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Hi, and welcome back to calm your caveman. Today, this episode is for people like me. Things that I wish, I wish that I had known 20 years ago, because if I had understood them, it might have given me a huge advantage on my journey toward anxiety mastery a long time ago. We're going to talk about exercise. And I want to talk specifically to those of you, who, like me, know that you need to exercise, know that it's important for you physically, but you just haven't been able to get a regular routine going.
Now the main reason why I was not able to establish a regular routine previous to 2020, was that I was really busy. I just felt that there was so much on my to-do list that was urgent. And exercise was important, but it wasn't urgent. And so it always got pushed to the bottom of the list. I would always do the other things that were pressing my attention more, and only exercise if I had time left over.. Because I found if I went out and exercised while I was worried about my to-do list, exercising would just make me feel more stressed because I was so preoccupied with all of these things that I was not doing while I was exercising. So exercise was always just the leftover time for me. Another reason why I had trouble establishing a routine was it, it was difficult for me to find a form of exercise that didn't make me feel anxious. I didn't want to go to the gym, right? I didn't want to exercise in front of other people and feel the anxiety of being watched as I'm exercising. I didn't want to do water sports. I live right by the ocean. I live right by a beautiful freshwater lake, but water is a big anxiety trigger for me, especially the ocean. And so that wasn't something that I could easily face. Bike riding was another issue, another type of exercise that I wasn't going to get into easily. I have trouble with high speeds. That tends to make me feel really anxious and uptight. And then there's the cars rushing by as you're riding on a road. So bike riding, wasn't going to be a good choice for me. In any case, it was difficult for me to find a form of exercise that wasn't anxiety producing in and of itself. And one additional reason that exercising made me feel anxious was that, that physical strain as you are pushing your body and you start to feel that pain of pushing your body, that made me feel worried. A part of my brain felt afraid of those symptoms of exercising, of the pain and the strain on the body, and made me just want to stop. . So all of these different reasons combined made it very difficult for me to establish exercise as a regular routine, because I had to overcome all of these different anxiety barriers in order to start it. But I wish that I had understood that exercise is effective, not only for our long-term health, but also for our anxiety management, short term and longterm. That exercise, and I want to tell you about the research that talks about this, but exercise can help you when you're already in a state of anxiety, when you've already got that anxiety triggered, your inner and emotional response. It can help calm that emotional response. It's one of those bodily calming techniques that can help calm you down. But it also, if you can do it consistently, it can help create an environment in your body which makes for much less anxiety overall, just generally. So it helps both as a proactive strategy, before anxiety comes up, and also as a reactive strategy, if you've got anxiety already operating right now.
So, let me just talk a little bit about the research associated with the effects on anxiety of exercise. So there is consensus among decades of researchers that exercise does indeed not only help dealing with anxiety disorders, but it also helps with managing anxiety symptoms in various different populations. It seems to help everybody reduce anxiety and depression generally, if you can have exercise as part of your anxiety management routine. And I want to talk about six different reasons why it is that exercise helps with anxiety. Most of these reasons, five of them, come from a book called Spark, the revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain by John Rady. One of these reasons comes from additional research sources, which I'll tell you about in a minute. But let me just talk to you about all of these different ways that exercise will influence your anxiety.
First of all, as a reactive strategy when you've already got anxiety going, when you're feeling anxious, exercise is a good way to be able to distract your brain. It helps you to focus on something other than your fear. So studies have shown the anxious people can respond well to any type of directed distraction, including quietly sitting meditating, eating lunch with a group of people, reading a magazine. But all of these types of distractions are things that require cognitive involvement. They require focus. They require a lot more cognitive activity. And so if you're already at a level of emotional distress, if you're already feeling very anxious, it can be hard to use these methods of distraction. Because as we talked about in our Know Your Context episode, several months ago, we talked about the thinking threshold and how there is a point beyond which your brain is going to get reduced blood flow, reduced oxygen. And so you're not going to be able to regulate your emotions at that point, with strategies that rely on your brain. So all of these distraction strategies that I just mentioned, including meditating, eating lunch with a group, reading a magazine, all of these can be too much for me if I'm feeling really upset. But I can always go out and move and go on a walk. Even if my brain is totally offline. So that is one advantage of exercise, is that it is a reactive technique. That once you already have a high level of emotional stress, if you've already got high anxiety going on, it's a way you can use your body to calm your brain down because it makes your brain have to focus on issues of balance and coordination and moving through space. And so it occupies your attention with these concerns rather than with your fear. So that's the first reason.
The second reason is that it will reduce your muscle tension. John Ratey ,the author of this book, cites a study that talks about how, how people with anxiety have overactive electrical patterns in their muscle spindles. And that exercise reduces that tension. And reducing that muscle tension reduces the feeling of anxiety. So it's one more way to work on that emotional response, that physical, emotional response from a bodily angle, that doesn't require cognitive interference, other than just to get yourself to go out the door and start walking. Or get on your treadmill or whatever it is. But it can reduce that muscle tension. Which then can reduce that overall tension in your body and make it easier for you to switch out of a threat response.
Here's the third reason. Moving in a sense sets you free from immobilization. Immobilization is the state that we go into when we are anxious. When you are feeling anxious, you will tend to immobilize yourself. A lot of times, people will kind of roll up in a fetal position or just find a safe spot to hide from the world. And when researchers want to study stress in rats, they immobilize them. So, if you do the opposite where you are taking action and you are moving through the environment, you are doing the opposite of the physical anxiety default, which is to be immobilized. And it can help you again from the body up, from the bottom up, calm your brain and help you to break out of that threat appraisal.
The fourth reason is really powerful. And that is that getting your heart rate up changes your brain chemistry. And so this will really influence your ability to experience the world and generate the challenge appraisals. Because it changes your brain chemistry in a way that increases the availability of certain important anti-anxiety neurochemicals. And I'm not an expert in these chemicals, but they include serotonin, Gabba, bNDF and endocannabinoids. But these different neurochemicals can make it a whole lot easier for you to switch out of anxiety.
The fifth reason does not come from John Rady's book, but this comes from several different journal articles, scientific journal articles, that I want to tell you about. This reason has to do with your vestibular system, your balance system. It is really interesting that there is an established link in the research literature between balance disorders and anxiety disorders. People who suffer from anxiety also tend to have issues with balance. So one study that I want to refer to quickly studied children with balance and anxiety issues and divided the children into different groups. And some of these children were given 12 weekly sessions of balance treatment, and then their anxiety and balance were analyzed in comparison to the other group of children who were not given these balance treatment sessions. And the children who worked on their balance, who had balance exercises did show improved balance performance and reduced anxiety and increased self-esteem. So, this was also studied in mice, who had issues with their vestibular system, mice who had balance issues, and they were divided into different groups. And some of these mice were raised in either balance training cages. Or the other group was raised in standard cages. And they were subjected repeatedly to one to three months of balance and anxiety related tests. So they were testing both the improvements in the mice's balance and in their anxiety indicators. And they found that those mice raised in the balance training cages consistently got better at their balance, improved in their balance and also decreased their level of anxiety compared to the untrained mice. And so the researchers surmise that in some cases of anxiety, it might be appropriate to try physical rehabilitation of the vestibular system to help with anxiety treatment. So this is pertinent because exercise stimulates your vestibular system. It involves balance and coordination. And so when you exercise, you are triggering, you are working on your balance system. Yoga is one type of exercise, which includes a lot of balance exercise. And it's something that I include in my exercise routine, because I find that if I'm feeling especially anxious, if I can do exercises which really stimulate that vestibular system, one legged stances and things like that, uh, or exercises that involve um, bending over and standing up, looking down and looking up all of these things, uh, really stimulate the vestibular system. And I feel the calming effect uh, quite rapidly in myself. But all types of exercise will work on your balance system. And so this may be another reason why exercise is important and effective for helping with your anxiety.
And the last reason is that exercise teaches your brain to associate a different outcome with the physical symptoms of anxiety. We know that when we feel anxiety, a lot of times our heart rate goes up and our breathing increases.
And these physical symptoms can be very distressing, especially if we're talking about performance anxiety, whether it's having to give a speech or going out on stage to perform a musical number, or simply a social situation, which is a type of performance anxiety. But these physical symptoms can make us feel more anxious when we feel them. When we exercise, however, we experienced these same symptoms. Our heart rate and our breathing pickup. We start to sweat. But we have done it because of something that we initiated and something that we can control. And so our brain will start to associate this bodily distress, which is something that I referred to at the beginning of the episode as something that, that bothered me, the bodily distress of exercise. If we will exercise consistently, our brain can start to associate these same physical symptoms that we feel in anxious episodes with something that we are in control of, something that's positive. And so they won't distress you quite as much.
So these are different reasons why exercise can have a really big effect and does consistently have a big effect on people's anxiety. Studies are not conclusive about what type of exercise should be done, whether it should be high intensity, moderate, intensity, or low intensity. And studies also don't clearly show that exercise works in isolation. It does seem that it is a good adjunct treatment to other treatments. And this goes along with our understanding of things from the beginning that essentially anxiety stems from our appraisals and we still need to work on other aspects of our anxiety management.
So again, exercise is not going to take care of all of the aspects of your anxiety, because it doesn't directly work on your appraisal. But it does indirectly help your appraisals. It makes it a lot easier from a lot of different angles. It helps you with your emotional response. It helps to modify your situation to give you a situation in which you have more resources and fewer demands. And it also helps you to allocate your attention in a way that's more conducive toward helpful appraisals and more likely to develop helpful emotions.
So I wanted to teach you these six different reasons why exercise can be crucial in helping you to have less anxiety. If I had understood this 20 years ago, I would have put exercise at the top of my list, which is what I do now. Exercise is the first thing that I do when I get up in the morning. I go walking on the beach for an hour. And I really feel the difference in my day. Exercising gives me the kind of start to my day that reduces my anxiety drastically. I like to combine my physical exercise with other potent anxiety management tools, like being outside, like being somewhere where I can experience awe. So walking on the beach satisfies both of these criteria. I also try and go early in the morning, right when the sun is rising. So that I can get that early morning light. And Andrew Huberman, who's a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at the Stanford school of medicine has a podcast and has talked extensively about the importance of getting morning light in your eyes. And how that can set your dopamine levels for the day and optimize your hormones for the day. So I combine my exercise with getting more morning light, being outside, being in a place where I can feel awe. All of that together makes a real whammy of a beginner for, of a day for me. And then I get home and I do my gratitude paragraph. So I adopted this routine because it changes my resources drastically. It really makes my resources a lot more robust for dealing with the challenges that I come up against. So these are the various different reasons why I have chosen to move exercise up to the top of my to-do list. And I do at first. And why it is so important. It really makes all the difference. It helps me to feel like I am a person who can handle what is coming my way. So I want you to understand that this is something at your disposal and so much for your benefit. So, thanks for listening again today. And don't forget to stay tuned for our kindness narrative, your nearly effortless gratitude practice for this week.
This incident happened shortly after I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I was in the doctor's office waiting for my appointment. This was a time of great anxiety for me. I was afraid, I was worried about the surgery, the chemo, and what the future would hold for me. As I sat there thinking about these things, a woman I recognized came over to me. I didn't know her well. I had been introduced to her at a dinner for university professors. Our husbands worked together at the university. She came and spoke to me as a friend. She asked why I was there, and then she shared her own experience with cancer. She had first been diagnosed 20 years before and was grateful for those 20 years. She had undergone surgery and chemo just as I would have to. Her kind words comforted me and helped me to feel calm and gave me hope that I could survive this trial. So, I will ever be grateful for her kindness.