How simply moving benefits your mental health

While it is obvious that your feelings can influence your movement, it is not as obvious that your movement can impact your feelings too. For example, when you feel tired and sad, you may move more slowly. When you feel anxious, you may either rush around or become completely paralyzed. But recent studies show that the connection between your brain and your body is a “two-way street” and that means movement can change your brain, too! 

How exercise can improve mood disorders

Regular aerobic exercise can reduce anxiety by making your brain’s “fight or flight” system less reactive. When anxious people are exposed to physiological changes they fear, such as a rapid heartbeat, through regular aerobic exercise, they can develop a tolerance for such symptoms. 

Regular exercise such as cycling or gym-based aerobic, resistance, flexibility, and balance exercises can also reduce depressive symptoms. Exercise can be as effective as medication and psychotherapies. Regular exercise may boost mood by increasing a brain protein called BDNF that helps nerve fibers grow. 

For people with attention-deficit disorder (ADHD), another study showed that a single 20-minute bout of moderate-intensity cycling briefly improved their symptoms. It enhanced the participants’ motivation for tasks requiring focused thought, increased their energy, and reduced their feelings of confusion, fatigue, and depression. However, in this study, exercise had no effect on attention or hyperactivity per se. 

Meditative movement has been shown to alleviate depressive symptoms. This is a type of movement in which you pay close attention to your bodily sensations, position in space, and gut feelings (such as subtle changes in heart rate or breathing) as you move. Qigong, tai chi, and some forms of yoga are all helpful for this. For example, frequent yoga practice can reduce the severity of symptoms in post-traumatic stress disorder to the point that some people no longer meet the criteria for this diagnosis. Changing your posture, breathing, and rhythm can all change your brain, thereby reducing stress, depression, and anxiety, and leading to a feeling of well-being. 

The surprising benefits of synchronizing your movements

Both physical exercise and meditative movement are activities that you can do by yourself. On their own, they can improve the way you feel. But a recent study found that when you try to move in synchrony with someone else, it also improves your self-esteem. 

In 2014, psychologist Joanne Lumsden and her colleagues conducted a study that required participants to interact with another person via a video link. The person performed a standard exercise — arm curls — while the participants watched, and then performed the same movement. 

The “video link” was in fact a pre-recorded video of a 25-year-old female in a similar room, also performing arm curls. As part of the experiment, participants had to either coordinate their movement or deliberately not coordinate their movement with the other person’s arm curls. They filled out a mood report before and after each phase of synchronizing or falling out of synchrony. They also reported on how close they felt to the other person. 

The results were interesting. When subjects intentionally synchronized their movement with the recording, they had higher self-esteem than when they did not. Prior studies had shown that synchronizing your movement with others makes you like them more. You also cooperate more with them and feel more charitable toward them. In fact, movement synchrony can make it easier to remember what people say and to recall what they look like. This was the first study to show that it makes you feel better about yourself, too. That’s probably why dance movement therapy can help depressed patients feel better. 

Putting it all together

Your mind and body are intimately connected. And while your brain is the master control system for your body’s movement, the way you move can also affect the way you think and feel. 

Movement therapies are often used as adjunctive treatments for depression and anxiety when mental effort, psychotherapy, or medication is not enough. When you are too exhausted to use thought control strategies such as focusing on the positive, or looking at the situation from another angle, movement can come to the rescue. By working out, going on a meditative walk by yourself, or going for a synchronized walk with someone, you may gain access to a “back door” to the mental changes that you desire without having to “psych yourself” into feeling better.

How Alcohol Affects Your Body. Just The Facts.

The holidays are coming so if you plan on celebrating with a few drinks ,read this first.

Straight to Your Head

Thirty seconds after your first  sip, alcohol races into your brain. It slows down the chemicals and pathways that your brain cells use to send messages. That alters your mood, slows your reflexes, and throws off your balance. You also can’t think straight, which you may not recall later, because you’ll struggle to store things in long-term memory 

Your Brain Shrinks

If you drink heavily for a long time, booze can affect how your brain looks and works. Its cells start to change and even get smaller. Too much alcohol can actually shrink your brain. And that’ll have big effects on your ability to think, learn, and remember things. It can also make it harder to keep a steady body temperature and control your movements.

 Does It Help You Sleep?

Alcohol’s slow-down effect on your brain can make you drowsy, so you may doze off more easily. But you won’t sleep well. Your body processes alcohol throughout the night. Once the effects wear off, it leaves you tossing and turning. You don’t get that good REM sleep your body needs to feel restored. And you’re more likely to have nightmares and vivid dreams. You’ll also probably wake up more often for trips to the bathroom.

 More Stomach Acid

Booze irritates the lining of your stomach and makes your digestive juices flow. When enough acid and alcohol build up, you get nauseated and you may throw up. Years of heavy drinking can cause painful sores called ulcers in your stomach. And high levels of stomach juices mean you won’t feel hungry. That’s one reason long-term drinkers often don’t get all the nutrients they need.

 Diarrhea and Heartburn

Your small intestine and colon get irritated, too. Alcohol throws off the normal speed that food moves through them. That’s why hard drinking can lead to diarrhea, which can turn into a long-term problem. It also makes heartburn more likely – it relaxes the muscle that keeps acid out of your esophagus, the tube that connects your mouth and stomach.

 Why You Have to Pee … Again

Your brain gives off a hormone that keeps your kidneys from making too much urine. But when alcohol swings into action, it tells your brain to hold off. That means you have to go more often, which can leave you dehydrated. When you drink heavily for years, that extra workload and the toxic effects of alcohol can wear your kidneys down.

 The Steps to Liver Disease

Your liver breaks down almost all the alcohol you drink. In the process, it handles a lot of toxins. Over time, heavy drinking makes the organ fatty and lets thicker, fibrous tissue build up. That limits blood flow, so liver cells don’t get what they need to survive. As they die off, the liver gets scars and stops working as well, a disease called cirrhosis.

 Pancreas Damage and Diabetes

Normally, this organ makes insulin and other chemicals that help your intestines break down food. But alcohol jams that process up. The chemicals stay inside the pancreas. Along with toxins from alcohol, they cause inflammation in the organ, which can lead to serious damage. After years, that means you won’t be able to make the insulin you need, which can lead to diabetes. It also makes you more likely to get pancreatic cancer.

 What’s a Hangover?

That cotton-mouthed, bleary-eyed morning-after is no accident. Alcohol makes you dehydrated and makes blood vessels in your body and brain expand. That gives you your headache. Your stomach wants to get rid of the toxins and acid that booze churns up, which gives you nausea and vomiting. And because your liver was so busy processing alcohol, it didn’t release enough sugar into your blood, bringing on weakness and the shakes.

 An Offbeat Heart

One night of binge drinking can jumble the electrical signals that keep your heart’s rhythm steady. If you do it for years, you can make those changes permanent. And, alcohol can literally wear your heart out. Over time, it causes heart muscles to droop and stretch, like an old rubber band. It can’t pump blood as well, and that impacts every part of your body.

 A Change in Body Temperature

Alcohol widens your blood vessels, making more blood flow to your skin. That makes you blush and feel warm and toasty. But not for long. The heat from that extra blood passes right out of your body, causing your temperature to drop. On the other hand, long-term, heavy drinking boosts your blood pressure. It makes your body release stress hormones that narrow blood vessels, so your heart has to pump harder to push blood through.

 A Weaker Immune System

You might not link a cold with a night of drinking, but there might be a connection. Alcohol puts the brakes on your immune system. Your body can’t make the numbers of white blood cells it needs to fight germs. So for 24 hours after drinking, you’re more likely to get sick. Long-term, heavy drinkers are much more likely to get illnesses like pneumonia and tuberculosis.

 Hormone Havoc

These powerful chemicals manage everything from your sex drive to how fast you digest food. To keep it all going smoothly, you need them in the right balance. But alcohol throws them out of whack. In women, that can knock your periods off cycle and cause problems getting pregnant. In men, it can mean trouble getting an erection, a lower sperm count, shrinking testicles, and breast growth.

 Hearing Loss

Alcohol impacts your hearing, but no one’s sure exactly how. It could be that it messes with the part of your brain that processes sound. Or it might damage the nerves and tiny hairs in your inner ear that help you hear. However it happens, drinking means you need a sound to be louder so you can hear it. And that can become permanent. Long-term drinkers often have hearing loss.

 Thin Bones, Less Muscle

Heavy drinking can throw off your calcium levels. Along with the hormone changes that alcohol triggers, that can keep your body from building new bone. They get thinner and more fragile, a condition called osteoporosis. Booze also limits blood flow your muscles and gets in the way of the proteins that build them up. Over time, you’ll have lower muscle mass and less strength.

 Bottom Line: Moderation is the key  

 

Overweight vs Overfat

Overweight vs overfat: Is your scale lying to you?

You may be storing unhealthy amounts of visceral fat even if your weight appears normal.

For decades, the body mass index (BMI) has been the gold standard for gauging obesity-related heart disease risk. But this handy tool doesn't always tell the whole story. It extrapolates your body fat percentage based on your height and weight . But the formula can't assess how or where your body stores its excess fat — a distinction that is crucial for cardiovascular health. By some estimates, the BMI misclassifies nearly 50% of people who are at higher disease risk from excess fat, meaning that you can be overfat even when you're not overweight.

The secret life of belly fat

Some people are genetically programmed to have a lot of fat tissue under the skin, which is deployed to store extra food energy during times of scarcity. But other people have very few of these designated fat cells, explains Dr. Christos Mantzoros, professor of medicine at Harvard-affiliated Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

In individuals who lack an adequate quota of available fat storage cells (or people whose fat tissue is already filled to capacity), fat particles travel in the bloodstream and congregate in the liver, muscles, and other organs, which normally have no fat. This also leads to the accumulation of visceral or "belly" fat — a pattern of fat distribution that is particularly hazardous to your health (see "Who is prone to visceral fat?"). Visceral fat is associated with insulin resistance and other metabolic irregularities. "It also triggers the release of inflammatory substances that damage the arteries and help set the stage for cardiovascular disease," says Dr. Mantzoros.

Who is prone to visceral fat? The tendency to accumulate visceral fat is governed by genetic, ethnic, and gender differences. For example, people who inherit two copies (one from each parent) of a mutation in a gene involved in fat metabolism are more likely to have higher amounts of visceral fat than people with just one copy. Those without any copies of the gene mutation are less likely to develop heart disease — even if they become obese. Natives of India and South Asia have a higher-than-average propensity for abdominal obesity. And white men and black women tend to accumulate more visceral fat than black men and white women.

Fat and aging

With age, people tend to lose muscle tissue, especially the type of specialized muscle fibers that produce quick bursts of speed and power. Fat frequently accumulates within the remaining muscle tissue, causing your body fat percentage to increase even when your weight remains constant. This scenario is closely linked to bodywide inflammation and diabetes risk. It may also explain why your BMI measurement doesn't provide a true reflection of your health risks.

Evidence suggests that waist circumference and waist-to-hip ratio are better indicators of metabolic health than BMI. Even among people with the same BMI, those who have a large waist (defined as more than 40 inches for men and 35 inches for women) have a significantly higher risk. In addition, people who tend to carry their weight in their hips and thighs (a "pear" shape) have lower waist-to-hip ratios and are less prone to heart disease than people with abdominal obesity (an "apple" shape); see "Measuring your midsection."

Measuring your midsection To measure your waist accurately, exhale and wrap a measuring tape around your bare abdomen just above your navel (belly button). Don't suck in your gut or pull the tape tight enough to squeeze the area. To compute your waist-to-hip ratio, first measure your hips by putting the tape measure around the widest part of your buttocks. Keep the tape measure level. Then, divide your waist size by your hip size.
Measurements that signal high risk	Waist (inches)	Waist-to-hip ratio
Women	35 or more	0.9 or more
Men	40 or more	1.0 or more

What should you do about visceral fat?

People with abdominal obesity — even if they're not overweight — can lessen their heart disease risk with regular exercise and healthy eating habits. "Reducing the total amount of fat in your body frees up storage space for fat particles in places that are associated with less metabolic risk," says Dr. Mantzoros. That's why losing as little as 7% of your total weight helps lower heart disease risk: the most dangerous visceral fat disappears first.