Exercise and Coping

If you want to prevent yourself from exploding into anger, take a walk around the block instead.  That folk wisdom was promulgated regularly in pre-21st Century America.  People clearly believed that exercise could cool down a hot head.  What might cause that transformation?  Is it merely that incipient anger’s physical tension is discharged by the physical act of walking, or is it something else?

Emily E. Bernstein and Richard J. McNally (2017) wanted to understand more precisely the link between emotion and exercise.  To do so, they recruited 95 subjects, ages 18 to 36 who visited the psychology lab three times, and who had been instructed to refrain from all strenuous activity for at least 12 hours before arriving.  Baseline measurements were taken regarding the subjects’ physical fitness, demographics, moods, traits, emotional responses, and exercise habits.  They also completed several self-report questionnaires concerning their tendencies relevant to rumination, depression, anxiety, and stress.  At each visit, the subjects were assigned in a counterbalanced fashion to 25 minutes of resting, stretching, or moderately intense cycling.  After the activity, their attentional control was tested, they were administered stressors (having to solve verbal puzzles 30% of which were unsolvable and having to perform a serial subtraction task while being told that were erring), and they completed questionnaires about their emotional responses.  Finally, the subjects performed a number of cognitive tasks.  

As one would expect, Bernstein and McNally found that subjects who ruminated the most after being stressed, experienced more persistent and more intense negative emotion than did those who ruminated less.  But persons who fretfully ruminated much and who also had cycled were less negatively impacted.  Please note that cycling preceded the stressor, meaning that the moderately intense exercise amounted to a kind of stress inoculation against later upset.

The aforementioned folk wisdom about exercise and emotion really was not addressed by the study in question.  There certainly is a world of difference between sensing your own incipient anger and physically acting literally to distance yourself from it, compared to being stressed by being administered unsolvable verbal puzzles and being given negative feedback about your performance.  At minimum, in the former situation, you can act with full autonomy and in the latter, you are reacting to control exerted by someone else.  But the most important difference is that the folk wisdom implies that exercise during and just after the stress provides tension reduction.  By contrast, the Emily E. Bernstein and Richard J. McNally research suggests that exercise before stress is protective.

To my way of thinking, however, there is no significant contradiction here.  Exercise confers benefits to our physical and mental health regardless of whether the exercise occurs before, during, or after the stressor.  Physical fitness usually is achieved through a mindful approach to health.  In order to attain and maintain fitness, one must think through what needs to be done and actually perform the necessary behaviors consistently through the good and bad times.  That lesson is implicit in the Bernstein and McNally research just reviewed here.  Similarly, when stress mounts, the individual needs to physically act to reduce tension at that very moment — the folk wisdom with which we began this post.

Reference:

Bernstein, Emily E. and McNally, Richard J. (2017).  Acute Aerobic Exercise Hastens Emotional Recovery From a Subsequent Stressor.  Health Psychology, March 9th  , No Pagination Specified. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/hea0000482