In recent posts, I have highlighted different ways and strategies to accomplish stress reduction and/or management in our lives As I've said earlier, stress is a part of life. It is how we handle it that is a choice. There have been different ways to achieve stress reduction I've discussed including changing your thoughts, increasing focus, becoming a master of your time, using progressive muscle relaxation, and increasing goal setting. In this post, I will highlight the role physical exercise and activity play in stress reduction. We all know that exercise and physical activity help improve general physical as well as mental health, leaving us with a sense of well being. However, less well known is that physical activity may facilitate the brain reorganizing itself in response to stress.
In recent research published in the Journal of Neuroscience, a team based at Princeton University reported that physical activity reorganizes the brain so that its response to stress is reduced and anxiety is less likely to interfere with normal brain function.
The investigators noted that when mice allowed to exercise regularly experienced a stressor, such as exposure to cold water, their brains exhibited an increase in the activity of neurons that shut off excitement in the ventral hippocampus, a brain region shown to regulate anxiety. Also, the exercise of running produced a large increase in the number of new neurons in the hippocampus as well. These finding were in contrast to those found in sedentary mice.
The authors (Gould, Schoenfeld, Rada, and Pieruzzini) observed that these findings potentially resolve a discrepancy in research related to the effect of exercise on the brain. The typical finding has been that exercise reduces anxiety while also promoting the growth of new neurons in the ventral hippocampus. These young/new neurons are typically more excitable than their more mature counterparts. So, it would seem that exercise should result in more anxiety, not less. However, these Princeton-led researchers found that exercise also strengthens the mechanisms that prevent these brain cells from firing. The researchers found that running prevents the activation of new neurons in response to stress. For more sedentary mice, stress activated the new more excitable neurons though the effect dissipated after six weeks. Therein lies the possible transition to humans in that exercise may help reduce current anxiety (think stress) while creating mechanisms for us to deal better with later stressors and anxiety from a brain perspective. The authors did express hope that their findings may help science better understand and treat human anxiety disorders.
As noted by the authors, the research also shows that the brain can be extremely adaptive and tailor its own processes to an organism's lifestyle or surroundings. The brain may modify itself to respond best to its environment by regulating anxious behavior.
So what does all this mean for us humans? As I mentioned earlier, there are well known physical/psychological benefits to exercise. What we see here is a possible new and exciting way in which our brains may respond to physical activity to assist us in dealing with stress in our lives. Left unsaid in the research was how their findings connect to changing thoughts in the brain, particularly as it relates to responses to and strategies for dealing with stressors. In large part, that may have to do with the fact that they used mice. Nonetheless, there appears one more good reason to add an exercise and physical activity dimension to our lives. For additional information, go to www.successandmindset.com