Posted by mtdewcmu on November 26, 2009, at 11:56:58
In reply to Re: A great article on exercise, posted by Phillipa on November 25, 2009, at 11:09:48
I am skeptical that exercise has any benefit for mood or anxiety beyond a placebo effect. All of the studies I have seen promoting the idea that exercise benefits mood have been flawed. In my personal experience, I started exercising during one of the worst depressive episodes of my life, and if anything I got worse.
The flaw in this study is that rats will exercise spontaneously when given the chance. Keeping rats confined in cages without the opportunity to run constitutes a stressor, so you would expect the rats that have been artificially prevented from running to look more anxious by any measure.
When you tell people that exercise will help cure anxiety, you are talking about exercise as a specific intervention, i.e. something that they would not do if they had not been told. I argue that forcing yourself to exercise when you don't feel like it constitutes a source of stress, not a relief of it. This is why people generally dislike manual labor.
In periods of human history when manual labor was more the norm, rather than the exception, I doubt that anyone would prescribe more of it to improve mood. I think that people in those periods would have favored relaxation and relief from physical work as a way to lift mood. The idea that fruitless physical exertion is good for what ails you is a conceit of the modern age, I think.
poster:mtdewcmu
thread:926857
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20091117/msgs/927046.html