Beat depression with exercise
It is a common understanding that exercise heightens your mood. Runner’s high and endorphins are the terms associated to the activity. If you belong to the exercise enthusiasts, you are definitely aware of the advantages it brings. Abundant proof appears to advocate that exercise may treat disorders such as depression. Though personal and anecdotal proof shows the difference it makes. It is now the new antidepressant drug.
In the past 2 decades, there have been some concerns in search for mental health worth of exercise. Just until lately, research examining the efficiency of exercise in the cure of mental health was not carried out with equal level of scientific thoroughness as clinical examinations used to transport antidepressant drugs to the market. Restrictions of past researches involved the lack of control group, participants not assigned to a research group, and examining the outcomes of exercise upon the volunteers who were not enduring mood problems.
However, a current placebo-controlled research held by James Blumenthal, psychology instructor at Duke University issued in Psychosomatic Medicine journal last September, compared exercise with a usual antidepressant drug in a set of people identified with major depressive disarray and discovered that exercise was efficient as the treatment to lift the disorder symptoms.
In this research, 202 depressed individuals were randomly designated to each of the 4 sets, one with antidepressant sertraline, one with a supervised setting 3 times weekly, one which exercised at home, and the last have a placebo pill. 16 weeks after, 47 percent of the set which had antidepressant, 45 percent of supervised exercise set, and 40 percent who exercise in their home no longer belong to the category of major depression according to the standard evaluation of depression symptoms.
Other researches have discovered the advantages of physical activity can be appreciated by individuals who are not depressed, but are mentally exhausted and required more energy. “Calm Energy, How People Regulate Mood with Food and Exercise” by Dr. Robert E. Thayer explains the function of exercise as personal mood-regulator, and mentions in his studies that even 10 minutes of quick walking elevates the mood and energy in the subjects who undergone experiment for 2 hours after walking.
Additional study is required to duplicate these kinds of researches and further classify the mental health advantages of exercise. It is needed to determine whether what kind of exercise is beneficial, level of intensity, duration, and frequency of exercise which will generate the utmost gains. Moreover, age or gender disparities may be included when creating an exercise plan intended to increase the mood.
With this possibility for optimistic mental health advantages, with the most positive side effect of having improved physical health and weight loss, it is simple to consider that if exercise is a commercial drug, it will be the most wanted medication made by drug industries.