Today, survival of the fittest it the credo for reality television. Yet when humans first inhabited the earth, it actually was reality.
The mind evolved to help our hunter-gatherer ancestors devise better strategies for survival so they could outrun, outwit, and outlast their enemies in the life and death competition for foods, not just for bragging rights at tribal council on Survivor.
Movement, in other words, is a biological imperative, says John Ratey, M.D., a Harvard Medical School professor of psychiatry and author of Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain.
One of my workshops or lectures, now would be the time when I’d stop for a minute and tell a joke. Bear with me, it has relevance. (Plus, it was a favorite joke of my Jewish mother).
A Beverly Hills mother and her son arrive at a swanky hotel for a family vacation. She gets out of the limousine, followed by a butler, who then proceeds to lift the son up and carry him across the lobby to the check-in-desk. The clerk, observing this scene, clucks sympathetically, and says to the mother, “Oh, how said. I’m sorry to see your son can’t walk”. “Oh, he can walk”, the snotty mother sniffs, “but thank God he doesn’t have to”.
Okay, I didn’t promise that it was worthy of Jon Stewart, but it does illustrate a point. Although we haven’t evolved much genetically since the caveman, era, our lifestyle have all but wiped out the need for movement. Our sedentary ways are “disrupting a delicate biological balance that has been fin-tuned over half a million years”, writes Ratey.
To restore and maintain energy, we have to heed our very nature, and that means work up a sweat.
YOUR BRAIN’S OWN BUILT-IN ENERGY MAKER
Exercise increases blood volume in the brain, and that creates an optimal environment to grow new cells, strengthen neurons, and produce a potpourri of beneficial molecules, including a little protein with a long complicated name – brain-derived neurotrophic factor (or BDNF for short). Now you have my permission to forget its name, but do pay attention to what it does, because it can have a profound effect on your energy levels, not to mention depression, anxiety, addiction, and the aging process. It also helps keep your hormones and blood sugar in balance.
BDNF is the star of a class of what Ratey calls “master molecules”. Researchers have found that if you sprinkle some BDNF neurons into a cell-filled Petri dish, the cells automatically sprout new branches, called dendrites. That effect led Ratey to affectionately label BDNF “Miracle-Gro for the brain”. Guess what increases the production of BDNF? You got it – exercise, in particular, cardio-vascular exercise.
“BDNF is the critical biological link between thought, emotions, and movement”, Ratey told me when I interviewed him on the radio. Its actions are crucial for understanding why movement can profoundly impact your energy.
But wait, there’s more.
When BDNF levels are elevated, the part of the brain that shows the most activity is the hippocampus, and area involved in memory and learning. “Without Miracle-Gro”, said Ratey, “the brain closes itself off to the world”. Just as giving your car a good wax job protects the paint from the elements, exercise – by initiating the production of BDNF – provides a buffer so the stress of daily life doesn’t wear you down and drain your energy.
STRESS TURNS OFF THE ENERGY SPIGOT
By the way, if you’re still skeptical about the interconnection of stress, thoughts, emotions, movement, and energy, consider this little biochemistry factoid (feel free to drop it into cocktail conversation; it will dazzle your friends): The major stress hormone in the body – cortisol – actually shuts down the BDNF factories in the cells. The more stress you’re under, the more unrelenting it is, the less BDNF you make. That translates, ultimately, to a “closing off” to the world.
Mice with decreased levels of BDNF can’t find their way out of a paper bag, either because they can’t think will or because they don’t have the energy to explore.
Exercise – because it beefs up the BDNF factories – improves the infrastructure for learning, thinking, and relating to our environment.
Mice with decreased levels of BDNF can’t find their way out of a paper bag, either because they can’t think well or because they don’t have the energy to explore.
“Exercise improves learning on three levels”, Ratey explained. “First, it optimizes your mindset to improve alertness, attention, and motivation. Second, it prepares and encourages nerve cells to bind to one another, which is the cellular basis for logging in new information. Third, it spurs the development of new nerve cells from stem cells in the hippocampus”. IF that sounds a little heavy, allow me to break it down to the essentials: Exercise invigorates you mentally and physically. It increases your energy.
What’s the obvious conclusion? Seems to me – and to other observers – that going for a ten-minute run might be the best thing you could do before tackling a mentally challenging task. It will not only energize you body, but it will also stimulate your brain.
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