86Thousand400: Stress and Exercise

Chronic stress translates into emotional and then physical strain. The ripple effects of the body's stress can lead to full blown mental disorders such as anxiety and depression, as well as high blood pressure, heart problems and cancer.

Stress is a threat to the body's equilibrium.

In the brain, anything that causes cellular activity is a form of stress. For a neuron to fire, it requires energy, and the process of burning fuel creates wear and tear on the cell. The feeling of stress is essentially an emotional echo of underlying stress on your brain cells

As far as your brain is concerned, stress is stress - the difference is simply in the degree.

Today there is an ever-widening gap between the evolution of our biology and our society.

The way you choose to cope with stress can change not only how you feel, but also how it transforms the brain.

Brain activity caused by exercise can damage cells, but repair mechanisms leave cells hardier for future challenges.

Neurons get broken down and built up just like muscles - stressing them makes them more resilient. This is how exercise forces the body and mind to adapt.

Challenges are what allow us to strive and grow and learn. The parallel on the cellular level is that stress sparks brain growth. Assuming that the stress is not too severe and that the neurons are given time to recover. Connections become stronger and our mental machinery works better.

Triggered by a primitive call to survive, the body's stress response is a built in gift of evolution.

Any degree of stress activates fundamental brain systems. If we strip away everything else, our ingrained reaction to stress is about focusing on danger, feeling the reaction, and logging in the experience for future reference, which the book ‘Spark’ refers to as wisdom.

Flight or fight response (which I’m sure most people will have heard) calls into action several of the body's most powerful hormones. The brains panic button, the amygdala, sets off the chain reaction about a possible threat to the body's equilibrium.

The amygdala's job is to assign intensity to the incoming information. It's not just about fear, but intense emotional state, including for example euphoria or sexual arousal.

Within ten milliseconds the amygdala fires off messages that cause the adrenal gland to release different hormones at different stages. The hormone epinephrine (or adrenaline) is released into the bloodstream which increases heart rate, blood pressure and breathing rate. This contributes to the physical agitation we feel under stress.

Humans are unique among animals in that the danger doesn't have to be clear and present to elicit a response - we can anticipate it, we can remember it, we can conceptualize it. And this capacity complicates our lives dramatically. The mind is so powerful that we can set off the (stress) response just by imaging ourselves in threatening situations. (On that note – try not to overthink)!

Just as the mind can affect the body, the body can affect the mind. But the idea that we can alter our mental state by physically moving still has yet to be accepted by most physicians, let alone the broader public.

The purpose of the flight or fight response is to mobilise us to act, so physical activity is the natural way to prevent the negative consequences of stress. When we exercise in response to stress, we're doing what human beings have evolved to do over the past several million years.

Exercise not only takes you out of the moment but when you work at high intensities it also allows the body to be put under ‘controlled stress’, which in the long run keeps you coming back stronger both mentally and physically.