Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #166 BITESIZE | How 10 Minutes of Exercise a Day Can Improve Mental Health | Dr Brendon Stubbs

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today's Bite Size episode is brought to you by AG1, a science-driven daily health drink with over 70 essential nutrients to support your overall health. It includes vitamin C and zinc, which helps support a healthy immune system, something that is really important at this time of year. It also contains prebiotics and digestive enzymes that help support your gut health. It's really tasty and has been in my own life for over five years. Until the end of January, AG1 are giving a limited time offer. Usually they offer my listeners a one-year supply of vitamin D and K2 and five free travel packs with their first order. But until the end of January, they are doubling the five free travel packs to

Starting point is 00:00:51 10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More, bite-sized your weekly dose of optimism and positivity to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 97 of the podcast with the physiotherapist and academic researcher Brendan Stubbs. Now Brendan's work is helping to provide the much-needed evidence base for what we all know instinctively, that physical activity makes us feel good. In this clip, he explains why movement is not just good for our body, but also for our our minds and why you don't need to exercise

Starting point is 00:01:45 for hours to feel the benefits. Have we understood enough that exercise is just as powerful for our mental health as it is for our physical health? I think now we're at the point where we can say you know without reservation that moving around in your daily life is beneficial for your mental well-being and your mental health just as much as it is your physical health. You're right in that the focus generally and in society and in medicine has been about how does it improve our physical health and often an individual or societal level it was if I move around and exercise more how does it make me look how does it make me feel or fit into my my clothes but really we're trying to frame the the conversation to be quite different around saying how does physical activity and exercise make you feel

Starting point is 00:02:39 does it make you feel good and that's very much the focus of the research what we're doing and we can say really really strongly that when you look at big populations of people moving around in your daily life and different types of exercise can really help build up resilience reduce the risk of developing adverse mental well-being and even mental health conditions also we know that moving makes us feel good yeah but i think what you've done so well is move it beyond that sort of human intuition to actually get some hard science on this are there any particular papers that you consider to be quite landmark in this so i think there's a few key research papers which you know provide good data and one is which we published in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 2018. It was led by Professor Felipe Schuch who's a professor of

Starting point is 00:03:32 physical activity and in Brazil and essentially we did something really really simple is we wanted to look at everything that had ever been published on how active people are in their daily lives and the risk or odds of developing depression in the future and we looked at data points from over 46 individual studies and we followed those 260,000 people who are free from depression or any adverse mental health or well-being at baseline, followed them for an average of seven and a half years and we found that people who were most active compared to the least active around 15 less likely to develop depression in the future but the most potent effect was when people were meeting recommended government guidelines of say 30 minutes five times

Starting point is 00:04:17 a week or 150 minutes over the course of of a week as around 30% reduced risk or odds of developing depression in the future. So longitudinally, 30% reduced risk or odds in the future. So that's predictive in the sense that if someone's listening to this now and goes, okay, what does that mean for me? If they currently do not have a mental health diagnosis and they're feeling pretty good, you know, they're feeling okay, but let's say they're worried about the growing rates of mental health problems, or they have a family member, let's say, that particular paper is suggesting for them is that if they meet those government guidelines of activity, they are 30% less likely to develop depression at some point in the future.

Starting point is 00:05:01 Yes, that is essentially the message. The way we look at nutrition and lifestyle and things like exercise, it's never really been deemed real medicine. And therefore, it's almost as if the onus is on us to prove to a much higher degree that, you know, this kind of basic stuff can really work. Do you know what I mean? I of do it's really frustrating because it's so powerful so powerful and it's just you know the evidence now is is accumulating in in in such mass which is just wonderful because we have the credibility to say this can help to help prevent adverse mental health but also be used as a real viable treatment for people who are presenting with

Starting point is 00:05:43 depression as well and perhaps one of the you know examples I use when I work with people as well is saying, you don't have to wait 12 or 16 weeks to feel the benefits. There was a really nice randomized control trial done in Japan. And one of the areas which is implicated as being reduced in people with depression and other cognitive disorders is the area of the brain called the hippocampus which is really important to consolidate our memories from short to long term and processing of emotions so this is often reduced in mental health conditions and what they did in this study in japan was something really really simple they

Starting point is 00:06:22 randomized people so again gold standard evidence to sit still in a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner or to sit down in a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner and cycle very very lightly on the spot and they looked at people's brains live which an fmri enables you to do and what they showed in this randomized control trial is just 10 minutes of light very very very light activity the equivalent to just gentle walking could result in meaningful changes in electrical activity happening within the hippocampus and also other emotional processing areas of the brain so just 10 minutes today of light activity can get meaningful changes in the emotional processing areas of your brain

Starting point is 00:07:13 and the volume of the hippocampus as well i think on one study i saw yeah so we've also done studies as well where we've looked at changes in the volume and obviously that's really exciting because neuroplasticity or changing the structure of the brain is is really important and and changed in many mental health care conditions and we've shown that with aerobic exercise over a 12-week period you can get changes in the volume of the hippocampus i mean this is 12 weeks this is mind-blowing information because ultimately what we're saying is that moving regularly can change the size of a very important part of your brain. You know, the memory center in many ways, the hippocampus,

Starting point is 00:07:50 you can change in size by regularly being active. And it's again, it's about, for me, it's about how do you reframe the conversation around movement and exercise? So it's not about your appearance and your weight. It's so much more varied than that. There's so much more exciting things to talk about than that. It changes the structure of your brain, your nerve cells. We don't even mention BDNF today, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, this hormone that goes up when you exercise, which helps to create new nerve connections. And it's like, this is exciting stuff that we have access to if we move more. Exactly. And today, you, I, anybody can get meaningful changes in the electrical activity in the brain fertilizer. You mentioned BDNF,

Starting point is 00:08:37 just from moving around more today. And we've shown that in randomized control trials as well, you can increase BDNF. We can change our brain connectivity and actions today. It's just remarkable how small things, when done consistently, add up very, very quickly. It's not about a one-hour spinning class three times a week. If you can do that, go for your life. But if you can't, don't let that put you off. Absolutely. Small changes, just getting up

Starting point is 00:09:06 and moving around every minute 20 minutes half an hour going out and having a bit of fresh air can make a big difference just these small cumulative changes can make big differences to our physical and also our mental health and it's just when it becomes to being more active just making those small changes can help you move along that physical activity continuum and the key thing for any behavior is finding something which you enjoy getting started finding something you enjoy and and do it and if that is a spin class then then great if that is a hit class then great but if that is going out and having a walk for five minutes then that is absolutely perfect too hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. Please do spread the love by sharing this episode

Starting point is 00:09:51 with your friends and family. And if you want more, why not go back and listen to the full conversation with my guest. And if you enjoyed this episode, I think you will really enjoy my new bite-sized Friday email. It's called the Friday Five. And each week I share things that I do not share on social media. It contains five short

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Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #166 BITESIZE | How 10 Minutes of Exercise a Day Can Improve Mental Health | Dr Brendon Stubbs

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