Occasional stress is both normal and healthy, but when it lingers, it can wreak havoc on your mind and body. Chronic stress increases your risk of developing anxiety, depression, insomnia, high blood pressure, and more.
Movement tackles stress from multiple angles, explains Brie Vortherms, LMFT, a therapist and senior director of Life Time Mind. It works at a chemical level, pumping out endorphins that help you relax. It also dampens cortisol, epinephrine, and other hormones that contribute directly to stress.
Blood flow is another perk. “The more you work out, the more blood flow you’ll have and the stronger that blood flow will be to the brain,” says Vortherms. Overall, more oxygenated blood improves brain function, which can help you cope with stress.
Exercise also eases stress by counteracting the learned helplessness response, says John Ratey, MD, associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and author of Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain.
Learned helplessness is a state of mind that develops in response to stressful situations that feel uncontrollable. In the face of future stress, these feelings cause you not to act, even if you can change your circumstances. Stress mounts, creating anxiety and increasing your risk of depression.
“Movement is a good antidote to learned helplessness,” Ratey says. Exercise teaches you to focus on the task at hand and to stick around instead of giving up right away when things get tough or frustrating.
Over time, this can improve your response to stressful situations. “A lot of people with mental health issues overrespond to stress and make their own demons too quickly.”
Want to boost the stress-relieving benefits of exercise even more? Take your fitness routine outside. A 2019 study found that spending 20 to 30 minutes in nature leads to a significant drop in cortisol.
Learn More
For more on how stress operates in your body —
and how to reduce stress and build resilience —
see “How Stress Affects Your Body.”
For more about the mental health benefits of time in nature,
go to “The Nature Cure.”
Moving for Mental Health
Exercise is a powerful tool for improving mental health: It can reduce stress, relieve depression and anxiety, and be a salve for loneliness, to name a few of its benefits. Delve into the many ways movement can serve as medicine for the mind at “7 Ways Movement Benefits Mental Health,” from which this article was excerpted.
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