399. The psychology of exercise

Summary

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The Psychology of Your 20s

Episode 399: The Psychology of Exercise

Host: Jemma Sbeg
Date: March 23, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, host Jemma Sbeg delves into the multi-layered psychology of exercise, exploring both its profound benefits and its potential pitfalls. She moves beyond the surface-level discussion of endorphins and "feeling good" to analyze exercise’s effects on the brain, emotional processing, and mental health—including the darker aspects like body image issues and exercise addiction. The discussion covers the biological, emotional, and social dynamics of exercise in the context of life in your twenties.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why Exercise Feels Good: Beyond Endorphins

• Endorphins: Well-known for pain relief and the “I can do hard things” feeling.
  • “Endorphins are basically your body’s endogenous opioids, ... they make discomfort basically feel less threatening, they make it feel more tolerable so you can keep going.” (05:00)
• Endocannabinoid System: Recent research suggests this system is a major driver of the post-exercise “high.”
  • “Cannabinoids in your body are internally produced... so much research shows exercise boosts endocannabinoids, but endocannabinoids also make you want to exercise too.” (08:45)
• Motivation & Genetics: Study with mice showed those lacking cannabinoid receptors lost motivation for exercise, suggesting some people are less "wired" to enjoy or seek out exercise. (11:32)
• The Loop: Exercise increases endocannabinoids, which makes it more rewarding, building a self-reinforcing loop. Environment and early experiences can disrupt or enhance this loop.

2. Somatic & Emotional Impacts

• Exercise as Somatic Release: Physical movement helps process and release emotional or traumatic energy.
  • “Exercise is one of the only coping strategies I have found that is not self-destructive ... it is a form of somatic release.” (14:52)
• Stress Inoculation Theory: Voluntary physical stress (like exercise) builds resilience to emotional/psychological stress.
• Optic Flow: Forward movement (like walking/running) calms threat-processing areas of the brain.
  • “Your ‘hot girl walk’ is a form of therapy... your eyes' constant lateral movements calm the brain’s threat processing system...” (17:17)
• Benchmarks & Control: Exercise creates tangible, controllable goals that can be stabilizing for mental health amidst the chaos of your 20s.
• Social Regulation:
  • Moving side-by-side with others (co-regulation, physical synchrony) “unlocks a deep, ancient peace”—humans are wired to seek safety and emotional regulation in shared movement.
  • Dancing and group activities increase pain tolerance and emotional resilience.

3. Exercise Physically Reshapes the Brain

• Brain Volume (Hippocampus):
  • Older adults who walked regularly (even as little as 40 minutes per session) reversed age-related brain atrophy, equivalent to reclaiming 1–2 years of brain volume. (29:05)
  • Intensity is less important than consistency.
• Functional Connectivity: Regular exercise improves the brain’s ability to switch between self-focused and goal-directed thinking, fostering greater emotional flexibility.
• Key Quote:
  • “All that matters is consistency ... 40 minutes a day and you are getting years back on your life.” (30:51)

4. Debunking Myths: Exercise vs. Antidepressants

• Misleading Narratives:
  • “Exercise is not the holy grail...” (33:24)
  • Viral studies (e.g., on dance) are much less definitive than social media claims suggest. Many compared exercise to “no treatment”, not traditional interventions like antidepressants.
• Jemma’s experience: She ran 30–35km a week while on antidepressants and still felt depressed—a clear sign that for many, exercise is not a replacement for clinical mental health treatment.

5. When Exercise Becomes Unhealthy: Addiction, Control, and Body Image

• Personal anecdotes about professional athletes—showing how discipline can become obsession.
• Exercise Addiction: Patterns mirror other behavioral addictions; not inherently bad until control and compulsion overtake joy and autonomy.
• “Exercise can become the domain where control feels possible. This isn’t inherently bad, but it can become dangerous when that attempt at gaining control becomes compulsive.” (37:18)
• Intersection with eating disorders and conditional self-worth: when exercise is solely about managing body image or “earning” self-acceptance, it becomes psychologically unhelpful or even harmful.

6. Childhood Experiences and the Roots of Our Relationship with Exercise

• PE Class Trauma: Early negative experiences (embarrassment, shame, social exclusion) deeply impact adult attitudes towards exercise.
• Shame is a Powerful Demotivator: If early exercise associated with shame, group settings in adulthood may trigger the same withdrawal.
• Find What You Love: Enjoyment and autonomy are key predictors of sticking with exercise and getting its psychological benefits.
• “If you perform any behavior, exercise included, out of hatred, the psychological benefit is always going to be underscored by that shame and pain.” (45:07)

7. Practical Takeaways: Finding Joy and Sustainability in Exercise

• If you dread a specific workout, “find another exercise. There’s a million classes...there is something for everybody.” (54:01)
• Comparison is toxic: “Nobody cares. Your body is for you. If you find enjoyment through movement...it does not matter [how it looks to others].” (56:12)
• Small, consistent steps (even as little as five minutes of brisk walking) make a measurable difference in longevity and well-being.
• Rest is not laziness—it’s crucial.
• “Going slow, especially if you don’t exercise regularly...is the best way to go far.” (58:12)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On brain change through exercise:
  “They were getting years back of their memory, of their lives, of the plasticity of their brain.” (30:08)
• On exercise and antidepressants:
  “Exercise is not the holy grail... this belief has gotten worse in recent years because of one very famous study from 2024.” (33:24)
• On early trauma’s impact:
  “If you learned that exercise... equated to being embarrassed in your body, well, you know, you’re never going to instinctively want to do it.” (43:18)
• On finding your exercise:
  “If you genuinely are doing an exercise and ... the entire time you’re like, this sucks, find another exercise.” (54:01)
• On movement for joy vs. punishment:
  “If you exercise as a form of self-punishment rather than self-respect, all of those benefits are removed in an instant.” (59:10)
• Jemma’s closing message:
  “Be safe, be kind, be gentle with yourself. We will talk very, very soon.” (63:59)

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Key Segment Timestamps

• Introduction & Content Warning — 03:38
• Why exercise feels good—Endorphins & Endocannabinoids — 05:00–13:15
• Somatic/emotional benefits & optic flow — 14:50–20:00
• Motivation to exercise & genetics (mouse study) — 11:32
• Benchmarks/control & mental structure — 18:40–21:45
• Social element: Co-regulation & synchrony — 21:45–23:04
• How exercise changes brain structure — 28:22
• Debunking “exercise cures depression” myth — 33:24
• Exercise addiction, control, and self-esteem — 37:18–41:40
• Impact of childhood experiences — 41:40–47:18
• Finding sustainable, enjoyable movement — 54:01–59:10
• Summary & conclusion — 59:10–63:59

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Additional Insights

• Exercise’s benefits are diverse—spanning neurobiology, emotion regulation, and social cognition.
• The best exercise is the one you enjoy and can sustain, not the one that fits some perfectionist or externally imposed ideal.
• Shame, comparison, and self-punishment undermine the real psychological benefits of movement.
• Consistency and enjoyment matter far more than intensity.
• Exercise is a valuable tool for well-being but is not a panacea for mental illness and should not be weaponized against those seeking help.

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Final Thought

The psychology of exercise is deeply intertwined with our history, wiring, emotional needs, and social context. Jemma encourages listeners to explore movement that feels good, let go of all-or-nothing mindsets, and build a compassionate, sustainable relationship to exercise as a part of self-care—not punishment.

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Transcript

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Foreign. I'm Gemma Spake and welcome back to

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the psychology of your 20s, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments and transitions of our 20s and

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what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody. Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. It is so great to have you here back for another episode. As we of course break down the psychology of our 20s, I just want to give you guys a heads up. Today's episode will touch on themes to do with eating disorders, weight loss, body image and exercise addiction. So if that is something that you are struggling with or you know you are particularly sensitive to, please take care. There will be some links in the description below. And honestly, feel free to skip this episode. Feel free to come back to it at a later date. It will always be here in a day, in a month, in a year when you are in a better head space. Today everybody, we are talking about something that almost feels too obvious to analyze. We are talking about the psychology of exercise. We all know exercise is good for us. We all know it has something to do with endorphins, something to do with a chemical reaction in our brain we're not really aware of. But it is so much deeper than that. Exercise changes the literal structure of your brain. We have seen it in study after study. It makes you smarter. It makes you sharp. It greatly influences the functioning of your mind. And especially if you make exercise regular, structured, goal centered, social, you will reduce your risk of cancer, dementia, you will reduce your risk of basically every and any disease you can think of. It also has a much darker side that Many of us are all too familiar with the use of exercise as punishment, the use of it to maintain a disordered body image, exercise addiction. We're going to talk about it all, and I promise, as boring as you may think this topic is, we are going to go deeper than you are probably used to talking about exercise on an emotional level, a physical level, a psychological level, to kind of determine what exercises are best for us, what is what exercises are best for our mind, what does it do for us psychologically, how to find exercise you enjoy, and why. The intensity of your exercise doesn't really matter. It's often the consistency. So there is a lot to discuss. Without further ado, let's get into the psychology of exercise. We've all heard, you know, exercise makes you feel good, it makes you feel amazing. We've all probably felt the effect of a great workout. What is that feeling? Where does that actually come from? The main, like, celebrity of this topic is obviously the role of endorphins. Endorphins are basically your body's endogenous opioids, meaning they are chemicals your brain and your pituitary gland produces naturally that bind to opioid receptors in your brain, the same receptors that can be stimulated by an external source like drugs or like other substances. We hear a lot about them in reference to exercise, but they are silently involved in everything from pain management to your stress response, how your brain sees reward. Basically, your endorphins, through all these different functions, contribute to the very human feeling of I can do hard things, whether that's in life at work, but also when it comes to intense physical effort, I can do hard things. What are they actually doing in your brain and your body when you exercise that makes them as powerful as they are? Essentially, as the intensity of exercise rises, your body is attempting to balance a lot of different signals, right? Like you are deliberately putting yourself under strain, maybe under pain, under fatigue, under stress. And your conscious interpretation of that is to not do that, is to slow down. And what endorphins do is try and work on the pain and frustration and stress part of this, so that you keep going, so that you finish the workout, so that you finish the run. They make discomfort basically feel less threatening, they make it feel more tolerable so you can keep going a big way. They do that is they turn down the volume of, of pain signals in your body and in your mind so that you are able to continue with an activity without panick. They are one of the reasons that effort and exercise can feel so satisfying, rather than just unpleasant. It's why we get, you know, a run as high. It's why we feel so euphoric at the end of a workout. But they are not the only explanation for this feeling and for why exercise feels so emotionally, emotionally rewarding. Actually, a lot of research suggests that the endorphins released into your bloodstream, like when you are working out, they actually don't cross the blood brain barrier that quickly. It seems like slightly improbable that they would be able to have that impact in such a short term amount of time. This is the reason why scientists kind of started to look for other, other explanations, like for what is really influencing our brains directly when we exercise. There is a very strong argument that has come out of this that the endocannabinoid system is actually what deserves a lot of the credit when it comes to the feel good feeling of exercise. You may hear cannabinoid and think we're going to talk about marijuana. We're not actually, but they are kind of related. Endo cannabinoids are molecule molecules your body produces that bind to the cannabinoid receptor. That is the same like receptors that respond to the effects of cannabis, except cannabinoids in your body are internally produced. Like you don't have to smoke something or consume something to get that feeling, to get that boost in your mood, reduction in your anxiety, sense of reward, maybe even that floaty feeling. There is so much research that shows exercise boosts endocannabinoids, but endocannabinoids also make you want to exercise too. So it kind of works both ways. Essentially, like these chemicals are what make you feel not just good and happy, but calm. That is why you might feel lighter, calmer, floaty after a run or after a workout. That's why you might feel relaxed. This same system also seems to influence motivation, I. E. Whether or not you want to move in the first place. It's not just the nice feeling afterwards. There's actually something else going on. In 2019, a group of researchers from France conducted a study on a group of mice looking into this and they basically, they asked a very relatable question. Why don't some mice, why don't some people find exercise as attractive? You know, there are some mice, as there are some humans who will happily run for miles, who will find that really rewarding and who would, you know, prefer that over a simpler reward like chocolate? And then there are some humans who or. And mice who are the opposite, who just really don't enjoy running, would much rather the simple reward of a chocolate, or of sitting down, or of talking with friends. What they basically thought was that whether people are naturally drawn towards exercise comes down to these cannabinoid receptors. And so what they did is they had two groups of mice and in one of the groups, they knocked out these receptors. The receptors like what they called, they're called CB1 receptors, they essentially didn't work. So no matter how much external amounts of this they received or internal, they were never going to get the effect. They then built this challenge, right? The mice could earn access to either the running wheel or a small chocolate treat, but they had to work for both. They had to push their nose against this device basically like over and over again. And it got increasingly hard if they wanted the reward because they were testing motivation. What they found was pretty amazing. Mice with a strong working endocannabinoid system actually put in effort to exercise, choosing the running over the chocolate over and over again. And the mice without the cannabinoid receptors did not want anything to do with the wheel. They only kind of occasionally wanted something to do with the chocolate, but they definitely didn't want to run. The only thing that was different was these receptors. So in other words, when these cannabinoid receptors aren't functioning, the mice didn't suddenly become lazy. Overall, they weren't lazy mice. There was just this part of them that lost interest in running. And the researchers takeaway was that these receptors play a major role in the motivation to exercise. That's why some people really love it, some people don't. This is obviously a mouse study, but it does connect to this bigger idea that's been building in humans too. Some people naturally just do not find exercise as rewarding. Some people naturally could run 100 miles and never get that high. The question that comes from that is like, is it just their DNA? The answer is a bit more complicated. I think the best way to picture it is this loop whereby exercise actually increases endocannabinoids. Endocannabinoids can make exercise feel more rewarding, which makes you more likely to do it again, which then increases the level and increases how basically receptive our receptors are to this chemical. This also is influenced by environment. So if you grew up in a family where nobody really ever exercised or exercise for you is always associated with discomfort, a social discomfort, an emotional discomfort, bullying, whatever, whatever number of these chemicals you have in your brain, it is always going to be harder to find motivation because the negative reinforcement of this poor past experience will often continuously outweigh the Positive reinforcement of these counterpinoids. Let's move on from this biological explanation. Let's talk about why exercise is so powerful from a somatic and emotional perspective. Because I don't know about you, I don't exercise for the physicality of it. I don't exercise because of looks. I really exercise because I'm a very stressed individual. And exercise is one of the only coping strategies I have found that is not self destructive. And I feel like I have tried a few others. This is because exercise is a form of somatic release. Basically, it is a way for our body to physically process emotions through sensation and movement. A lot of trauma. Emotion is obviously psychological. It's all. It's also deeply physical. It sits, it is stored in your body. If you have ever read the Body Keeps the Score, you will know this. But trauma leaves its mark in so many ways. In the form of a hyperactive nervous system, in the form of a constant sense of danger that can wreak havoc on your hormonal balance, stress levels, immune system. To work through stress and emotional trauma, at some point we have to deal with this physical side and we have to feel safe enough to inhabit our bodies and safe enough for our bodies to return to homeostasis. When we move, the movement gives those, I guess, tense or stuck energy somewhere to go. You know, for example, when you increase respiration and circulation through a run, this can shift your autonomic nervous system back on from fight and flight to a balanced response to rest and digest. When we exercise, we also convert that weird vague floating anxiety that comes from stress into a specific bodily sensation. We begin to find it manageable. It also indicates to your brain, hey, like, we encountered physical stress and we survived. Maybe when we encounter emotional stress that feels like physical stress in the future, we will be psychologically resilient enough for that as well. This is actually. This has a name in psychology. It's called stress inoculation theory. Essentially exposing yourself to manageable voluntary stress like running, like exercise, it puts your body under a state of strain that then prepares it and allows it to practice coping mechanisms for when it's under stress and strain in the future in an involuntary way. Finally, this is one of my favorite concepts ever. The reason exercise, and specifically forward movement like walking, running, riding, hiking, horse riding, even the reason those are so good for you emotionally is because of the power of optic flow. Basically, you're like hot girl. Walk is, is a form of therapy. Because your eyes make constant lateral movements to track your environment. This optic flow calms the brain's threat processing system and centers. It shifts you into a more relaxed emotional state that can change your thought patterns for the better, literally. If you have heard of EDMR therapy, the creator of that therapy, Dr. Francine Shapiro, is she conceived of that theory that is one of the most prominent in trauma therapy these days. On a walk, she realized that when she was walking, those movements that her eyes were doing was reducing her stress levels. That is why for some people, when they exercise, when they walk, when they hike, when they run, that is the only time their brain is still. It's the only time they don't overthink. Beyond all this psychologically as well, I really just think that exercise helps us rewire our mind and change our cognitive frameworks because it gives us benchmarks to strive for. Because of the structure of it, you know, how fast can I run? Well, especially if you're focused on improvement, right? How fast can I run? How much further can I run? How much heavier can I lift? How many more reps can I do? How can I improve my form? How many more inches can I get? Benchmarks like that that are so obvious and available in exercise and sport are incredibly stabilizing for the human mind because they make progress visible, they give us. They give us a sense of control. I really think that's what it is like. If we look and we think about the stress we experience in everyday life, a lot of it is external pressure that feels completely outside of us and we have no say in it. You know, we have no say if somebody at work hates us, we have no say if we're having a fight with our friend, we have no say if, I don't know, we got scammed or we missed our bus. Some of those things we have say in. But a lot of, like, the more general stress of living in big cities or being in your 20s, like, it just kind of all gets thrown at us. Exercise creates controllable benchmarks that we can work towards systematically. You cannot discount this mental structure. Study after study, including a very famous one in 2018 from the University of Exeter and the University of New South Wales, shows that structure like this, the mental structure of exercise, reverses mental aging, improves emotional functioning in, reduces your risk factor for dementia, even if you hate exercise. This is so important to know because you probably won't hate exercise as much as you will hate losing your memory as you get older. And this is one of the best ways you can protect against that. Let's talk about the final element of exercise that makes it so powerful. It is the social psychology behind co regulation. Doing exercise by yourself, amazing. Doing at least one workout a week with others is spectacular. For every single element of your health that you can think of, there is something uniquely regulating about doing something next to somebody. Not necessarily facing them, not necessarily talking deeply, just moving alongside them, side by side. Movement like that is one of our most primal states of being. It's one of the most rewarding sensations. It unlocks this deep, ancient peace in you because that is how we were meant to move across planes, across mountains, with other people, naturally, as a pack, side by side for thousands of years, thousands of years before we got here. That is hardwired into your DNA for that to be a relaxing, mood stabilizing sensation that you are with the herd, you are protected, you are moving forward. In fact, research on this, what they call physical synchrony, shows that it increases bonding, it increases affiliation. Interestingly, it can even shift and downgrade pain tolerance. Literally. Your run club is reducing your perception of pain. The best example of this published in the research was a journal from a couple of years ago on group dancing. And it showed that, yeah, dancing is great, but when you dance with other people, it improves emotional coping. People felt better able to handle hard situations when they got out and danced, when they were dancing with other people in a group setting, even at the club, in the old person's home like that. Movement is ancient. It is an ancient rit. Physical movement is a spiritual ritual in this sense that unlocks a core, I think a core need in us that not many activities in the modern day will naturally do. That is really our first takeaway from the psychology of exercise. It's not just good for you because of endorphins. Therefore it doesn't only benefit you if you're pushing yourself to the physical limit every time. There are so many other reasons why even just walking yoga, low impact exercise is just as vital and helpful because of somatic release, because of co regulation, because of physical synchrony. Okay, let's take a short break here before we get into discussing how exercise changes our brains. Whether it is or could ever be a replacement for antidepressants, as some suggest. Some of those more controversial sides to this topic we're going to get into after the short break. Stay with us.

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[Jemma Spa]

Regular exercise will literally change the physical structure of your brain. That is a claim a lot of people make. Let's explore it together. There is, there is no doubt really that exercise will physically change your brain. But it's not. It's not going to create like new loes or anything. Primarily, it's going to increase what we call brain volume. And it's also going to promote functional changes as well. So when you hear somebody be like, it changes your brain. It's not giving you a new brain. It's changing how networks in your brain communicate. If we look structurally. One of the most famous findings about the neurological impact of exercise comes from this randomized trial showing that people who did aerobic exercise tend to have increased hippocampal volume. So the hippocampus, basically, it's involved in, like, learning and memory. More volume in those areas means greater memory abilities, means more brain reserves, more neurons, more white matter, greater hydration from more cells being able to hold water. That's all very important for electrical signaling. So that change in volume influences the change in function. This 2011 University of Illinois study trial, I guess, actually looked at 120 older adults and asked them to engage either in regular walking, starting at 10 minutes, going up to 40 minutes, or it asked them just to stretch. They then did a number of before, during, and after MRIs. And what they found was that in these older adults, the hippocampus, the part that usually really shows a decline in age and that naturally shrinks, was staying really strong and healthy, showing less deterioration and sometimes an increase in volume in people who were walking regularly. The craziest statistic from the study, the average volume increase was 2%. That equals one to two years of reversal of age related volume loss. Basically, they were getting years back of their memory, of their lives, of the plasticity of their brain. And that's really important to emphasize. I think when you do an episode about the psychology of exercise, right, People want you to, like, emphasize how intense exercise is probably great for you. And you're probably assuming that working out vigorously would increase anaerobic, aerobic, blood circulation, digestion, all these things that would help with this mental longevity and physical longevity. What these studies are showing us is that intensity doesn't matter. All that matters is consistency. All that matters is how much were they doing. 40 minutes, 40 minutes a day. And you are reversing, you are getting years back on your life. And I think that knowledge is important for people who don't always have the best relationship with exercise or people who think that it is. Yeah, again, intensity, that's going to matter. Absolutely not in terms of the more functional changes. Exercise also improves. Basically how your different brain networks talk to each other. Your brain has these big systems that switch on depending on what you're doing. One network you hear a lot about in the podcast, the default mode network, is more active when like you're daydreaming or you're stuck in self focused thought patterns. And another network, which is the executive control network, is more active when you're concentrating, planning, controlling your attention. A 2025 review of functional connectivity and the relationship it has with exercise revealed that people who exercise regularly can switch between these networks easier. Basically, it nudges your brain to have better coping, to become more flexible and to have smoother switching, meaning you don't just stick in one mode. We're not always either on or feeling a little bit off or detached. Regular exercise means that we can retune that, that kind of network balance to help our brain shift gears between self focused thought and goal directed thought more efficiently. And that's great for mental resilience. Now what does this all mean for our mental health? We had to get to it. We've been circling this element all day for this whole episode. Something that has become a huge annoyance of mine is a very old and I would say increasingly boring narrative that exercise is better than any antidepressant. If you're depressed, put on your running shoes. You don't need a pill, you need some new sneakers. You need to get off the couch and go for a run. I remember famous TikTok about that a couple of years ago. I don't know. I trained for a half marathon last year. I was running like 30, 35 kilometers a week. I was also on antidepressants and I was still depressed. So unless you want to say they canceled each other out, something isn't adding up. Exercise is not the holy grail. I think so many people think it is. I think this belief has gotten worse in recent years because of one very famous study from 2024. This is a paper that went viral. Academic articles so rarely go viral. And this paper essentially looked at the results of 19 different studies measuring the effects of dancing on depression in older adults. And it found that those who took part in dance interventions actually saw a significant reduction in depression compared to those who didn't. That's what the, the blanket finding was. If we think back to the synchrony research that we talked about earlier, like that makes a lot of sense, right? We're moving with other people. It's this natural rhythm. But the issue is this paper only included 19 randomized studies. That's only 500 people all up in these studies, even themselves. Even the researchers themselves said the findings of this paper were high risk for generalization and were probably very low in terms of validity. So the fact that they could be produced again and again and again. So we have to acknowledge there are holes in this research. There was another study that also got a lot of hype that was very similar to this one titled Exercise for Depression, very to the point title. This research basically published a finding about how exercise can improve depressive symptoms, which is true. But a lot of people online took that out of context and said, this is proof that mentally ill people just need to exercise more. The important caveat, these findings were compared to no treatment, not antidepressants, not therapy. Basically, they had two groups of people. One group was a depressed group of people who didn't do any intervention, including exercise. One was a depressed group of people who the only intervention was exercise. That's why they got better. That's why they felt better. It wasn't a cure. You know, it was this difference between doing nothing and something. That's something, you know, a lot of people said, could have been anything. I really do think that exercise is a very, very valuable part of mental health treatment. I genuinely think I would lose my mind if I did not run regularly. And I've got so many friends who have said very similar things. We have to be really careful with generalizations, though. We have to be incredibly specific because the consequences of saying dance will cure my. Will cure your depression. Dance was better than any antidepressant. Running was better than any therapy. Treatment offered is supremely dangerous because there are people out there, you know, I feel like I'm probably one of them. You're probably. We all know somebody out there who's really doing it tough and looking for a solution. And to say your antidepressants or your. Whatever other methods or interventions are getting in the way of the purity of exercise and the purity of results you could get from exercise is deeply dangerous and really just excludes other parts, you know, of the truth. Okay, let's move on from this. Let's pivot from this. Should I say, let's get into the deeper relationship between exercise and mental health beyond it is a treatment for depression or anxiety. When does exercise actually become bad for our mental health and our psychology? Here is something you may not know about me. My sister is actually a professional athlete. She plays football. My mom was also a professional athlete or a elite athlete. She was a javelin thrower. She played men's basketball back in the day when they didn't have a women's team. I did not get that gene. Obviously. One of my best friends, also a professional athlete. I have heard stories, horror stories, of how obsessive People will get people doing 10k races when they had been warned by doctors not to do it because of heart impairments. People tearing muscles and going back to the gym the next day. The diet, the control, the obsession, everything, the stories they will tell you. There is a growing amount of research on what we could now call exercise addiction. Uncontrolled, excessive exercise that persists even when it causes you harm. That behavioral pattern is very similar to other addictions. There's a bit of controversy as to whether we could call it an addiction, but I think, I think it is a massive reason being. It works on very similar neurological levels and biological levels. Exercise has this amazing potential to change our mood. It provides this rare combination of things which is immediate relief and measurable progress, as well as social reinforcement and moral validation. For somebody who feels lost, for somebody who feels powerless, you know, ecstasy, heroin might not be their drug of choice. Exercise very easily could be because it gives you something to focus on if you have all these areas in your life that feel uncontrollable. Relationships, work, family, money. Exercise can become the domain where control feels possible. This isn't inherently bad, but it can become dangerous when that attempt at gaining control becomes compulsive. A lot of exercise addiction research that is, you know, coming out at the moment really highlights the overlap between exercise and body image issues and exercise and eating disorders and the fact that you lose the joy for progress. It's about management, it's about shame, it's about self worth, it's about control. Because of this, like, exercise can become a way that somebody manages their emotions. Yes. It can also become the way that people manage their identity. You know, you feel panicked, you feel guilty, you feel low, you feel bad about yourself. Exercise is the emotional regulator. And when it becomes the only method for that, it becomes really confining because it will, like life will eventually interrupt it. You know, when you experience illness, injury, travel, you have caring responsibilities, school, grief, burnout, and you cannot stick to the rigid schedule anymore. If your emotional stability depends on never missing a session, you are building mental health on a very rocky foundation. The thing is, exercise and self esteem have this very complicated relationship, right? On one hand, exercise can really encourage self esteem because it improves, like, it improves mastery, which we know is very psychologically important. It improves competence, it improves agency, all things that give us a real identity boost, all things that are very important. It also improves trust in yourself. Like, look, I can rely on myself to do this. I can rely on myself to be strong. And research supports this. It supports the positive link between self esteem and physical activity. However, sometimes it goes too far and it becomes the only thing that makes us feel good about ourselves. Not just the only thing that makes us feel good about ourselves emotionally, but physically. And that is when it begins to worsen self esteem, because it becomes a performance of worth. It might feel like exercise only counts if you are the best at something, or if you are feeling like you need to pass out at the end, or if you are getting certain times hitting certain reps. Progress is only progress if it is perfect. Another common thought that begins to bubble up is that rest or rest days are lazy, which, if you think about it, is, you know, a deeper topic about our relationship with slowing down. But in these mindsets, really, exercise becomes a form of conditional self acceptance. It becomes this thing whereby you have to earn feeling good about yourself. This self acceptance, much like the kind of emotional regulation that comes from exercise, never sticks around for too long because the goalpost will constantly move. Especially if it also becomes tied in with how you see yourself physically. If it is a method of changing physical form, and society's ideal physical form is always changing, like, you are never going to be happy no matter how much control exercise gives you. Because again, the goalpost always changes. Okay, let's move on from this a little bit and talk about early experiences with exercise and how they linger, how they hurt or help our relationship with movement. This is the thing I'm deeply fascinated by, because many people's relationship with exercise, for a lot of us was formed like, way before social media. At least if, like you are in your 20s, mid to late early 20s. Often we experience exercise at school or like, with family as our first experience. And literally the split that I see in society between people who loved PE and people who hated PE also tends to split. Like how adult love of exercise versus our hatred. Like, it genuinely so much of it comes down to this, like, childhood experience. And if you are sitting there being like, I've never been able to love exercise the way that I thought I could, or the way that others could, it is worth having a look back at those times. In 2022, researchers from Middlesex University published a qualitative piece of research which essentially did just this. They had like, I don't know how many participants. I think it was like hundreds of thousands or hundreds or thousands, not hundreds of thousands. And it basically was like, what did you think about PE class? Were you embarrassed? Did you have fun? Were you always picked? Were you not picked consistently? They found negative memories linger into adulthood and it shaped how people felt in exercise later on, if they would go into a group class and, and they felt judged, they would never go back. If they went to a run club and they felt like left behind or they didn't have the right shoes, like they would exit, they wouldn't want to be there. And this is not surprising. What is happening in those moments, in those moments of shame, is that people feel judged and they feel insecure about their ability. They feel shame about their bodies. They feel shame in comparison to their, to their peers. And we know that shame is one of the most powerful motivators, especially for stopping something and especially for feeling like, this isn't, this isn't for me, this isn't something that I'm going to do with my life. If you learned that exercise, you know, equated to being embarrassed in your body, well, you know, you're never going to instinctively want to do it. You're never going to feel like it's something that naturally kind of comes across your plate. This is why people, a lot of people out there can logically understand the benefits of exercise and still dread it, still fear it, still hate the idea of it. So this is how I think we regain that healthy relationship to exercise. This is why it is so important to do exercise you love. I personally think a large part of our relationship to exercise in our teen years, in our early, like very early 20s, is exercise as self punishment. Most of us have not yet formed this idea that movement is freedom or movement is privilege. Often what we do is we exercise in the way that we think it's going to mold our body into the thing that is trending at the time. You really have to find autonomy and delight if you want to be good at exercise, if you want to feel good about exercise, if you want to get those psychological benefits. Because there's evidence that pushing yourself to an extreme level, time after time, pushing yourself to do things your body doesn't want to do and doesn't feel capable of before it is ready, like, genuinely can sometimes reverse some of the positive impacts of exercise. There is an initial boost of being like, wow, look at me, I can do hard things. There is the initial circulatory boost, the initial respiratory boost, the initial physical boost. But if you perform any behavior, exercise included, out of hatred, the psychological benefit of it and the emotional benefit of it is always going to be underscored by that shame and is always going to be underscored by that pain. If you do exercise that you enjoy, even if it is not as strenuous you are more likely to keep going with it. You are more likely to set those benchmarks. You are more likely to avoid all or nothing thinking and the all or nothing spiral that sends you into a period of exercise abstinence.

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[Jemma Spa]

A great way to decipher what exercise might be. Your exercise is to think about why you're doing it and why you enjoy it. Maybe you like walking because you listen to a podcast while you're doing it. Maybe you like dancing because it feels Expressive. Maybe you like swimming because it's the only time you can focus. Maybe you like strength training because it makes you feel strong. If you genuinely are doing an exercise and you are sitting on that Pilates mat or you are sitting behind that barbell and the entire time you're like, this sucks. Find another exercise. Like there is a million classes. The amount of videos I see of people doing the most ridiculously funny, I will admit, but kind of like seemingly very fun exercises. It's astounding. There is something for everybody. I literally saw. You know what I've been seeing a lot is those people with those moon boots that have like trampolines on the bottom, people doing like trapeze exercise. You know what class I do at the moment that I freaking love is like Pilates in a sauna. Fitness Health and fitness. Health and wellness is a billion dollar, maybe even at this point, trillion dollar money making machine. You can find, I promise, an exercise you enjoy more than running or you enjoy more than, I don't know, I don't want to say like specific workouts, but more than like weight workouts or like high hit rep workouts. I also think we need to get out of this mindset that if you're not amazing at something, if you're not dying at the gym every day, every weekend, like you're lazy, what causes us to believe that? What's the danger of that? I know a lot of times where, you know, we're held back by this thought of like, well, if I'm not doing this very well, like is my body feeling it? Or if I'm not doing it how everybody else is doing it, is it even worth it? Or am I embarrassing myself by showing up in this environment where I know I'm the one who knows the least? This comes down to everything. The impact of comparison, social media, childhood shame, perfectionism, all or nothing thinking. I need you to realize that nobody cares. Nobody cares. And your body is for you. And if you find enjoyment through movement, even if it's the wrong kind of movement, even if people don't think you're doing it right, even if you're not doing it to the level that everybody else is doing, it does not matter. Your enjoyment and the fact that you are doing it is the only thing that does. Going slow, especially if you don't exercise regularly or if you're getting back into it, is the best way to go far. There was a study from the Lancet found that just five extra minutes of exercise and 30 minutes less sitting time each day Will help you live longer. Brisk walks, five minutes a day was a, that was a reduction, I think in 10% of premature deaths across 135,000 people. That is huge. And it just goes to show us that exercise doesn't need to be this huge overhaul. Life commitment, all it requires is a consistent commitment to your well being to see the psychological impact, to see the neurological impact, the emotional impact, the physical impact. If you do not let your body guide you in a way that is going to be sustainable and healthy. If you exercise as a form of self punishment rather than self respect, I actually just think that all of those benefits are removed in an instant. You have to find the exercise you love, the exercise you enjoy, make it part of your routine as a form of self care. Putting yourself in an exercise routine that you like, even if it's not as physically demanding, is one you don't. Personally, I actually think that's better for you if it means that you are going okay, this has been a long episode. If you're listening to this episode at the gym, by the way, or on a run, leave a comment. I need to know. DM me. I need to know if. Because it'd be, I don't know, kind of fourth Wally kind of breaking the dimension here if you're learning about what's happening in your body whilst you are doing that activity. But to summarize, again, to summarize this episode. Exercise feels good for a lot of reasons. It is not just endorphins, we know, it's also endocannabinoids. It's also the pain system. It's also somatic release, the physical representation of emotional anger, trauma, pain that is let out through this process. It is the tangible benchmarks that exercise allows us to set. It is somatic synchronized movement. It is optic flow over time. Exercise, regular exercise, consistent exercise is one of the, if not best things other than like not drinking and getting a good night's sleep. You can do for your brain that hippocampal volume statistic. You could literally even into old age, reverse aging by one to two years. And that's probably more going to be greater the more you do it. Is it better than an antidepressant? No. Is it as good as an antidepressant? Probably not either. But it is a very important method for managing well being. It is never going to be a replacement because it just, it doesn't work that way. It just, it's just not how exercise and the. Yeah, the neurotransmitters and the chemicals it releases Operate in the same way as, you know, a biological explanation for depression or anxiety or mental health operates. As for the role of dancing, yeah, pretty cool. One of the most important exercises, not just like emotionally and physically, but also like socially. So as to whether like going to the club is a form of exercise, I think that one's up for debate. But in terms of the emotional and social impacts of, I think it totally counts. Also important to remember when exercise can become toxic and can become dangerous, there is a difference between repetition and doing. Doing exercise because you love it and compulsion and doing exercise because it's a coping tool. Remember like that will just, I think having that relationship to exercise will just further, further integrate some pretty shameful beliefs about your body and your worth and how worth and self esteem is tied to looks and tied to your abilities. So that is something you're dealing with. I will definitely leave some links down below. I feel like I actually am hearing about this so much more. Exercise addiction. Exercise is self punishment, I think is something a lot more people have experience with. Then you may think, then you definitely may think, but it's definitely something we can change. And if you've had negative experiences with exercise in the past, whether that's been because, I don't know, you were bullied over was a painful experience for you, it was a boring experience for you. Just like getting back out there and doing a little bit, finding something you love, trying out as many random ass like classes as you can is like the best thing you can do with all that in mind. That is me done for the day. Thank you for listening this far. If you made it this far, leave a little comment down below on Spotify. What is your favorite, perhaps most ridiculous exercise class? I already gave you guys mine. So if you guys are in London and you see an advertisement for a Pilates class in a sauna, know that I'm probably there and you should definitely come and join me because it will kill you. I will say one of my friends did pass out in the class the other day and I felt incredibly terrible for bringing her in and actually the instructors did not give a single hoot. So maybe, yeah, maybe it would be best to avoid. Unless you really like to suffer through your exercise, which sometimes honestly I do enjoy. So I know I gave it shit. But sometimes it's fun to really see how far you can push yourself. Thank you as always to our researcher Libby Colbert for her assistance and her great research skills and her help with this episode. Make sure that if you are listening, you. You give an episode on Netflix a try. You go and watch us over there just so you can say that you've done it. Make sure you're following us on Instagram as well so you know when new episodes come out and you get the summaries and you get to see when we're doing events near you. If you want to come and meet other listeners of the psychology of your 20s, if you want to see what we're up to, that is where you can find out all about that. We also have a substack if that is. If you prefer reading over listening or over watching, I'll leave everything in the description. But again, thank you for listening to this episode. I hope it enlightened you. But until next time, be safe, be kind, be gentle with yourself. We will talk very, very soon.

[Podcast Advertiser / Host Voice]

A big priority for me in 2026

[Jemma Spa]

is to make healthier, better choices so

[Podcast Advertiser / Host Voice]

I can take care of myself and just have more energy for my everyday life. That is of course easier said than done when life is so chaotic all of the time. But that is where Premier Protein shakes come in. They have 30 grams of protein, no added sugar and tons of delicious flavors from cake batter to peaches and cream caramel. They are a healthy choice you'll actually want to make because they never feel boring. Focusing on fitness and health can be really overwhelming, but having 30 grams of protein protein immediately in the morning with Premier Protein can really get you moving and enjoying life. Premier Protein powers you to say yes to more, whether it's crushing a big presentation at work, building an epic fort with your kids, or hitting the hiking trail with friends. Find your favorite flavor@premier protein.com that's P R E M I E R protein.com or at Amazon, Walmart and other major retailers.

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