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Psychological Benefits Of Physical Activity – In this article, we’ll take a 360° look at the context, facts, research, and benefits that connect the brain, health, and physical activity.
This discussion will be supplemented with tips and detailed specific exercises, as well as details of their health effects.
Psychological Benefits Of Physical Activity
Before you read on, we thought you might want to download our three positive psychology exercises for free. These science-based exercises will explore fundamental aspects of positive psychology, including strengths, values, and self-love, and give you tools to increase the well-being of your clients, students, or employees.
Psychological Benefits Of Exercise
After the Industrial Revolution, technology also experienced a major shift in Great Britain and much of Western Europe. According to Watson, Weir and Friend (2005), technology.
“Sparked a leisure revolution among the working-class population and played a major role in refocusing the Victorian psyche on health.”
Technology sped up production lines and the production of goods and reduced the number of active jobs for the growing middle class. Along with the automation of industry came a more sedentary lifestyle, as well as a rapid increase in cardiovascular and respiratory diseases.
The growth of blue- and white-collar factory jobs also replaced small-scale farming and traditional manual labor. At the same time, the population moved by the thousands to urbanized centers, smaller settlements close together in proximity to their jobs.
The Mental Health Benefits Of Exercise For Children And Teenagers
Markets and supermarkets also made food available to people who could no longer raise livestock and produce their own food.
The way people spend their leisure time also changed when television became America’s favorite pastime (Krantz-Kent, 2018), with people consuming between 4 and 5 hours of screen time per day (Shaw, 2004).
All this meant that the standard of living in today’s developed regions has risen dramatically. Without physical effort, one could survive and even earn money, have fun and eat well.
Most people can do anything for income from their couch or with little physical effort. This includes paying bills, buying clothes and groceries, enjoying holidays and socializing with friends.
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It is important to recognize that not everyone has the opportunity to do non-physical work in a safe home environment. Physical inactivity is not a reality faced by many workers around the world. Regardless, we are moving towards an urban, physically demanding society.
Jonathan Shaw (2004) writes that 75% of the United States population fails to meet even the minimum government recommendation for exercise, ie walking 30 minutes each day.
Even these statistics differ radically from the habits of our hunter-gatherer ancestors 10,000 years ago, who walked at least 10-20 kilometers each day (Wrangham in Shaw, 2004).
“America likes to think of itself as a young, fitness-focused nation, but behind the bright images of strong runners, Olympic dream teams and mountain bikers lies the disturbing reality of a generation of young people who, to a large extent, inactive, unfit and increasingly overweight’
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Ancient Greece glorified the body through athletic rituals and competitions, so much so that the Olympic Games, held in honor of Zeus, could take place (Ratey, 2015).
Before then, there were no marathon or sports-oriented societies. “Survival of the fittest” prevailed as the basis of human evolution (Ratey, 2015).
In other words, you were either in shape or you were dying. Western cultures have oscillated between extremes, going from “adaptation for survival” to “adaptation for entertainment” to “physicality as a privilege.”
So how do we start thinking about more realistic and affordable ways to incorporate physical activity into our lives?
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We are not genetically programmed to live in a state of idleness and indifference. And if we do, our brains pay dearly in both the short and long term.
You may already know that exercise is good for you, but do you know how it affects the brain?
People exercise for a variety of reasons, but many people stay fit to prevent serious health conditions. These conditions include heart disease, obesity, diabetes, and stroke (Godman, 2014).
Other people mainly exercise to lose weight. Only a few people exercise with the goal of improving their brain function.
Psychology Of Exercise: Improvements In Mental Health
Now it gets technical. We have several videos to help explain these three theories of how exercise affects brain chemistry.
The reason the three theorems differ is that they describe through different lenses different phenomena that occur simultaneously in the brain during exercise.
Any related brain function you can think of, exercise can either improve, optimize specific functions, or prevent unwanted health conditions.
We’ve compiled the key points from each section that we’ll delve into as the article unfolds regarding the neurological benefits of physical activity.
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All of these benefits are related to neurogenesis (the generation and creation of new neurons) and neuroplasticity (synaptic plasticity, or changes in the strength of already existing synapses).
We have many myths surrounding how our brain works, as well as much pending research. Perhaps we should go over some facts before we get back to how exercise benefits the brain.
The following list dispels common misconceptions about the brain and the role of exercise. As one of the body’s least understood organs, this three-pound mystery has kept scientists busy.
For a long time, scientists believed that cognitive abilities, such as our intelligence and memory, also known as fluid intelligence, peaked around our twenties and then slowly declined.
The Benefits Of Physical Activity
It’s not that our cognitive processes get better or worse over time, it’s that they change. This means that at different ages we are more prone to some things than others.
Exercise increases areas of the brain associated with memory, task management, coordination, planning, and inhibition (prefrontal cortex and supplementary motor area).
This expansion means that the developed parts of the brain work faster and more efficiently. When you exercise, the flow of oxygen to these areas of the brain is very beneficial.
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In the “new era of obesity” (Monbiot, 2018), more studies are also highlighting the effects of exercise on the brain as well as overall health (Ravey, 2015). Obesity stigma is a complex topic, but relevant to the study of access to exercise and healthy lifestyles.
The Psychological Benefits Of Exercise
For now, suffice it to say that exercise increases brain size and reduces obesity rates.
Anxiety is bad for the brain, but how? There is evidence that individuals who experience anxiety are 48% more likely to develop dementia.
This is caused by cortisol, the stress hormone, which damages areas of the brain involved in memory and complex thinking.
Working to minimize your stress or seeing certain stress as positive can benefit your brain health. My article on Eustress explains more about how your beliefs about stress affect whether it is harmful or helpful.
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If you suffer from high stress or anxiety related to the very idea of stress, there is still hope for you. Exercise can play a transformative role in your life, which we’ll explore later in this article.
Every 1.5 to 2 hours, the brain goes through stages of performance and productivity. In the first stage, cognition can work at a remarkable speed thanks to the release of sodium and potassium ions that reset the brain’s electrical signals.
If a person continues to work on the same task, it is likely that he will experience low productivity of attention. This is because the brain needs new ions to “refuel” to continue working at the same pace, just as long-distance athletes need fuel between workouts.
Taking a short twenty-minute break every 1-2 hours, whether the break is a walk, exercise, or socializing, can stimulate the brain and return it to the first stage of optimal productivity.
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I tried applying this while writing this article and it worked wonders. I always came back to my desk inspired with new ideas.
Some people want workplaces to be more comfortable places where all employees have an alternative to sitting all day” (Carroll, 2018).
Recent research conducted by Mitchell and Kumari (2016) claims that the shape of a person’s brain can provide indicators of their personality predispositions and risk of suffering from certain mental illnesses.
The “stretches and bends” caused by changes in cortisol levels can indicate whether a person is more likely to be neurotic, extroverted, open, agreeable, and conscientious.
Psychological Benefits Of Physical Activity Free Essay Example
For example, increased thickness, reduced surface area, and absence of cortical folding are associated with higher levels of neuroticism.
On the other hand, prefrontal cortex thinness, increased surface area, and increased fold predict high levels of openness.
The health of our brains should be one of our top priorities if we want to live a healthy and happy life. What better way to show your brain some love than to feed it oxygen through exercise.
Our brain is constantly growing new nerve cells and would benefit from daily stimulation (Steljes et al., 1999). Prior to this discovery, most of the scientific community believed that the brain was incapable of generating new neurons (Ploughman, 2008).
Pdf) Psychological Benefits Of Exercise And Physical Activity In Older Adults
Steljes’ study showed that the generation of new neurons by stem cells, called neurogenesis, occurs in the hippocampus and in cell layers around the subventricular zone of the brain.
“…activities like learning, meditating, enjoying, laughing, being around
