Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding

by Daniel E. Lieberman

Insomniacs and healthy controls prescribed popular sleep medications (for example, Sonata and Lunesta) slept on average the same number of hours (about six hours and twenty minutes) as those prescribed a placebo, and they fell asleep only fourteen minutes faster, despite sometimes also reporting memory lapses the next day.69 To quote Jerome Siegel, “In twenty years, people will look back on the sleeping-pill era as we now look back on the acceptance of cigarette smoking.”

You use more than thirty pounds of ATP during a one-hour walk and more than your entire body weight of ATP over the course of a typical day—an

As detailed comprehensively by Steven Pinker, our species has become exponentially less violent only very recently thanks to social and cultural constraints, many fostered by the Enlightenment.

If many so-called diseases of aging are preventable, it follows that a slow demise at the end of life is not inevitable. In a celebrated study, the Stanford medical professor James Fries showed that preventive medicine could help people stay healthier for longer through a compression of morbidity. Fries initially based his argument on a massive study that measured life span, disability, and three risk factors for disease (high body weight, smoking, and lack of exercise) among more than twenty-three hundred alumni from the University of Pennsylvania. Predictably, the alums with two or more risk factors died 3.6 to 3.9 years earlier than those with one or no risk factors; perhaps more impressively, they lengthened their period of disability prior to death by 5.8 to 8.3 years.59 Simply put, an unhealthy lifestyle affects morbidity twice as much as mortality.

persistent physical inactivity along with smoking and excess body fat are the biggest three factors that influence the likelihood and duration of the major illnesses that kill most people who live in industrial, westernized contexts.

Commonly recommended, sensible methods to make exercise more fun (or less unfun) include: Be social: exercise with friends, a group, or a good, qualified trainer.27 Entertain yourself: listen to music, podcasts, or books, or watch a movie. Exercise outside in a beautiful environment. Dance or play sports and games. Because variety is enjoyable, experiment and mix things up. Choose realistic goals based on time, not performance, so you don’t set yourself up for disappointment. Reward yourself for exercising.

Schedule exercise so it becomes a default.

Make exercise necessary and fun. Do mostly cardio, but also some weights. Some is better than none. Keep it up as you age.