Writer’s Note: please be advised that this post is a reprint
from years back, where it first appeared at websites that are no longer active,
and my current anxieties are quite different and, perhaps, much the same.
This week, my brand-new MacBook Air died. It took three big projects with it, as well as software that had already been complaining about being loaded too many times. The living room is a mess of books. (My older daughter was the number one patron of our local library last year, and I have the library fines to prove it). I could go on about leaks, an electric switch that was smoking, the flat tire, the clogged drain (and me doing dishes in the back yard), and the fact that my daughter just made a sundial to help me tell time, because the stove unilaterally switched over to military time. Or I could just say this: with all these things picking away at me, I feel anxious!
Anxiety is actually a natural reaction that sharpens our attention so we can meet challenges. However, clinical anxiety—in the form of generalized, social phobias and panic attacks—can be crippling. Forget about feeling picked at. Think emotional fetal position (or even, in some cases, physical fetal position).
Clinical anxiety affects about 18 percent of the population (at least in America), which translates to about 40 million people. The causes of anxiety in the brain are a complicated dance that involves deep neuronal pathways of fear that may have developed through actual trauma, as well as inadequate cease-and-desist signals traveling between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. Over time, a person has more and more difficulty discriminating between danger and safety.
Here are common ways people with clinical anxiety cope (some may surprise you):
• compulsiveness
• passive-aggressiveness
• overall inflexibility
• taking beta blockers or imipramine
The good news is that exercise can significantly reduce (or even, in some cases, replace) the need for these behavioral and medicinal controls by:
• Providing distraction. Even a 15-minute, on-the-spot workout in the face of anxiety can help a person powerfully focus on something other than the fear
• Reducing muscle tension. People with chronic anxiety have overactive electrical patterns in their muscles; in other words, a physical feeling of anxiety promotes a mental state of anxiety. Exercise tranquilizes the muscles and breaks the body-to-brain negative feedback loop just like beta-blockers.
• Building brain resources. Exercise increases the chemicals that help regulate signals and inhibit fear; it also helps cement alternative (good) memories.
• Teaching a different outcome. Increased heart rate and faster breathing rate come to be associated with something positive instead of panic and fear (John Ratey calls this a “biological bait and switch”).
• Improving resilience. By doing something to relieve the anxiety, a person begins to realize she can do something positive to control her experience.
Exercise provides these benefits in both the short and long term—or, as Ratey puts it: exercise treats both the state and the trait. All of this is terrific news. And suddenly I’m wishing that a 15-minute workout could even revive my MacBook Air.
Information about exercise, anxiety, and the brain is from John Ratey’s book, Spark
Read Part I: Why Exercise? Part 1, Learning and the Brain
As always,
L.L.