The Cyclical Nature of Mental Health and Exercise
It is a known fact that exercise is an essential part of maintaining human health. When humans receive enough regular exercise, it can lead to several known long term health benefits including stroke prevention and decreased cognitive decline. So if this is so widely understood, why is it not widely practiced? What keeps people from achieving the consistent health benefits of exercise? Many people would argue that due to short cuts in weight loss (newer weight loss drugs or dieting plans) and human inclination to laziness are some of the largest barriers keeping people away from exercise; but what if it isn’t that simple?
In his recent research talk, Dr. Buhr presented his research surrounding rats that experience stressful stimuli and how their inclination to continue exercise changes. Notably, the lab looked directly into the effect on the physical and psychological stress on rats that were shocked at different rates and recorded how dopamine levels in the prefrontal cortex changed. It was recorded that there is a link in rats between increased psychological trauma and decreased physical activity. Dr. Buhr explained a possible explanation for this phenomenon to be that running is considered a natural reward system in the rat body and the response to stress could be interfering with that reward.
As it relates to humans, I recently stumbled upon an article (in Neuroscience News) that hypothesizes physical activity can play a part in rewiring the brain, as much so as to say that childhood trauma cannot implore permanent damage. The study focused on the amygdala, hippocampus, and anterior cingulate cortex and how those regions connect with the cerebellum. It was put in the article that “physical activity changed how adversity was linked to communication between different brain regions”, which indicates that childhood trauma and how our brains react to triggers can be changed when one exercises.
Overall, these findings together indicate a few things. First, it may be more than just peoples’ laziness and convenience that distract modern adults from the goal of regular exercise. Next, the traumas that might lead to the physical inactivity are not permanent, and lastly, it is the physical activity that humans may be avoiding due to trauma that could inevitably help people heal from their traumas. The moral being that we exist in a cyclical nature with exercise because it has several benefits even if our traumas attempt to prevent us from reaping them.
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