Feeling stressed? Getting out and exercising could certainly help you cut that stress. According to a new study from the Emory University School of Medicine, exercise boosts our resilience and makes it easier to bounce back from stress.
In the study with mice, researchers found that regular exercise increases psychological resilience by boosting strategic chemicals in the animals’ brains.
The team noted that this is applicable to humans because of the ways in which we have become accustomed to stress. If we sense a viable physical threat, our instincts tell us to run, but given that most modern-day perils are non-life-threatening, we have transformed this fight or flight instinct into anxiousness and stress.
Fortunately, regular exercise seems to be able to build up our stress resilience. In mice, those who exercised on wheels regularly responded with less trepidation to light shocks in their paws than their sedentary counterparts. The researchers think the correlation between physical exercise and stress could be linked to galanin, a peptide that is produced throughout the body in many animals, including humans.
These findings might not be surprising if you use a brisk walk or workout to wind down from a long day. For many people, exercise is a primary strategy for stress reduction. Now we have even more reason to keep up with regular exercise as it might be a solution to mitigating stress in the first place.
