Mental health has been pushed to the forefront of our focus in the last year as the pandemic placed most of us at home, in isolation from our normal patterns and social situations. Many of us had a significantly larger amount of time to sit at home and think. Along with this was incredible amounts of societal stressors, financial stressors and more which created anxiety and depression for many.
One of the greatest tools for battling depression and anxiety is exercise. It has been found in studies that exercising is as effective as antidepressant medication in improving mood. So, how does this work? There are several ways, by increasing monoamine levels which influence the stress hormone cortisol and increases growth of neurons in the brain. Exercise has also been shown to improve sensitivity of the tissues to the hormones present in the brain and help decrease HPA axis activity, which becomes hyperactive in times of chronic stress or depression.
Depression and anxiety are complicated mechanisms to describe, because there are multiple things happening with the chemical makeup of the brain, but also with the receptors and the neurons in the brain itself. First let’s define what a neuron is: the cells in your brain that are responsible for thoughts, receiving sensory input from the external world, for sending motor commands to our muscles, for interpreting all the information. One of the best metaphors I have heard for depression is to envision that all the neurons are a series of lights that connect you to all the different parts of your brain. Imagine all these bright light impulses of thoughts and communication going to all the parts of your brain and back to your body like a well lit home. Depression is like someone has come in the home and started to shut off all the lights in the rooms one by one until there is only one dimly lit room in the whole house. As the body stops using these neurons, you have a harder time concentrating, harder time remembering things, harder time sleeping. You can even lose some of the mass of your brain itself. Exercise has been shown to stimulate growth factors in the brain, increasing numbers of neurons and ‘lighting’ up parts of the brain that had not been in use due to the depression.
No one specific type of exercise has been brought up as being better than others, but 3-4 sessions of exercise per week are correlated with lowering anxiety. Also, exercise can be as effective as your typical antidepressant medication, but it can take up to 16 weeks of exercise to see a comparable effect. Although the antidepressant medication tends to work more quickly for initial symptom relief, the upside of exercise is there are less side effects. Two of the major side effects of antidepressants are weight gain and sexual dysfunction, both which are unlikely to happen with exercise. (Unless you’re trying to gain muscle mass!)
Coach Sarah, FNP-BC, MSN