Click here for more informationexercise and no more stress!a new study reveals all
Exercise and say goodbye to stress, new study shows
It’s been well known for a long time that when we exercise we tend to deal with stress more easily. Scientists have known this for years but the big question remained-how does this actually happen? Well, now thanks to researchers at Princeton University and a handful of very fit rats we know why.
An incredible discovery was made recently at Princeton University; they noticed that the rats that were exercising had brain cells (neurons) that would respond differently to the couch potato rats. Last week if you happened to attend the annual meeting of the society for neuroscience in Chicago (who didn’t) you would have learnt that a group of scientists did an experiment which had extraordinary findings. They allowed one group of rats to exercise and the others to be big fat sloths, then they plunged both groups into cold water to go for a swim which apparently rats don’t like to do-it stresses then out! I must admit that I am not exactly fond of a cold water plunge either. Before you think how cruel, those poor little rats getting put into cold water I would like to remind you of the experiment I wrote about a while ago regarding stretching and tendon strength. The researchers were seeing if stretching would make a difference to muscle and tendon tears, in other words does stretching decrease or increase your risk of injury. In this experiment they stretched out the rats until a tendon or muscle went snap! So I am thinking the cold water dip was a walk in the park compared to their mates in the stretching class.
Anyway,
What the scientists noticed is that the rats that had been exercising had biochemically and molecularly calm brains. The new neurons that were formed as a part of their running seemed to have been buffered from the stressful experience. For many years we have all touted the benefits of exercise as a mood enhancer but how a physical activity could directly affect your psychological state such as anxiety levels was not known. There were just educated guesses and postulated theories until now. This has become easier due to better research techniques and of course our deeper understanding of genetics and thought processing.
So we now see evidence that exercise remodels the brain to protect us against stressful states. We literally become more resistant to stress. In another study at the University of Houston, researchers have looked at how exercise affects the levels of dopamine (your feel good neurotransmitter in the brain) and also the levels of antioxidants in the body. Scientist have know for a long time that stressed people that suffer from anxiety a lot have excessive oxidative stress which leads to cell death throughout the body including the brain.( I don’t need to tell you that that is not good!) However, moderate regular exercise has shown to decrease the effects of oxidative stress and a report at the society of neuroscience in Houston said that they had observed rats whose levels of oxidative stress which had been artificially increased( by injecting with chemicals) were extremely stressed and anxious when put into unfamiliar situations. However, the rats that had been doing their regular workout (and I imagine were looking rather buffed) and were also injected and put in the same situations were calm as cucumbers. They apparently did not go running into the corners looking for dark areas to hide but just cruised around exploring.
“It looks more and more like the positive stress of exercise prepares cells and structures and pathways within the brain so that they’re more equipped to handle stress in other forms,” says Michael Hopkins, a graduate student affiliated with the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory Laboratory at Dartmouth, who has been studying how exercise differently affects thinking and emotion. “It’s pretty amazing, really, that you can get this translation from the realm of purely physical stresses to the realm of psychological stressors.”
I hear what you’re thinking, I will go for a quick walk this morning and I will be stress free! Unfortunately, it won’t happen immediately. They had a bunch of rats that ran for only three weeks and then were ‘stressed out’ but did not get the protective benefits of the rats that ran for six weeks. There seems to be a change neurologically between a 3 and 6 week period of exercising.
Dr. Greenwood who is a research associate in the department of integrative physiology at the University of Colorado who has been in charge of the experiment says that he is unsure how this translates in regards to humans. It could be that we need more weeks of exercise than the rats or hopefully for the lazy ones reading this, less. He does go on to say though, although the effects will not happen overnight they will happen and the effects will be profound!
So I don’t know about you but I am getting away from this computer and my stress and going for a walk, or a ride, or to the gym.
