Anxiety: practice of physical exercise reduces the risk – 09/04/2023 – Equilibrium

To better deal with all the bad news and problems, you can exercise, according to a study. The large-scale study, done in Sweden with just under 200,000 cross-country skiers, shows that being physically active halved the risk of developing clinical anxiety over time. The work focused on skiing, but the researchers said that virtually any type of aerobic activity can help protect us against excessive worry and fear.

Science already offers a lot of encouraging evidence that exercise can improve mood. Experiments show that when a person (or a laboratory animal) begins to exercise, they usually calm down, become more resilient, happier and less likely to feel sad, nervous or angry for no apparent reason.

Public health research, which often focuses on connections between one type of activity or behavior and various aspects of health or longevity, has also found that the more we exercise, the less likely we are to develop severe depression. On the other hand, a sedentary lifestyle increases the risk of depression.

A major 2013 neurological study found that exercise resulted in lower anxiety in rodents, triggering an increase in the production of specialized neurons that release a chemical that calms hyperactivity in other parts of the brain.

Most of these studies, however, were small, short-lived, or mostly done on rodents, leaving many questions open about what kind of exercise can help our mental health, how long a good mood can last, whether men and women benefit from it. equally and whether it is possible to overdo the exercise to the point of increasing the likelihood of feeling worse emotionally.

So, for a study of skiers, which was published in Frontiers in Psychiatry, exercise scientists at Lund University in Sweden, together with professionals from other institutions, decided that it was worth examining the long-term mental health of thousands of skiers. men and women who have participated in the Vasa Race, the famous cross-country skiing competition held in Sweden over the years.

The Vasa Run is the world’s largest cross-country ski race series, in which throngs of athletes annually head into the woods of central Sweden to push their legs and arms and glide in races ranging from 30 km until the main race of 90 km. As this type of event requires abundant health, stamina and training, researchers have already compiled data on Vasa Runners to study how exercise influences heart health, cancer risk and longevity.

“We use participation in a Vasa Run as an indicator of a physically active and healthy lifestyle,” said Tomas Deierborg, director of the department of experimental medicine at Lund University and lead author of the new study, who completed the run twice. of 90 kilometers.

To start, he and his colleagues compiled the finishing times and other information from 197,685 Swedish men and women who participated in at least one race between 1989 and 2010. They then cross-referenced that information with data from Sweden’s national health record, looking for by diagnoses of clinical anxiety disorder among runners over the next ten to 20 years. For a basis for comparison, they also analyzed the national health record of 197,684 randomly selected fellow citizens who did not participate in the race and were considered relatively inactive. So they looked for diagnoses of anxiety during the same period.

According to the researchers, the skiers proved to be considerably calmer over the decades after the race than the inactive Swedes, with a more than 50% chance of not developing clinical anxiety.

These positive data were prevalent among male and female skiers of almost all ages – except, interestingly, among the fastest female runners. Women who had the best finishing times were more likely to develop anxiety disorders than other runners, although their risk remained generally lower than that of age-matched women in the control group.

“These results indicate that the connection between exercise and reduced anxiety is strong,” said Lena Brundin, principal investigator of neurodegenerative diseases at the Van Andel Research Institute in Grand Rapids, Michigan, who also co-authored the study.

“You don’t have to go on a long-distance cross-country ski race in the snowy woods of Sweden to reap the rewards,” says Deierborg. Previous studies on exercise and mood suggest that just following the WHO (World Health Organization) recommendations and engaging in about 30 minutes of brisk walking or similar activities most days of the week will “get good effects on your mental health”, he says, and those benefits seem to apply to a “broader population” than just Swedes.

Still, it may be worth monitoring your psychological response to intense training and competition, especially if you’re a competitive woman, he notes, adding that the finding that women with the best brands tend to develop anxiety more often than not that other skiers surprised the researchers, suggesting that running may trigger or catalyze performance anxiety or other issues in some people.

“It is not necessary to practice extreme exercises to achieve the beneficial effects in relation to anxiety”, points out Brundin.

The findings, however, have limitations. They don’t prove that exercising improves a person’s mood, just that highly active people tend to be less anxious than their more sedentary peers. The study also does not explain how skiing can reduce the level of anxiety.

The researchers suspect that physical activity alters the level of brain chemicals related to mood, such as dopamine and serotonin, and reduces inflammation throughout the body, including the brain, physiologically contributing to more robust mental health. Moving between silent, snow-covered pines, away from Zoom calls while training for a Vasa Run, probably doesn’t hurt either.

Any exercise in any environment can help us have better mental health, the researchers said. “A physically active lifestyle seems to have a strong effect on reducing the chance of developing an anxiety disorder”, points out Deierborg, who hopes to extend these benefits to the next generation. He plans to sign up and train for another Vasa Race in the near future when his children are old enough to join him.