Your brain can be your best friend and your worst enemy. I am not even going to start on how important mental health is and the turn of recent events has brought light to it more than ever.
The body like most structures in natures is analogous to a machine. Performance is driven by fuel and efficiency of the engine. Your orientation, your performance in the gym, on the field and in life is highly dependent on your brain and how good you take care of it. I don’t deem myself to be qualified to give anecdotes on how to deal with mental health issues but from my study and experience; understanding my brain chemistry and being consciously aware of its changes has always helped me most during the hardest of times.
Your brain on exercise
As I was doing my research, I came across various scientific literature which prove that exercise regulates these hormones, releases dopamine and endorphins, provides oxygen supply to the brain and increases the level of the neurotrophic factor BDNF in the hippocampus.
Being an individual scoring high on neuroticism I’d say that working out has always been my anchor. It’s something I’ve always looked forward to by the end of the day with a similar behavioural pattern you’d see in a chain smoker or an addict which I realize is due to the same incentive reward system that the brain works on. This might sound crazy but go ask a serious lifter how they have been feeling the past few months not being able to work out and I won’t be surprised if they associate with feeling depressed or similar to withdrawal symptoms.
For me being an athlete who’s training just revolved around a bar, weights, belt and chalk, this lockdown has been a nightmare but reading more literature, I’ve turned to running and my current routine is more or less like the workout from the previous article and a 5k run daily. Nowhere close to the feeling of pulling 240kgs of the floor but then I guess we all have our biases.
I will cite the research papers I studied below, feel free to read.
Take away being:
Perform any physical activity you can for at least 30 min that gets you in the flow. Yoga, dance, running, callisthenics whatever you enjoy.
Be consciously aware of how you feel and journal if possible. If you can engineer your mood, you can engineer your behaviour which will help you beyond in life. (Further reading: Tony Robbin’s Priming techniques. It’s a life changer.)
Read about brain chemistry. There’s more to it than just dopamine and cortisol.
Citations
Lee HJ, Baek SS. Role of exercise on molecular mechanisms in the regulation of antidepressant effects. J Exerc Rehabil. 2017;13(6):617‐620. Published 2017 Dec 27. doi:10.12965/jer.1735188.594
Basso JC, Suzuki WA. The Effects of Acute Exercise on Mood, Cognition, Neurophysiology, and Neurochemical Pathways: A Review. Brain Plast. 2017;2(2):127‐152. Published 2017 Mar 28. doi:10.3233/BPL-160040
Bjørnebekk A, Mathé AA, Brené S. The antidepressant effect of running is associated with increased hippocampal cell proliferation. Int J Neuropsychopharmacol. 2005;8(3):357‐368. doi:10.1017/S1461145705005122
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