Exercise has payoffs for the mind, too, as it can improve feelings of overall well-being, along with reducing stress and depression. Many people who feel lethargic or drained all the time are generally just out of shape. Exercising makes you feel tired while you’re doing it, but its longer-lasting effect is the reverse: it enhances your overall energy levels.
Likewise, movement lowers your mental stress. Just getting up from your desk and work when you’re stressed out and going for a short walk can clear your mind, improve your mood, and enhance your productivity when you return to the task at hand. Studies have also shown that exercise is an effective remedy for mild to moderate depression and possibly major depressive disorder as long as the activity is continued over time.
What’s more, it appears to reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia that have recently begun appearing at earlier ages in many adults, even well before retirement age. For older individuals, exercise clearly improves brain function. For example, in a study of 1,740 adults over sixty-five years of age who were followed for more than six years, individuals who exercised three times a week were a third less likely to develop dementia. However, even in younger individuals, regular exercise is associated with less brain atrophy, or shrinkage, and even as little as six months of regular aerobic training can reduce your rate of brain loss.
Any activity increases blood fl ow and oxygen delivery to your brain and results in a reduced cell loss in the part of your brain called the hippocampus, which is the region associated with memory and spatial navigation. Not only can activity delay or prevent dementia, it may be able to restore some of what you’ve lost mentally.
Thus you need to exercise to keep from losing your brain, but also if you’ve already lost some of it.
