When Jennifer Heisz was in graduate
school, she borrowed a friend’s aged, rusty road bike — and wound up
redirecting her career. At the time, she was studying cognitive neuroscience
but, dissatisfied with the direction of her work and her personal life, began
experiencing what she now recognizes as “pretty severe
anxiety,” she told me
recently. Her friend suggested biking as a reprieve. Not previously athletic,
she took to the riding with enthusiasm, finding it “soothed my mind,” she said.
اضافة اعلان
That discovery convinced her to change the focus of
her research. Now the director of the NeuroFit Lab at
McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, she studies the interplay of physical and emotional health
and how exercise helps stave off or treat depression, anxiety, stress and other
mental health conditions.
“The effects of motion on the mind are just so
pervasive and fascinating,” Heisz said.
That idea animates her new book, “
Move the Body, Heal the Mind,” which details the latest science about exercise and mental
health, as well as her own journey from inactivity and serial emotional slumps
to triathlon training and increasing serenity.
Recently, I caught up with Heisz to talk about her
book and what it can tell us about
mental health, the benefits of gentle
exercise, the strains of the pandemic years, and how to choose the right
workout, right now, to raise your spirits. The edited conversation follows.
Can
we talk about exercise and anxiety, which many of us are feeling these days?
Exercise is extremely beneficial for reducing anxiety. At the end of
every workout, in fact, you typically get a brief reprieve from anxiety, due to
neuropeptide Y, which increases with exercise. It is a resiliency factor. It
helps soothe the anxious amygdala, which is the part of the
brain that
recognizes danger and puts us on high alert. For the last few years, with the
pandemic, our amygdala has been on hyper-alert, setting off an almost constant
stress response. This chronic stress starts to make our minds really
fearful and people wind up with constant anxiety. Exercise, by up-regulating
neuropeptide Y, helps soothe the anxious amygdala, dial down the fear and
hyper-vigilance and keep us calmer.
Any
particular type of exercise?
The really nice thing is that light to moderate exercise, like walking, is
enough. Research from my lab shows this kind of exercise reduces anxiety
immediately after your workout and then, over time, if you keep exercising,
reduces anxiety even more and for longer. It looks like about 30 minutes of
this kind of exercise three times a week is good. Walking, cycling, swimming,
dancing — a wide
variety of activities work.
What
about more intense workouts?
You need to be careful with really intense exercise and anxiety. If you
are feeling anxiety, you are already under stress. High-intensity exercise is
also a kind of stress. But our bodies only have, in general, one stress
response. So, during
intense exercise, you add extreme physical stress onto the
stress your body already is feeling and it might all become too much. Right
before the pandemic, I was training for a triathlon and doing a lot of
high-intensity workouts. But once the pandemic started, I was feeling so much
emotional stress, I couldn’t finish those workouts. So, I backed off. What I
would tell people is that, when you’re already feeling stressed-out, prolonged,
intense exercise may not be the right option. … Aim for exercise that feels comfortably
challenging, so your heart rate is elevated but not racing.
Does
exercise help in the same ways against depression?
Classically, depression has
been blamed on a lack of serotonin in the brain, which
antidepressants treat.
But for some people with depression the drugs don’t work well, probably because
serotonin is not their problem. Many of us who study depression now think their
problem may involve inflammation, which is linked to stress. The inflammation
starts to damage cells in the body, inducing an immune response and increasing
inflammation, which can then get into the brain, affecting mood. For those
people, exercise may be the medicine they need, because it helps fight the
inflammation.
In studies, when
individuals who have not responded to antidepressants start exercising, they
usually see significant reductions in their symptoms. … One study that looked
at frequency, or how much exercise you need to combat
depression, compared 150
minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise a week, which is the standard exercise
recommendation for physical health, with a quarter of that. Both groups
benefited the same. So, it looks like the exercise prescription for mental
health is less than that for physical health, which is kind of nice.
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