The best drug that you do not need to take
Yes, you read it right! But what the hell I'm talking about? I am talking about the best thing you can start doing for yourself: Mooving!
It's easy to forget that we were born movers since we engineered movement from the beginning, just think about the invention of the wheel in the five-millennium a.c.
But before all of that, we were movers and to survive in a world in constant evolution our ancestors had to use their intelligence to search, collect and store food. It is in this background that our brain evolved, from the need of refining motor skill to survive in an hostile and rapidly evolving environment.
According to the neuroscientist Daniel Walpert we have a brain for one reason and one reason only; to produce adaptable and complex movements.
To prove its point, he introduces the sea squirt, a very simple jellyfish-like animal with a "brain" of more or less 300 neurons. In the early stages of its life, this animal has to swim and move until it finds a rock on wich to attach. In doing so, it has 12 hours otherwise it won't survive. What is surprising is that, once it has found the right place, this sea squirt digests its own brain to recover energy. Why? Because for most of its life it will be similar to a plant and, since it doesn't need to move to survive it doesn't need a brain!
Take the Koala, that flurry animal that sleeps almost 20 hours per day. Researchers have found that in the past, this animal had a bigger brain, but as its diet become less diversified requiring less movement to survive its brain started to shrink. Less movement in order to survive less brain needed.
In the last few years new studies on movement and the brain have found a strong link between body and mind, suggesting that they aren't something separated, but something deeply tight and that by acting on one you can influence the other.
If we take the cerebellum, that deals with motor coordination from the simplest movement to the more complex one, neuroscientists found that it also coordinates thoughts, emotions, focus. When we move and exercise, if this requires at least complex movements, we are also exercising the parts of the brain that deal with cognitive functions, causing the fire up of signals in the same network of cells, hence consolidating their connection.
The brain reacts as a muscle; it grows with use, it fades with inactivity.
Another important point is that through movement and exercise, we are able to balance neurotransmitter together with neurochemicals in our brain, giving us a powerful instrument to partially control all those harmful states of mind; stress, anxiety, bad mood, depression.
To conclude, my message is: Steemers move! Take a break from what you are doing, turn off the screen, do 15-20 minutes of stretching, go for a walk, for a run, remember to move a bit every day and make it a routine because we were born movers and we don't have to forget it. Trust me, I have incorporated it and it's a game changer.
"If there were a drug that could do for human health everything that exercise can, it would likely be the most valuable pharmaceutical ever developed" Dr. Mark Tarnopolsky.
Thank you for reading, hope you found it informative and remember: Movement makes you smarter!
Simone