Your brain loves exercise and meditation for reducing stress

Last week’s article discussed managing work into independent single tasks to help focus and alleviate stress. Today I look at two healthy ways to reduce stress – exercise and meditation.

Remember some stress is OK

Some degree of acute stress is useful as it readies your brain for an optimal response by keeping you alert. Adrenaline release can motivate you to work hard and do well under pressure and in healthy people, once a threat has passed, levels of stress hormones return to the normal homeostatic balance with no long-lasting effects. Even after chronic, long term stress you can recover. Neural stem cells can regain their ability to regenerate at a normal level when the threat has moved to another area.

Adopt healthy habits

Healthy habits can help you avoid or reverse the effects of chronic stress. To calm down the stress remember that what is good for the body is good for the brain. So you can make good conscious choices for your body, thinking about what you eat and drink, how much exercise you get, how many hours sleep you have – and even the thoughts you pay attention to. Exercise and meditation are discussed in more detail here.

Exercise helps increase an important protein in the brain

Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) is a protein that is central to keeping brain cells healthy and to stimulating new ones to form through neurogenesis. Just like eating protein for muscle growth, BDNF is the protein for your neurons - it’s like the ultimate brain super-food. But the raised cortisol of stress stops the production of BDNF so fewer brain cells are formed.

Exercising is the fastest way to increase BDNF levels which is why it is so effective in helping to alleviate stress. A University of California study showed that after just two weeks, those who exercised daily produced the protein much more rapidly than those who exercised on alternating days (1). Don’t worry about having to make it a daily habit as after a month, there was no difference in production of BDNF between those who exercised daily and those who exercised every other day.

The researchers also noted that the protein returned to baseline (non-exercise) levels just after two weeks of not exercising. The good news is that it shot right back up after just two days of exercising. The message gives strong evidence to get away from the couch and flex some muscles.

Exercise helps neurotransmitters

And there is more good news. Neurochemicals abound as a result of exercise. Activity increases the firing of serotonin neurons, which causes them to release more serotonin. It also increases the neurotransmitter norepinephrine and the dopamine system. The brain also releases endorphins, neurotransmitters that act on your neurons like opiates by sending a signal to reduce pain or provide anxiety relief.

One life change - exercise - can have multiple, seemingly unrelated benefits. Exercise causes loads of unnoticed brain changes by modifying circuits, releasing positive neurochemicals and reducing stress hormones. And here’s the thing – you can do slow walking or chair pilates. No one is asking you to sign up for an iron man. Focus on what you can do rather than what you can’t.

Meditation

Mindfulness meditation trains you to put to one side the constant high-speed train of thoughts travelling through your mind. It teaches you to be still, to be calm, to sit in the present without any fear about the future or worry of the past getting in the way of the peace of the moment. Essentially it does the opposite of stimulating your cortisol and stress. It elicits peace and tranquillity, bringing balance to the body and brain.

Be fully present

Focusing on the present helps. Worrying and anxiety are projections of yourself into the future, they don’t exist when you are fully present. It’s all about paying attention to what is happening now, noticing and focusing on the present. Buddhist monks practice mindfulness being aware of the now, just noticing, without attaching any emotional reaction to it. This cuts off anxiety at the source. Taking a pause, a deep breath, inhaling and exhaling slowly, focusing on the breath itself, calms the sympathetic nervous system and reduces stress.

Meditation and mindfulness techniques move your cognitive judgement from threat to challenge, decrease ruminations, and reduce stress arousal.

Mindfulness reduces inflammation

Carnegie Mellon University researchers working in a new discipline called health neuroscience, showed that mindfulness training, compared to relaxation training, reduces inflammation in the body (2).  Brain scans showed that mindfulness meditation training increased the functional connectivity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Participants who received the relaxation training did not show these brain changes. The mindfulness group had lower Interleukin-6, an inflammatory health biomarker, and the changes in brain function accounted for the lower levels. The researchers believe the brain changes provide a neuro-biological marker for improved executive control and stress resilience through meditation. This increases the brain’s ability to help you manage stress, and these changes improve a broad range of stress-related health outcomes, such as your inflammatory health.

How do you deal with any stress when it rears its head?

Photo by Simon Rae on Unsplash

1: Berchtold, N. C., Castello, N., Cotman, C. W. (2010). Exercise and time-dependent benefits to learning and memory. Neuroscience, 167(3), 588–597.

2: Creswell, J. D., Taren, A. A., Lindsay E. K., Greco, C. M. Gianaros, P. J., Fairgrieve, A., Marsland, A. L., Brown, K. W., Way, B. M., Rosen, R. K., Ferris, J. L. (2016). Alterations in resting-state functional connectivity link mindfulness meditation with reduced interleukin-6: A randomized controlled trial. Biological Psychiatry, 80 (1), 53 – 61.