10 Ways That Running Changes Your Mind and Brain

“One 60-minute run can add 7 hours to your life” claimed The Times last week. The story was based on a new review in Progress in Cardiovascular Diseases that concluded that runners live, on average, three years longer than non-runners and that running will do more for your longevity than any other form of exercise. But there’s more to running than its health-enhancing effects. Research published in recent years has shown that donning your trainers and pounding the hills or pavements changes your brain and mind in some intriguing ways, from increasing connectivity between key functional hubs, to helping you regulate your emotions. The precise effects sometimes vary according to whether you engage in intense sprints or long-distance running. Here, to coincide with a new feature article in The Psychologist – “Minds run free” – we provide a handy digest of the ways that running changes your mind and brain.



Running changes your brain wiring
David Raichlen and his colleagues scanned the brains of young, competitive distance runners and controls while they rested in a scanner with their eyes open for six minutes. As reported in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, the runners showed greater connectivity between the so-called frontal parietal network and other neural regions involved in working memory and self-control, which the researchers interpreted as likely due to the cognitive demands of running and the runners’ increased aerobic fitness. The runners also showed greater “anti-correlation” between their default mode network (the DMN, which sparks into life when we’re resting) and a series of regions involved in motor control and sensation – the researchers said this could indicate that when on the move, the runners are likely to be very cognitively engaged, with their DMN suppressed.

Intense sprints seem to boost your executive function
For a study published last year in Preventive Medicine Reports, researchers asked young volunteers (average age 12) to complete several 10-second sprints for ten minutes and then take some cognitive tests. The participants acted as their own controls and on another day (either before or after the sprint day) they completed the same mental tests after 10 minutes of rest. The participants’ performance on the Stroop Test – a long-established measure of mental control or what psychologists call “executive function” – seemed to be enhanced immediately after the sprints and 45 minutes afterwards, as compared with after resting. There were no effects of the sprints on visual-spatial memory performance or basic mental speed (as judged by the Digit Symbol Substitution test). Based on their finding of an apparent benefit of sprints on executive function, Simon Cooper and his colleagues said there was a case for including more opportunities for intense exercise in the school day.

Seven weeks of interval running training can boost your cognitive flexibility
For three times per week for seven weeks, a small group of young dinghy sailors spent 45 minutes per session, rising to 90 minutes at the end of the programme, engaged in interval training: running fast for between 200 to 1000m, interspersed with periods of rest. The researchers tested their volunteers’ cognitive function before the training period and afterwards, and compared the outcomes with a control group of young dinghy sailors who just continued their active lifestyle as usual. Writing in The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, Tomas Venckunas and his colleagues reported that the running group didn’t just get fitter and better at running, but also showed superior gains in their cognitive flexibility: that is, they were better at adapting to rapid switches in task instructions in a keypress task on a computer.

Ridiculously extreme long-distance running shrinks your brain (but it grows back)
In 2009, 67 endurance athletes ran nearly 3,000 miles over 64 days, without a single day’s rest, to complete the TransEurope-FootRace ultramarathon. For a paper in BMC Medicine, a team of researchers led by Wolfgang Freund scanned the brains of a sample of these runners before the race, during and eight months afterwards. During the race, the runners’ brains shrunk, in terms of grey matter volume, by about six per cent, an amount that the researchers described as “substantial” considering that normal aging is associated with volume loss of around 0.2 per cent per year. However, at the final scan, the runners’ brains had recovered to their pre-race volume. In a follow-up study in BMC Sports Science, Medicine and Rehabilitation, the same research team pinpointed the running-related grey matter loss to four key areas, including parts of: temporoparietal cortex, occipitotemporal cortex, anterior cingulate and prefrontal cortex, and caudate nucleus. Although highly speculative, they noted the overlap of these areas with the Default Mode Network and suggested the observed cell loss in these regions may reflect the combination of the metabolic demands of running combined with a prolonged lack of use of the DMN, the brain’s resting-state network.

The “runners’ high” may be linked to changes in brain chemicals
Completing a run can leave you feeling euphoric and several studies suggest this could be down to changes to the brain’s chemical messengers. For instance, a 2008 study in Cerebral Cortex used PET neuroimaging to show that a two-hour run led to enhanced opioid binding across several areas of the brain, as compared with before the run, and that this was associated with subjective feelings of euphoria. This supports the idea that running triggers the increased released of endorphins in the brain – a kind of natural high. A more recent paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology pointed to the importance of other neurotransmitters: the researchers found that an intense treadmill run, but not a walk, was associated with increased circulation of endocannabinoids – endogenous brain chemicals that bind to the same receptors in the brain as cannabis.

Running may quieten your mind
Anecdotally, many runners also say that going for a jog has a calming effect, helping their brains dial back on usual levels of worry and rumination. A study published last year in Experimental Brain Research appeared to provide some partial scientific support for this idea. Petra Wollseiffen and her colleagues used electroencephalography (EEG) to measure the surface electrical activity of the brains of 11 ultramarathoners several times during a six hour run. Running was associated with reductions in activity in the frontal cortex of the brain, and for the first hour, runners also reported feeling more relaxed and an increased sense of “flow”. However, the levels of decreased brain activity and subjective feelings of flow didn’t correlate so it would be an oversimplification to say that this research shows that running helps you to relax by switching off your brain.

Running increases the growth of new neurons (at least in mice)
It was the received wisdom through most of the last century that adults can’t grow new neurons – a process called neurogenesis. It’s now known that this isn’t true: in fact, new neurons continue to grow through life in specific areas of the brain. Interest has turned to the function of these news neurons and ways to encourage their growth. To date, much of the research is on rats and mice, in whom a recurring finding is that running seems to encourage neurogenesis. Take a seminal paper published in Nature in 1999. Fred Gage and his team reported that mice who had the opportunity to choose to run in a spinning wheel exhibited twice the amount of neurogenesis in a part of the hippocampus (a brain region involved in memory and learning), as compared with mice who had no choice but to swim or others who had to complete a water maze. More recent animal research suggests that it is particularly long-distance running, as opposed to interval-style training (short bursts of running) that may increase neurogenesis, perhaps through release of what’s known as “brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF)”, a chemical that encourages cell growth.

A short jog may help you regulate your emotions
For a 2015 study in Cognition and Emotion, Emily Bernstein and Richard McNally asked volunteers to jog or stretch for 30 minutes and then they showed them a sad clip from the film The Champ. Participants who said they usually struggled to handle negative emotion were more intensely affected by the sad clip, just as you’d expect, but crucially this was less so if they had completed the jog (but not the stretching). The researchers said: “… a bout of moderate aerobic exercise appears to have helped those participants potentially more vulnerable to problematic affective dysregulation to be less susceptible to the impact or lingering effects of the stressor”.

Intense sprints may boost your ability to learn
Bernward Winter and his colleagues tested participants’ ability to learn new made-up words for objects after either two intense sprints of three-minutes length, after 40 minutes of gentle running, or after resting. Participants were able to learn 20 per cent faster after the sprints compared with the other conditions, and they showed superior memory retention when tested again a week later. Writing in the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, the researchers said the blood measures they took suggested that the participants’ enhanced learning performance after sprints may have been associated with increased levels of dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine and BDNF. “This [finding] is pertinent to the organization of learning-supportive environments, e.g., in schools (intense exercise during the breaks),” the researchers said.

Running a marathon seems to wipe your memory of the pain
Let’s not romanticise long-distance running. As Daniel Engber observed at Slate last year, “a vast, disturbing literature has now accumulated on the ill effects of running marathons”, particularly all the pain, including chaffing, blisters and cramps. One way that repeat marathon runners seem to cope is that the satisfaction of completing a run gradually wipes their memories for the pain they went through. Researchers demonstrated this for a study published in Memory: they asked marathon runners to report their pain and emotions directly after completing a marathon and then caught up with them again six months later, to ask them to recall their earlier post-marathon pain. The runners tended to have forgotten just how much pain they’d been in, and this was especially true if they’d been on an emotional high at the end of the marathon.

SOURCE:

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2017/04/19/10-ways-that-running-changes-your-mind-and-brain/(accessed 28.4.17)

Single Or Married: Which Is The Most Fulfilling Life?

Psychologist challenges the orthodox view with evidence from studies conducted over 30 years.


Single people are more likely to experience psychological growth and development than those who are married, a psychologist claims.


This is just one perk of being single which is often ignored.

Others include greater sociability and resilience.

The conclusions come from surveying 814 studies conducted over 30 years.

Dr Bella DePaulo, addressing the American Psychological Association’s 124th Annual Convention, said:


“The preoccupation with the perils of loneliness can obscure the profound benefits of solitude.

It is time for a more accurate portrayal of single people and single life — one that recognizes the real strengths and resilience of people who are single, and what makes their lives so meaningful.”

While the advantages of being married are well-known, if over-stated, Dr DePaulo wants the perks of singledom to be acknowledged and understood.


Dr DePaulo finds several advantages to being single, after reviewing the research:

Single people are more connected to their friends, family, neighbours and co-workers.
Single people derive more meaning from their work than married people.
Single people have greater self-determination.

It is the greater self-determination, along with other factors, that may contribute towards single people being more likely to experience a feeling of growth and development as a person.

In addition, single people who feel self-sufficient are less likely to experience negative emotions.

These advantages are seen despite the many benefits that society grants to married people, Dr DePaulo pointed out:


“People who marry get access to more than 1,000 federal benefits and protections, many of them financial.

Considering all of the financial and cultural advantages people get just because they are married, it becomes even more striking that single people are doing as well as they are.”

Being married, of course, has its advantages as well and Dr DePaulo does not claim one status is better than the other:


“More than ever before, Americans can pursue the ways of living that work best for them.

There is no one blueprint for the good life.

What matters is not what everyone else is doing or what other people think we should be doing, but whether we can find the places, the spaces and the people that fit who we really are and allow us to live our best lives.”

The study was presented at the American Psychological Association’s 124th Annual Convention by Dr Bella DePaulo.

SOURCE:

http://www.spring.org.uk/2016/08/single-married-fulfilling-life.php(accessed 25.4.17)

Πόσο έτοιμη είστε για τη μητρότητα;

Η ιστορία είναι γνωστή: Πρώτα έρχεται ο έρωτας, μετά ο γάμος και μετά το μωρό! Είναι όμως πάντοτε κατάλληλη η στιγμή για οικογένεια; Πόσο έτοιμη είστε να γίνετε μάνα; Η Αμερικανίδα ψυχολόγος και οικογενειακή σύμβουλος Dr. Laura Berman αναφέρει τρία σημαντικά σημεία που θα πρέπει να λάβει υπ'όψιν της μία γυναίκα, η οποία σκέφτεται να αποκτήσει παιδί:




Φαντασία vs πραγματικότητα

Είναι πολύ εύκολο να «χτυπήσει» το βιολογικό σας ρολόι τη στιγμή που παρατηρείτε μία μαμά με ένα μωρό στο σούπερ μάρκετ ή όταν βρεθείτε για δύο ώρες στο σπίτι της φίλης σας που μόλις γέννησε. Η πραγματικότητα, όμως, μπορεί να απέχει πολύ από το ροζ συννεφάκι που έχετε στο μυαλό σας. Κι όσο αξιολάτρευτο κι αν είναι κάθε μικροσκοπικό πλασματάκι που συναντάτε, οι δύο ώρες ύπνου την ημέρα δεν είναι εύκολη υπόθεση.

Κάντε, λοιπόν, ένα τεστ: Δοκιμάστε να κάνετε babysitting στο μωρό της φίλης σας για μερικές ώρες... μπορεί μετά από αυτό να θέλετε να το σκεφτείτε λίγο καλύτερα!

Σκεφτείτε τα κίνητρά σας

Είτε θέλατε από μικρή να γίνετε μαμά είτε πρόκειται για μία επιθυμία που σας γεννήθηκε πρόσφατα, είναι σημαντικό να σκεφτείτε τα κίνητρά σας. Γιατί θέλετε να κάνετε παιδί; Είναι επειδή το θέλει πολύ ο σύντροφός σας; Γιατί το θεωρείτε λογικό επόμενο βήμα στη σχέση σας; 'Η είναι επειδή νιώθετε έτοιμη να κάνετε οικογένεια και να μοιραστείτε τη ζωή σας με το νέο σας δημιούργημα;

Είναι πιθανό να ανακαλύψετε ότι υπάρχουν πολλοί διαφορετικοί λόγοι πίσω από την απόφασή σας να γίνετε μαμά, όμως είναι σημαντικό οι λόγοι αυτοί να αντανακλούν αυτό που θέλετε να κάνετε, όχι αυτό που σας ωθεί να κάνετε η κοινωνία ή ο σύντροφός σας. Ακόμα πιο σημαντικό είναι να μην αποκτήσετε παιδί με σκοπό να βελτιώσετε τα πράγματα στην σχέση σας, καθώς τα προβλήματα μπορούν μόνο να διογκωθούν μέσα από την πίεση που αναπόφευκτα δημιουργεί το μεγάλωμα των παιδιών. Είναι φυσιολογικό να νιώθετε ένα σχετικό άγχος για την απόφασή σας, καθώς αυτό δείχνει ότι αντιλαμβάνεστε τη σπουδαιότητα ενός τέτοιου γεγονότος. Όμως αν το άγχος είναι το μοναδικό σας συναίσθημα, θα πρέπει σίγουρα να περιμένετε μέχρι να νιώσετε μεγαλύτερη αυτοπεποίθηση για τα σχέδιά σας.

Προετοιμαστείτε για τις αλλαγές στη σεξουαλική σας ζωή

Το σεξ για ένα άτεκνο ζευγάρι μπορεί να συμβαίνει πάντα και παντού –δεν χρειάζεται να βρείτε ποιος θα κρατήσει το μωρό για να περάσετε μερικές ώρες οι δυο σας. Με την έλευση του μωρού, όμως, αυτό αλλάζει: Οι γονείς ανησυχούν μήπως το παιδί μπει στο δωμάτιο την ώρα που κάνουν σεξ, ενώ οι ρόλοι της «μαμάς» και του «μπαμπά» μπορεί να μειώσουν τη λίμπιντο στο ζευγάρι. Γι' αυτό είναι πολύ σημαντικό να βρίσκεστε σε διαρκή επικοινωνία μεταξύ σας. Και ανεξάρτητα από την κούραση και τις υποχρεώσεις είναι σημαντικό για το ζευγάρι να βάζει σε προτεραιότητα τη σχέση του και την ερωτική του ζωή. Αυτό δεν θα σας κάνει «εγωιστές» γονείς: Δεν υπάρχει μεγαλύτερο δώρο για να δώσετε στο παιδί σας από ένα σταθερό σπίτι και έναν ευτυχισμένο γάμο.

Ένα μωρό θα σας αλλάξει τη ζωή οριστικά, όμως οι αλλαγές αυτές μπορούν να εμβαθύνουν και να εμπλουτίσουν την σχέση σας με τρόπους που δεν είχατε ποτέ φανταστεί.

Κι αν δεν θέλω παιδί;

Έρευνα που έγινε πρόσφατα σε 40.000 οικογένειες στη Μεγάλη Βρετανία έδειξε ότι τα νέα ζευγάρια που καθυστερούν την απόκτηση παιδιού είναι πιο ευτυχισμένα από ζευγάρια που αποκτούν παιδί νωρίς και σε μικρή ηλικία.

Στις μέρες μας, μάλιστα, όλο και περισσότερες γυναίκες αποφασίζουν να μην αποκτήσουν καθόλου παιδιά και μεγαλώνοντας δηλώνουν όλο και πιο ικανοποιημένες με την απόφασή τους. Μελέτη από το Πανεπιστήμιο της Florida έδειξε ότι μεσήλικα ζευγάρια με παιδιά δεν είναι πάντα ευτυχισμένα και αυτό έχει να κάνει με την ποιότητα των σχέσεων που δημιουργούν τα άτομα με παιδιά, συγκριτικά με τα άτεκνα ζευγάρια.

Πιο συγκεκριμένα, αναφέρουν οι επιστήμονες, γυναίκες χωρίς παιδιά που έχουν ισχυρές σχέσεις με άτομα του κοινωνικού και επαγγελματικού τους κύκλου μπορεί να είναι εξίσου ευτυχισμένες με συνομήλικές τους μαμάδες (και πολύ πιο ευτυχισμένες από μαμάδες που δεν έχουν καλές σχέσεις με τα παιδιά τους).

Κι αν είμαστε βιολογικά προδιατεθειμένοι να αποκτήσουμε παιδιά, είναι γεγονός ότι γυναίκες που δεν έχουν ασπαστεί τη μητρότητα μπορεί να νιώθουν πλήρεις μέσω άλλων καταστάσεων στη ζωή τους, π.χ. από την καριέρα τους που τους προσφέρει οικονομική ελευθερία, από τις δραστηριότητες ή τους ανθρώπους που έχουν γύρω τους. Η ελευθερία, άλλωστε, δεν έρχεται μέσα από αυτά που πρέπει αλλά που θέλουμε να κάνουμε.

Από την άλλη, οι γυναίκες που ονειρεύονται να γίνουν μαμάδες δεν θα πρέπει να απογοητεύονται από τα συμπεράσματα των παραπάνω ερευνών. Είναι γεγονός ότι ένα παιδί αλλάζει για πάντα την σχέση του ζευγαριού, αλλά και τις ατομικές προτεραιότητες του καθενός ξεχωριστά, δημιουργώντας συχνά την ανάγκη στους γονείς να αναπροσδιορίσουν την ίδια τους την ταυτότητα. Άλλωστε δεν υπάρχει μαμά που να μην σας πει ότι η μητρότητα είναι ό,τι καλύτερο της συνέβη ποτέ!

ΠΗΓΗ:

http://www.mama365.gr/11003/poso-etoimh-eiste-gia-th-mhtrothta.html(accessed 20.4.17)

What Children Can Teach Us About Paying Attention

Thinking like a five-year-old can help you learn more in a new environment.


Young children have one cognitive talent that most adults have forgotten.


That is the ability to pay attention to everything.

As adults we learn to focus our attention and block out distractions.

But, sometimes being distracted means noticing and learning more.

Professor Vladimir Sloutsky, study co-author, explained:


“We often think of children as deficient in many skills when compared to adults.

But sometimes what seems like a deficiency can actually be an advantage.

That’s what we found in our study.

Children are extremely curious and they tend to explore everything, which means their attention is spread out, even when they’re asked to focus.

That can sometimes be helpful.”

The study had adults and children watching a series of shapes appearing on a screen.


Some, they were told to look for; others (‘non-target shapes’), they were supposed to ignore.


Adults did slightly better at spotting the shapes they were supposed to be looking for but, said Professor Sloutsky:


“…the children were much better than adults at noticing when the non-target shape changed.

What we found is that children were paying attention to the shapes that they weren’t required to.

Adults, on the other hand, tended to focus only on what they were told was needed.”

Professor Sloutsky continued:


“The point is that children don’t focus their attention as well as adults, even if you ask them to.

They end up noticing and remembering more.

The ability to focus attention is what allows adults to sit in two-hour meetings and maintain long conversations, while ignoring distractions.

But young children’s use of distributed attention allows them to learn more in new and unfamiliar settings by taking in a lot of information.”

SOURCE:

http://www.spring.org.uk/2017/04/what-children-can-teach-us-about-paying-attention.php(accessed 18.4.17)

The study was published in the journal Psychological Science (Plebanek & Sloutsky, 2017).

Is your work ethic rooted in the quality of the relationship you had with your parents?

“The influence of the father … tended to be more important than the influence of the mother”



Some of us work to live, others live to work – these toilers see hard graft as virtuous and they’re more than happy to go the extra mile to climb the career ladder and serve their employer. Organisations, understandably, are interested in hiring people with this kind of work ethic and so psychologists are trying to find out where it comes from.

It’s already known that children with harder working parents also tend to have a stronger work ethic. But a new study in the Journal of General Psychology is one of the first to investigate whether our relationship with our parents in the past – when we were teenagers – is related to our attitude and approach to work as adults. Monique Leenders at the University of Groningen and her colleagues found some small but statistically significant correlations, in particular men’s approach to work seemed to be related to the quality of the teenage relationship they had with their fathers.



The researchers surveyed nearly 4,000 people in the Netherlands, including 1526 men with an average age of 47 and 2291 women with an average age of 44. The participants answered items tapping the quality of the relationship they had with mother and with their father when they were in their teens, such as rating their agreement with “My mother [father] and I were very close” and “I always felt that my father [mother] supported me”. They also said whether they agreed with statements regarding their approach to work, such as “I’d rather work overtime than fail to get something done on time”, and their work ethic, such as “I feel happiest after I’ve worked hard”.

Overall, there was a small but statistically significant correlation between the quality of the participants’ teen relationships with their parents and their current work attitude and work ethic. Digging deeper into the stats separately for men and women, the researchers found that the male and female participants’ teen relationship with their fathers, but not their mothers, was correlated with their current approach to work. Meanwhile, men’s work ethic was correlated with their past relationship quality with their mothers and fathers, but women’s work ethic was not.

“These findings suggest that parents influence work values differently and that the relationship with the father is more central to the development of children’s work values than the relationship with the mother,” Leenders and her team said, adding that this may be because historically it is fathers who more often have jobs outside of the home and may therefore “serve as important role models and have more impact on their children than mothers in the work arena.”

The researchers said their study was just a “first step” and they acknowledged they haven’t proved any causal influence of parental relations on work attitudes. Nonetheless, they said that careers counsellors might help employees not only by discussing their current issues at work, but also by considering the possible influence of their past family relationships.

Another major complication in interpreting research of this kind, not mentioned by the researchers, is the role of genetic effects. Although it’s tempting to speculate about parental role modelling, any apparent transmission of work ethic from one generation to the next is in large part likely to be related to the inheritance of genes associated with trait Conscientiousness.

SOURCE:

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2017/04/11/is-your-work-ethic-rooted-in-the-quality-of-the-relationship-you-had-with-your-parents/(accessed 18.4.17)