Build resilience to stress through physical activity sooner rather than later

Stress is a part of everyone's life, but when experienced constantly or in excess, it can become both mentally and physically detrimental. While some stress is beneficial to push you to do better, study for that test, and run that mile, too much stress can cause a loss of motivation and bring you down. One big factor that stress and mental health issues was found to affect is physical exercise. Because physical inactivity is the fourth leading risk for mortality, it is very important to look after yourself and start physical exercise sooner rather than later. 

In a presentation by Trevor Buhr taking about the study "The Persistence of Stress Induced Physical Inactivity in Rats" he raises the issue that nation-wide decreased amount of physical activity is leading to not only health problems with oneself but also changes to infrastructure and physical health monitors. The study used adult male mice that were exposed to different levels of stress by putting the rats is a cage with locked wheels for seven days and after introducing stress with episodes of either 0, 50, or 100 tail shocks. 36 hours after the shocks, they unlocked the wheels and gave then access for 9 weeks. The mice that were exposed to more stress shocks showed a decreased used of the wheels compared to the less or no stress mice, and this was shown continuously through the 9 weeks of access. Even though the depression like behaviors normalized within 1 week, the stress had already caused a long lasting change in the amount of physical activity. There was also a no stress run that demonstrated a higher dopamine turnover in the prefrontal cortex and equal amounts of dopamine was used in the stress and no stress mice. This was interesting because the stressed rats had less dopamine. This helped develop the understanding that stressful experiences with certain intensity can affect the brain to promote a decrease in physical activity. 

The article "Running from Stress: Neurobiological Mechanisms of Exercise-Induced Stress Resilience" (Nowacka-Chmielewska et al. 2022) shows another point of view of the relationship between physical activity and stress. This review shows how exercise can help the brain fight back to stressful experiences and become more resilient to stress by analyzing biological mechanisms where physical activity was shown to have some type of protection form changes to the brain related to stress. They found that regular everyday exercises help support neuroplasticity, which means it will help with forming new neural connections in the brain. BDNF, a protein that is involved with learning and memory, can also be increased with exercise. There were also discussions about physical activity showing better neurotransmitter system regulation. This article highlights that overall physical activity is shown to help people develop better stress resilience and long lasting stress mitigation. 

Both the studies look at the connection between stress and physical activity, but they look at two different perspectives. Buhr's study explains that increased stress can cause a decrease in physical activity whilst the review explained that a base of normal exercise can help protect from the stress itself. This introduces a cycle into the picture between motivation and stress. If an individual is to experience increased levels of stress, this could cause them to lose motivation to exercise, however, as an individual is doing less physical activity this can also affect their ability to have psychological or even biological benefits that exercise presents to help with stress later in life. There is also a connection to dopamine form Buhr's research and the effects of stress on neurotransmitter systems which both help with understanding that certain brain processes are influenced by physical activity and stress. 

Overall, these studies show that this problem is much more complicated than just telling people to exercise more so they feel better. Because of how stress impacts motivation, developing stress resilience is even harder after the stress hits. Understanding this relationship better can help us all find ways to create healthy everyday behaviors amongst the stresses of life. So before that stress hits, maybe try building that cycle of resilience to stress sooner rather than later to save yourself from the rising numbers of physical inactivity. Physical activity is important to manage stress but managing stress is also important to maintain physical activity. 

Buhr, Trevor J., et al. "The Persistence of Stress-Induced Physical Inactivity in Rats: An Investigation of Central Monoamine Neurotransmitters and Skeletal Muscle Oxidative Stress." Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, vol. 17, 2023, p. 1169151, https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2023.1169151.

Nowacka-Chmielewska, M., Grabowska, K., Grabowski, M., Meybohm, P., Burek, M., & Małecki, A. (2022). Running from Stress: Neurobiological Mechanisms of Exercise-Induced Stress Resilience. International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 23(21), 13348. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms232113348