Exercise Creates Cells That Induce Calmness

A recent article in the New York Times stated that scientists have known for quite a while that exercise stimulates the creation of new brain cells. I didn't know that. Does everyone?

Anyway in experiments with rats who exercised, it turns out that running created a brain that was biochemically and molecularly calm. The rats did not react to stress in the same way that rats who had not exercise did.

It seems that exercise can actually remodel the brain, making it more resistant to stress.

The article quoted Michael Hopkins, a graduate student affiliated with the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory Laboratory at Dartmouth, who has been studying how exercise differently affects thinking and emotion as saying: “It looks more and more like the positive stress of exercise prepares cells and structures and pathways within the brain so that they’re more equipped to handle stress in other forms.It’s pretty amazing, really, that you can get this translation from the realm of purely physical stresses to the realm of psychological stressors.”

And interestingly is the cumulative effective of exercise that has the most benefit. In experiments done at the University of Colorado, rats that ran for only three weeks did not show much reduction in stress-induced anxiety, but those that ran for at least six weeks did.