Exercise and Confidence

Exercise

Exercise is good for you and your business. It doesn’t just strengthen your heart; it creates positive changes in your brain, makes you more resilient, and will no doubt increase your confidence.

Unless you’ve been living on Mars for the last 50 years, you’ve heard that exercise is good for you. It lowers your blood pressure and strengthens your heart, it adds years to your life. However, this information does not seem to be very motivating for most people!

Research has shown that the benefits of exercise have a wider reach then heart health. It begins with the fact that human nature is to be physical. Our ancestors spent many more hours a day then we do moving around. The reduction of physical work in our modern world has a direct correlation to rising levels of mental illness. Not exercising is like taking a depressant or an anxiety drug.

In 2000 Babyak did a study with 156 people suffering from a major depressive disorder. He divided them into 3 groups. One group was prescribed only medication, the second group was prescribed medication and 30 minutes of aerobic exercise 3 times a week, the third group was prescribed only 30 minutes of aerobic exercise 3 times a week.

After 4 months, the recovery rate in each group was about the same, 60% got better, there was no significant difference, and in fact the group who were prescribed exercise alone took a bit longer to recover. Those who did recover were looked at again 6 months later. In that group, 38% who were prescribed medication alone relapsed, 31% who were prescribed medication and exercise relapsed, 9% who were prescribed exercise alone relapsed. Interesting. This is not to advocate that those in need forgo medication. In my own experience working with people suffering from mental illness, I think that medication is a wonderful thing and saves lives. Exercise is not a panacea. But this study does illustrate the powerful benefit of exercise, the advantage of heeding human nature.

It is also pretty well know that exercise enhances mood, the “runners high” is a commonly used phrase. And now we know why. I personally am not fond of rats, but I guess we do owe them thanks for all of the good information we get from experimenting on them Recent experiments on rats demonstrate that exercise causes changes in the brain that creates a different response to stress. And here I quote Michael Hopkins, a researcher affiliated with the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory Laboratory at Dartmouth. “It looks more and more like the positive stress of exercise prepares cells and structures and pathways within the brain so that they’re more equipped to handle stress in other forms. It’s pretty amazing, really, that you can get this translation from the realm of purely physical stresses to the realm of psychological stressors.” An example of one of these studies is the response of rats placed in an unfamiliar space. The rats that had exercised didn’t run for dark corners and hide, as the unexercised rats did. They explored.

Exercise also has a positive effect on behavior. In his book Spark, The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and The Brain. Dr. John Ratey states, “Having a bout of exercise is like taking a little it of Prozac, a little bit of Ritalin, right where it is supposed to go.” He studied children in a failing school and in a good school. With the introduction of daily exercise, the failing school became 17% above the state average, the good school became one of the top performing schools in the world. Obesity levels fell from 30% to 3%, disciplinary incidents declined, and violent incidents decreased 67%.

All this just by exercising, moving around as we are meant to. So let’s all go for a brisk walk today. But, before you go, please check out my workshop series for 2010, Grow Yourself/Grow Your Business:
http://tinyurl.com/yj3fenh