Excercise is most important for fit mental health

Mental health disorders like depression and anxiety are difficult to treat. Many people benefit from medications, but they have a high failure rate and may cause unpleasant side effects. Talk therapy is both time-consuming and costly. And neither method is effective in preventing the disorders from developing in the first place. However, many people overlook another option that, when done correctly, can be one of the most effective, least disruptive, and least expensive ways of managing mental health disorders: exercise.

Exercise, they learn, has deep effects on the structure of the brain itself, and particularly in areas most affected by depression and schizophrenia. It also provides other, more subtle benefits such as focus, a sense of accomplishment and sometimes social stimulation, all of which are therapeutic in their own right. And while more is usually better, even modest levels of physical activity, like daily walking, can make a big difference to mental health.

There is currently increasing evidence that exercise may aid in the treatment or prevention of anxiety disorders, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as well as maybe other significant psychotic diseases. "The more we undertake these studies, the more we see that exercise can be beneficial," Firth adds.

Exercise and brain health Scientists have proposed a few theories about how exercise improves mental health, according to Patrick J. Smith, a psychologist and biostatistician at Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina, who co-authored an article on the subject in the 2021 Annual Review of Medicine with his Duke colleague Rhonda M. Merwin. It appears to have little to do with cardiovascular fitness or muscular strength — the most evident benefits of exercise — because how hard a person can work out is only weakly related to their psychological wellbeing. Smith believes that something more significant than fitness is at work.

HOW EXERCISE WORKS ITS MENTAL MAGIC

Exercise may also aid in the treatment of anxiety problems. The brain alterations caused by BDNF appear to improve learning, which is a key component of various anti-anxiety treatments. This shows that exercise may be an effective method to improve the efficacy of such medicines. One of the usual treatments for PTSD, for example, includes exposing patients to the fear-inducing stimuli in a safe environment so that they learn to recalibrate their reactivity to trauma-related cues — and the better they learn, the more persistent this response may be.

Mittal works with teenagers who are at high risk of developing psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia but have not yet developed the full-fledged disorder. Researchers have gotten considerably better over the last two decades at identifying such people just as they begin to exhibit the early signs of disease, such as seeing shadows out of the corner of their eye or hearing indistinct voices when no one is home.

For between 10% to 33% of these teenagers, these early warning symptoms progress to something more serious. "A shadow could become a person," Mittal speculates. "A whisper could become words. A suspicion that they are being followed may lead to the assumption that the government is after them."

Previously, Mittal discovered that the hippocampus of at-risk youth who later slipped down this slippery slope differs from that of individuals who did not. He wondered if exercising could help strengthen the hippocampus and prevent the slip. So his team put this theory to the test in a group of 30 high-risk teenagers, half of whom followed a three-month schedule of aerobic exercise twice a week.

Moving the body, engaging the mind

However, modifying the structure of the brain isn't the only way physical activity can help people suffering from mental illnesses. According to Smith, the practise of exercising can be beneficial in and of itself by altering people's mental habits.

For persons suffering from mental illnesses, merely doing anything — anything — can be beneficial in and of itself since it diverts their attention and prevents them from ruminating on their condition. Indeed, a review of the available research discovered that placebo exercise — that is, gentle stretching that is too light to have any physiological effect — had about half the favourable effect on mental health as vigorous exercise.