Exercise and mental health
Exercise is increasingly recognized for its positive impact on mental health alongside its well-established benefits for physical well-being. Engaging in physical activity can enhance mood, boost alertness, and foster feelings of well-being while alleviating fatigue, tension, stress, and depressive symptoms. The release of endorphins during exercise is thought to contribute to these effects, creating a pleasurable state that encourages continued participation. Health professionals often recommend exercise as part of treatment plans for anxiety and depression, as well as stress-related conditions like chronic pain and fatigue.
Moreover, exercise can promote social bonding, particularly through team sports or group activities, further enhancing mental health benefits. However, it is important to recognize that exercise can also be associated with mental health issues, as individuals with disorders such as anorexia or body dysmorphic disorder may engage in excessive exercise compulsively. Such compulsions can stem from fears of weight gain or the desire for control over physical appearance, leading to unhealthy patterns that outweigh the benefits of exercise. Overall, while moderate exercise offers significant mental health advantages, maintaining a balanced approach is crucial for ensuring overall well-being.
Subject Terms
Exercise and mental health
Exercise is a behavior that affects both physical and mental well-being. It is well known as a practice for maintaining physical health. More and more individuals and health care practitioners have recognized the positive impact that exercise has on mental health. It can significantly improve mood, alertness, and feelings of well-being while decreasing fatigue, tension, stress, and depressed mood.
TYPE OF PSYCHOLOGY: Biological bases of behavior; developmental psychology; psychopathology; psychotherapy; stress
Introduction
Physical exercise affects mental health by releasing endorphins, or hormones that put the body in a pleasurable state. As such, exercise may be naturally reinforcing because endorphins may serve as a positive reinforcer.
Often doctors and specialists recommend an exercise regimen as part of a treatment program for conditions related to anxiety, depression, and stress reduction. Additionally, regular exercise can also affect stress-related diseases or conditions exacerbated by stress by helping to reduce stress. Headaches, pain disorders, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, and conditions such as diabetes may benefit from stress reduction in this regard. Stress reduction also may result from social bonding associated with exercise, including pairs or team sports or even simply walking or running with a friend. Additionally, direct effects on body fat, blood pressure, weight, and flexibility, among other physical aspects of health, also combine to make exercise beneficial for these conditions.
Mental health and exercise are also primary topics of sports psychology, an area of psychology that focuses on how mental state can affect athletic performance. Practitioners of sports psychology use numerous techniques to facilitate improved performance and persistence. Using visual imagery to see oneself performing successfully is one example of sports psychology. Another technique involves using positive self-statements to facilitate expectations of successful performance. Many times, athletes and others participating in sports or other exercise activities may experience reductions in performance that may be accompanied by thoughts or beliefs that can cause or exacerbate poor performance. Therefore, approaches encouraging positive self-statements, ways of reshaping beliefs to support performance improvement, can be extraordinarily beneficial.
By 2020, researchers were conducting more studies related to the extent of exercise that can prove beneficial to mental health, particularly for depression and anxiety. In 2018, as the US Department of Health and Human Services published the second edition of the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans that highlighted that even an accumulation of shorter activities performed throughout the day can have a positive physical and mental impact, the results of a large analytical study were published in the journal Lancet Psychiatry. The authors of the study, which looked at data collected from over one million adults who had taken part in annual surveys conducted by the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System between 2011 and 2015, found that those who had exercised for more moderate lengths of time each week saw some of the greatest mental health benefits. Such studies were indicative of increased discussion about customizing exercise routines with a focus on mental health benefits and determining how much activity is needed to take advantage of such benefits.
Disorders Related to Exercise
Though exercise has many physical and mental health benefits, it can also be associated with varying mental health problems. Some individuals may have extreme concerns about weight, as found in the condition of anorexia nervosa, and may engage in excessive exercise. If a person is driven by fears of weight gain, exercise may function as a compulsion, a behavior performed to reduce the fear and anxiety. Unfortunately, the reduction of these uncomfortable feelings about weight gain can be negatively reinforcing, meaning that the reduction in anxiety serves as a benefit to encourage more and more exercise. Unlike positive reinforcement, or stimuli that increase behaviors, works by removal of stimuli, in this case, reducing the fear and reinforcing the exercise. These compulsive patterns may develop into rituals. When the ritual is pathological, its interruption can further trigger anxiety, which then may help to further build the compulsion to follow through with the exercise rituals.
Similarly, individuals with bulimia may engage in exercise as a compensatory behavior for other problematic behaviors, such as binge eating. Binge eating can trigger fears of a lack of control and weight gain; the exercise behavior may be used to compensate for the overeating. Exercise is seen as a means of regaining control.
Individuals with body dysmorphic disorder, a condition in which a person has serious concerns about how some aspect of a body part looks, may also engage in excessive exercise. Desire to affect the body, such as to gain control over its appearance, may also be related to compulsive exercise.
Remarkably, even when a person is warned of the deleterious effects of excessive exercise that may result from body-fat levels that are too low and a dysregulated hormone system, the person will still feel driven to exercise. These are conditions in which the benefits of exercise do not objectively outweigh the risks; however, the person is unable to see this. In reality, individuals must recognize the value of moderation even in exercise. Healthy exercise that supports mental health is beneficial behavior that outweighs the negative effects of exercise.
Bibliography
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