Core exercises can help relieve stress! Exercise can activate the core and impact the adrenal medulla

Since most people are often in a state of mild anxiety, they tend to underestimate the impact of stress on the body. Chronic stress increases the risk of major illnesses including heart disease, cancer, dementia and depression. As for the social and economic costs of overwork, addiction and crime, they are all related to our inability to cope with the stress in our lives. As long as we find the physiological pathways that control long-term stress, we can manage stress in a targeted manner, and the results will be more significant.

Therefore, the discovery that the adrenal medulla is connected to motor-related areas of the brain is both surprising and important. Because the findings offer an alternative route to managing stress that doesn’t require you to change the way you think or try to undo your deep-seated emotional responses. It also suggests that we should stop paying lip service to exercise as an additional form of treatment and start thinking of it as a key element of good mental health, just as important as mindfulness-focused interventions such as mindfulness meditation and cognitive behavioural therapy.

As for what kind of exercise we should do? When Stryker looked at the motor cortex of monkeys, he found that the vast majority of connections to the adrenal medulla were in the motor core of the brain. "Exercise has some effects, there's no doubt about that, and it activates your core more than it does anywhere else in your adrenal medulla," Stryker said.

But the core is not the beginning and end of the control loop. When we get into trouble, there are obviously other ways to calm down besides leaving the scene. A significant proportion of the connections to the adrenal medulla come from cognitive (thinking) areas of the brain, particularly those that help us sort out conflicting information.

These areas are likely to play a role when we think about how to escape from a difficult situation or anxiety. Similarly, when we practice mindfulness meditation, the area of ​​the prefrontal cortex responsible for processing emotions becomes activated and also connects to the adrenal medulla, which may explain why mindfulness meditation can reduce stress in the present moment.

Interestingly, the area of ​​the brain responsible for processing sensory information from the back also talks to the stress system, which may explain why patting or stroking a crying baby's back can calm them and put them to sleep, and why a back massage can feel very relaxing.

Some connections to the adrenal glands also appear in the motor cortex area responsible for controlling facial and eye muscles, and these connections are activated by a genuine smile. One experiment involved giving subjects an irritating challenge (a task that sounds easy but turns out to be difficult when actually attempted) and trying to get them to contract the aforementioned muscles.

The subjects had to trace the edges of a star pattern on a piece of paper with their non-dominant hand for two minutes to see how many they could draw. The winner was rewarded with chocolate. But the problem was that the paper was hidden in a box and the subjects could only see their hand movements in a mirror. Even more infuriating, they told the subjects that most challengers drew eight stars in two minutes with fewer than 25 errors.

But this is not true, the true average is only 2, and the error is more than 25. The study found that although the task was really infuriating, people who laughed throughout the whole task were less affected by it and calmed down faster (as measured by their heart rate) than those who just smiled with their teeth showing.

This result shows that dealing with psychological and emotional stress does not necessarily require thinking or discussing the problems you encounter, or taking time out to relax yourself, but can also be solved through the correct exercise method that activates the core muscles. Even better is doing something that makes you laugh, which hits two pillars of stress control in one fell swoop. A recent study found that "belly laughter" is a better core exercise than sit-ups.

Alternatively, you can practice laughter yoga, which uses breathing exercises and other movements to exercise the same muscles as a belly laugh. While this may sound silly, the few studies that have been done on the matter show that it actually works.

Even pretending to laugh, like actually laughing like a maniac, can change your physiological state and make you feel happier in the process. Research has also shown that laughter yoga can help reduce anxiety and stress, so it may be a useful complementary therapy.

This article is from Caishi Culture's book "The More You Move, the More Successful You Will Be"