Exercise to Fend Off Daily Stress

At any given point in time, most people are feeling stressed out about something. Unfortunate though it is – having stress in your daily life is often unavoidable. But being stressed is something within your control. 

One way to exercise that control is to — exercise. A single bout of exercise may offer protection against the emotional events and stress that we encounter later in the day.  That’s the conclusion of new research from the University of Maryland (yes, I’m biased, but this is good work). The immediate ability of physical activity to boost mood and ease anxiety is well established. However, this study found that the stress-busting effects of exercise endure after we’ve left the gym, and more importantly, in the face of subsequent psychological stress. In other words, getting up and moving may make us more resilient to the effects of stress.  If we know there’s no escaping a stressful event, we can at least prepare ourselves to better handle it by breaking a little sweat earlier in the day.

The study, published in the February issue of Medicine and Science in Sports, measured how anxiety levels in college students differed following 30 minutes of moderate intensity cycling (described as “somewhat hard”) and 30 minutes of seated rest. To assess anxiety, students completed the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI). This tool essentially gathers a snapshot of a person’s emotional state by having them rate subjective feelings of tension, apprehension, nervousness, and worry. On one day, participants answered questions on the STAI before exercise, 15 minutes after exercise, and finally – after viewing a series of images, known to provoke emotion. These include highly arousing unpleasant, pleasant, and neutral pictures. On a separate day, students followed the same procedure with the resting condition.

Researcher J. Carson Smith found that once the emotional picture-viewing period ended, anxiety state rose back up to baseline levels following the resting condition but remained low following the exercise. As expected, exercise and seated rest were equally effective in reduced anxiety levels initially. Smith explains, “Even though you can feel better by just sitting and doing nothing, you’re probably not doing yourself as much good as you would be if you were to exercise to receive that same anti-anxiety effect.”

Americans between 18 and 33-years-old – the so-called Millennials – are more stressed than the rest of the population, according to a recent report from the American Psychological Association.  However, they are also more likely than other generations to turn to sedentary activities to cope with this stress.  Listening to music was most widely reported (59% of young adults), but playing video games, surfing the Internet, and eating were also common ways of managing daily stress. These findings should encourage people to adopt physically active coping mechanisms in lieu of such sedentary ones.

It is still unclear exactly how long the anxiety-reducing effects from exercise last, but this study found benefits on mood approximately one hour after the exercise stopped. The duration of these effects, as well as the intensity and length of exercise needed to optimize them, has also yet to be established.

It is popular belief that endorphins are to thank for these effects, but Smith cautions that very little evidence supports a role of endorphins here. Instead, he hypothesizes that “the neural networks related to reward and motivation are being modulated and tuned such that there is a resistance to the effects of the accumulation of stress.” The use of neuroimaging will shed more light on whether and how these neural networks, or interconnected groups of brain cells, may be systematically impacted by exercise.