but that’s how I imagine it is: All’s well with the world,
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John Bingham’s quote, ‘The miracle isn’t that I finished, it’s that I had the courage to start.’ I get weepy when I see that. If you can just find that little bit of courage that you need to start, it will change everything.”
The sensitization of the reward system to nondrug rewards such as food, social connection, beauty, and any number of ordinary pleasures may explain why exercise helps people recover from substance abuse. In both animal and human studies, physical activity reduces cravings for and abuse of cannabis, nicotine, alcohol, and morphine.
Studies like this suggest that exercise can reverse the anti-reward system’s takeover of the brain and bring a numbed reward system back to life. In doing so, exercise resembles not so much a habit-forming drug of abuse as an antidepressant. The closest parallel I could find to how physical activity affects the reward system is not addiction, but continuous deep brain stimulation, one of the most promising medical treatments for depression.
One way to think about exercise is that it is a kind of do-it-yourself deep brain stimulation. When you exercise, you provide a low-dose jolt to the brain’s reward centers.
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. This loss leads to less enjoyment of everyday pleasures, but physical activity can prevent the decline. Compared to their inactive peers, active older adults have reward systems that more closely resemble those of individuals who are decades younger. This may be one reason exercise is so strongly linked to happiness and a reduced risk of depression as we get older. It may also explain why people who eschewed exercise earlier in life find themselves drawn to it
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Are modern humans the equivalent of super-runners? Natural selection is a kind of selective breeding experiment. Some scientists argue that as the human species evolved, we developed a shared genome that reflects the survival advantage of being able, and willing, to exert ourselves. Maybe everything we know about how movement affects the human brain—from the runner’s high to our ability to get hooked on exercise and the psychological benefits of being active—is proof that, whether or not we have a closet full of sneakers, humans are all, at some level, genetic super-runners.
And yet, there are also clear individual differences in how active people are. Could some humans exercise more because they have brains that are more easily hooked? There is evidence that the tendency to be active is at least partly heritable.
Running has been one of the most effective and reliable ways she takes care of her mental health. “I am sure running does for me what antidepressants do for people for whom they work,” my sister says. “If I’ve been sick or injured and haven’t been able to run, as soon as I do my first run, I feel like the clouds have parted and the sun is shining, and I’m a human being again.”
I feel the same way, except the darkness exercise protects me from is anxiety. I have always had a tendency toward worry. My parents generously called my early temperament sensitive and shy, but a more accurate description of me as a child would have been scared.
All I’ve come up with is: I was born that way. I have a brain that expects calamity and is easily overwhelmed. If I had to guess my biologically determined psychological set point, I’d locate it somewhere between “on high alert” and “consumed by dread.” One theory of chronic worry is that people like me have an overactive fear circuit in our brains, set off not by anything specific, but operating more like constant background noise: There’s something wrong. There’s something wrong. The hyperactivity of this circuit produces a vague feeling of anxiety, leaving our imaginations to figure out
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My daily exercise habit doesn’t so much sedate me as it emboldens me, which is exactly the right remedy for my anxiety. Being active makes me a better version of myself, and for this reason, I am grateful to be hooked.
Here’s something I’ve come to believe: Movement isn’t addictive only when it feels pleasurable. I think the brain can sense resilience being wired in. And in fact courage is another predictable side effect of how physical activity changes the brain. At the very same time that a new exercise habit is enhancing the reward system, it also targets regions of the brain that regulate anxiety.
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. 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
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The word addict comes from the Latin addictus, meaning both “devoted” and “bound to.” Some neuroscientists have mused that all devotions—between lovers or between caregiver and child—are a kind of addiction. They point to similarities in the brain between adoration and dependence. When heartbroken young adults see a photo of their beloved, their brains instantly shift into a state resembling an addict’s cravings for cocaine. When a mother gazes at her baby, her brain’s reward system becomes activated in a way that neuroscientists compare to a drug high. The scent of her infant’s skin can
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the reward system is, evolutionarily speaking, ancient. 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 humans, that includes other people. And when you fall in love or become a caregiver, the reward system helps you forge strong attachments so that you will stay together. Through the repeated pleasure you experience from contact with loved ones, you come to like, crave, and need these relationships. You become willing to sacrifice to maintain them. When you are separated, you long to be reunited. This isn’t a destructive dependence; it’s a neurobiological mechanism for commitment. The same brain responses that scientists compare to addiction are also signs of strong bonds.
The burst of dopamine in a mother’s brain when she sees her infant predicts her ability to bond with and soothe her child. In long-term happily married couples, a dopamine surge upon seeing your spouse is linked to h...
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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. From this view, our ability to get hooked reflects our tendency to get attached. Physical activity isn’t just another habit-forming drug; instead, it harnesses our capacity to form the kind of bonds that hold together our most important relationships. As we’ve seen, exercise doesn’t impair your reward system the way destructive addictions do. What’s becoming clearer is that physical activity changes your brain in ways that are
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By harnessing the brain’s capacity to fall in love, regular exercise helps us joyfully commit to a relationship that enriches our lives and augments our happiness.
The joy of collective effervescence helps explain why fitness friendships and sports teams feel like family; why social movements that include physical movement inspire greater solidarity and hope; and why individuals feel empowered when they join others to walk, run, or ride for a cure. As with the runner’s high, our capacity for collective effervescence is rooted in our need to cooperate to survive. The neurochemistry that makes moving in unison euphoric also bonds strangers and builds trust. This is why moving together is one of the ways humans come together. Collective action reminds us
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had traveled to Marajó Island to study how dance brings people together. She was particularly interested in the sense of unity and self-transcendence people often report when dancing in groups.
As the dancer loses himself in the dance, as he becomes absorbed in the unified community, he reaches a state of elation in which he finds himself filled with energy or force immensely beyond his ordinary state, and so finds himself able to perform prodigies of exertion. This state of intoxication, as it might almost be called, is accompanied by a pleasant stimulation of the self-regarding sentiment, so that the dancer comes to feel a great increase in his personal force and value. And at the same time, finding himself in complete and ecstatic harmony with all the fellow-members of his
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This finding confirmed that collective joy is driven in part by endorphins. We usually associate an endorphin rush with high-intensity exercise, but Tarr has found that calm synchronized movement, even small gestures done while sitting, will also increase pain tolerance and social closeness among strangers.
Studies show that yoga, like dancing, can create social bonds. In one experiment, strangers who practiced yoga together reported a sense of connection and trust with the other members of the group.
When Bronwyn Tarr says that the essence of collective joy is an expanded sense of self, this is part of what she’s describing. Your understanding of the part of the world that belongs to you expands, too. This feeling can translate into both self-confidence and social ease. You can walk away from a dance party or group exercise class with an expanded sense of belonging and an embodied knowing that you have the right to take up space in the world.
group exercise, I felt welcomed, over and over and over again. I can’t even begin to explain how extraordinary a gift that was. The sense of belonging carried over into every aspect of my life, undermining my social anxieties and my tendency to isolate myself in times of stress.
It would be years before I’d learn the neuroscience that explains why my students saw the best in me. When you lead people in movement, a group-level trust is cultivated, but you, the instructor, are the one constant beneficiary of any synchrony-based bonding. Every person in the room has the experience of watching and synchronizing with you. The hours my students spent mimicking my movements contributed to a felt sense, in their bodies, that they could trust me. This trust was, in a way, unearned. I had unintentionally exploited a social shortcut. But the trust of my students had a very real
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At a very formative time in my life, I stumbled into this upward spiral of social trust, based purely on the fact that I led groups moving in unison. I am sure that this shaped who I am today. When someone views you through a positive lens, you tend to rise to those expectations. It’s as if you are being given permission to be your best self. Over the years, I was able to grow into the version of myself that my students perceived: someone who genuinely cares about them and our community, and someone who will happily contribute to the collective good. These traits were already inside me. They
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Repeated exposure to endorphins while in the company of others builds an extended family. We humans have our own forms of social grooming, including shared laughter, singing, dancing, and storytelling.
All of these activities release endorphins, and because you can laugh, sing, dance, and tell stories with many people at once, these group forms of social grooming make it possible to build large social networks with less time invested. And that’s a good thing, because humans thrive when our social networks are broad and diverse.
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, with an average of five members. These are the people who would be devastated if something happened to you and w...
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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. You would invite these friends or family members to special gathering...
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The next circle includes fifty or so individuals that you could describe as friends, bu...
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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 belo...
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It is the outer two circles that are most likely to get populated and strengthened through the social grooming of collective joy, whether through synchronized movement, singing, or shared laughter. And these outer circles, when robust, provide the kind of...
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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?
Other technologies connect users to a much bigger community. Jennifer Weiss, a forty-eight-year-old orthopedic surgeon in Southern California, rides her Peloton stationary bike in her garage at five-thirty most mornings. The bike connects her to as many as eight hundred riders around the world through a video app, which streams a live workout from Peloton’s New York City studio. The app also sends data about Weiss’s performance to the instructor and a community leaderboard, where every rider is listed according to their bike’s speed and resistance. When Weiss is near someone on the leaderboard
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When the instructor tells participants to ride to the beat of the music, Weiss knows that riders all over the world are cycling at the exact same cadence. This part of the ride reminds her of the feeling she gets in a flow yoga class when everyone is moving and breathing in unison.
In both of these cases—Jogging over a Distance and the livestreamed Peloton classes—technology...
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