One More Way Exercise Improves Mental Health

“Exercise improves mental health” is itself not a new idea. For example,

We talk often about “what’s good for your heart is good for your brain“, and it goes not just for reducing risk factors (see: What’s Your Vascular Dementia Risk?), but also for improving cognitive function, e.g: How Your Exercise Today Gives A Brain Boost Tomorrow

But it’s not just cognitive function! It boosts mood too: Running or yoga can help beat depression, research shows, even if exercise is the last thing you feel like

…and, for that matter, Behavioral Activation Against Depression & Anxiety ← of which, exercise is not a definitionally required component, but it’s one of the most common ones

It even goes for quite specific forms of depression, such as: Dancing vs Parkinson’s Depression

But, what’s new?

Fitness & emotional resilience

In few words: researchers (Dr. Katja Weiss et al.) found that that higher cardiorespiratory fitness was linked to lower anxiety, lower anger, and greater emotional resilience under stress.

Indeed, the paper got titled: Cardiorespiratory fitness is associated with lower anger and anxiety and higher emotional resilience

What they did: healthy adults were split into above average and below average fitness groups based on exercise used to estimate VO₂Max, then viewed 69 neutral or unpleasant images across two 30-minute sessions, with anger and anxiety measured before and after.

The findings were as follows:

• For anxiety: VO₂Max predicted lower trait anxiety (β = −0.456, p = 0.001), and participants below average in fitness had a 775% greater risk of shifting from intermediate to high anxiety after unpleasant images (OR = 8.754, 95% CI [1.202; 63.759]).
• For anger: lower VO₂Max predicted greater increases in state anger during unpleasant image exposure (β = −0.241, p = 0.003), and higher anger-out scores also predicted anger increases (β = 0.333, p = 0.040), with less fit individuals showing poorer anger control.

Limitations: small sample size (n=40), estimated VO₂Max, questionnaire-based self-reports of some data.

Nevertheless, it is consistent with the idea that physical health and emotional resilience are closely tied together, in what’s most likely a bidirectional relationship (e.g. either one being strong supports the other being strong, whereas either one being weak weakens the other).

See for example: The Stress Prescription (Against Aging!) ← this is about the work of the remarkable Dr. Elissa Epel, who has for the past 20 years specialized in the effect of stress on aging. She’s led groundbreaking research on cortisol, telomeres, and telomerase, all in the context of aging, especially in women, as well as the relationship between stress and weight gain. She was elected member of the National Academy of Medicine for her work on stress pathways, and has been recognized as a key “Influencer in Aging” by the Alliance for Aging Research. Indeed, she’s also been named in the top 0.1% of researchers globally, in terms of publication impact.

So you can tackle this one from both sides! As for what you can do from the psychological side, see: Building Psychological Resilience (Without Undue Hardship)

Want to improve your VO₂Max?

We’ve got you covered:

53 Studies Later: The Best Way To Improve Your VO₂Max

Take care!