Soul Music

Exercise is an amazing thing. Not only will it help your body, it will also help your mind. Exercise has been proven to help people boost their mood, as well as give the mental clarity needed to improve memory and deal with anxiety, depression and stress. Oh and it will also help improve your sleep. In short, exercise can help you lead a happier, healthier life. I’d say that was pretty awesome.

And if you don’t read any further, you have got the most important takeaway from this newsletter. But if you do decide to read on we will uncover some other totally amazing things that exercise can do for you and your brain.

Wait. What? There’s more? 

Yep. So much more.

“Exercise stimulates physiological changes in the body such as encouraging production of growth factors – chemicals that affect the growth of new blood vessels in the brain, and even the abundance, survival, and overall health of new brain cells.” Harvard Health

So what does that mean?

Well, to use the phrase coined by Harvard psychologist and neuroscientist, Dr John Ratey, exercise is like Miracle-Gro for the brain. It releases something called brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) which prompts the brain to grow new blood vessels and new brain cells. Here’s an experiment showing that you are never too old to benefit from exercise. A load of octogenarians had their brains scanned and were then asked to do some simple exercise – walk for about twenty minutes three times a week. After a short while they had their brains scanned again. Each and every one of them had a bigger brain after the exercise!

Another study found that people learn vocabulary words 20 percent faster following exercise than they did before exercise. Weird but pretty awesome!

A long held belief (I was taught this in biology class at school) was that once you had been through adolescence, your brain was hard wired for life, and it was downhill from there as we age because we were going to lose neurons. (Anyone remember the scare tactic of “Drinking alcohol kills brain cells and they never grow back!”?)

I am so pleased to say that those neurons do grow back, as the body responds to exercise. In that response it not only releases BDNF, but also IGF-1 (insulin-like growth factor), VEGF (vascular endothelial growth factor) and FGF-2 (fibro-blast growth factor). All of which have a direct positive impact on brain health, size and also your ability to learn and as well as your memory. 

Oh and exercise can prevent mental decline and Alzheimer’s disease too. Just saying…

So it is about growth rather than decay, activity versus inactivity. Our bodies are designed to move, and in moving we benefit our brains; in lots of ways including all that we have looked at above, as well as improving your self-esteem and giving you more resilience. It is all amazing stuff and great for your soul. As the proverb at the top of the page says, if you have health you have hope. And if you have hope you have everything. 

If you would like to help your brain as well as your body, get in touch by clicking this button right under this paragraph. I want to help!