Anxiety is a natural response to stress. It’s normal, healthy even, to experience some anxiety, but problems arise when we can’t turn off that response.
Exercise in the long run is a de-stressor. While a workout should get your heart rate up for its duration, it reduces anxiety and stress afterwards (Smith, 2013). That effect stays even through any stressors that may come up (Smith, 2013). In fact, a systematic review, a study that compiles results from many individual studies, found that exercise in some cases can be comparable to clinical treatment for anxiety symptoms (Stonerock, Hoffman, Smith, & Blumenthal, 2015). Further, it actually showed better results in one third of the trials (Stonerock et al., 2015). So, what does this mean in practice? For most people, symptoms of anxiety can be reduced or even stopped with exercise. Nervous before a presentation? Go for a quick jog. Chronic anxiety? An exercise regimen just might help.
Let’s take a closer look at a study on the relationship between exercise and anxiety done on people in their 20s.
Effects of Emotional Exposure on State Anxiety After Acute Exercise
by Dr. J Carson Smith, University of Maryland
First, let’s parse that title. ‘Emotional exposure’ in this case was a series of photographs meant to trigger a reaction. 'State anxiety' is non-chronic anxiety. In this context, 'acute exercise' means that only this one session of activity is relevant to the experiment. So, the researchers studied people without chronic anxiety who were exposed to anxiety triggers after a single, controlled workout.
After thirty minutes of exercise or forty minutes of rest, the participants were seated in a room and asked to view ninety photographs. Thirty were said to be pleasant, thirty neutral, and thirty threatening or scary, and they were arranged so that there were never more than two in a row from any category. Each person’s anxiety level was measured by the research-standard metric, the STAI-YI, every fifteen minutes – this covered three sessions of pictures and a final test during rest afterwards. Those people's results were then compared to a control group that did no exercise but were examined with the same metric.
The resulting data showed that people who did low-intensity exercise had no meaningful difference in anxiety scores than those who did no exercise, but for moderate-intensity, anxiety was consistently lower. That is not to say the exercise group had no anxiety. Their scores rose just like the non-exercise group scores did. But, they did not rise nearly as much. Exercise helped these people stay relatively more calm than their less active peers.
Links for Further Reading:
Exercise in the long run is a de-stressor. While a workout should get your heart rate up for its duration, it reduces anxiety and stress afterwards (Smith, 2013). That effect stays even through any stressors that may come up (Smith, 2013). In fact, a systematic review, a study that compiles results from many individual studies, found that exercise in some cases can be comparable to clinical treatment for anxiety symptoms (Stonerock, Hoffman, Smith, & Blumenthal, 2015). Further, it actually showed better results in one third of the trials (Stonerock et al., 2015). So, what does this mean in practice? For most people, symptoms of anxiety can be reduced or even stopped with exercise. Nervous before a presentation? Go for a quick jog. Chronic anxiety? An exercise regimen just might help.
Let’s take a closer look at a study on the relationship between exercise and anxiety done on people in their 20s.
Effects of Emotional Exposure on State Anxiety After Acute Exercise
by Dr. J Carson Smith, University of Maryland
First, let’s parse that title. ‘Emotional exposure’ in this case was a series of photographs meant to trigger a reaction. 'State anxiety' is non-chronic anxiety. In this context, 'acute exercise' means that only this one session of activity is relevant to the experiment. So, the researchers studied people without chronic anxiety who were exposed to anxiety triggers after a single, controlled workout.
After thirty minutes of exercise or forty minutes of rest, the participants were seated in a room and asked to view ninety photographs. Thirty were said to be pleasant, thirty neutral, and thirty threatening or scary, and they were arranged so that there were never more than two in a row from any category. Each person’s anxiety level was measured by the research-standard metric, the STAI-YI, every fifteen minutes – this covered three sessions of pictures and a final test during rest afterwards. Those people's results were then compared to a control group that did no exercise but were examined with the same metric.
The resulting data showed that people who did low-intensity exercise had no meaningful difference in anxiety scores than those who did no exercise, but for moderate-intensity, anxiety was consistently lower. That is not to say the exercise group had no anxiety. Their scores rose just like the non-exercise group scores did. But, they did not rise nearly as much. Exercise helped these people stay relatively more calm than their less active peers.
Links for Further Reading: