The Liz Moody Podcast - Stanford Psychologist: Anyone Can Crave Exercise—Here's How

Episode Date: January 7, 2026

I used to dread doing any type of workout. I remember thinking, maybe I’m just naturally more lazy. But it turns out, we’re all wired for it—I was just approaching it all wrong. Today’s episode is going to turn you into the type of person who gets excited to move.  I’m thrilled to share this conversation with Dr. Kelly McGonigal, a Stanford professor, bestselling author, and someone who has spent decades studying the psychology and neuroscience of movement. Her work was pivotal in changing my relationship with working out. This episode isn’t about forcing yourself to work out harder. It’s about why we’ve been thinking about movement all wrong—and how to finally make it work with your brain instead of against it. 🎧 What you’ll learn: Why motivation is the wrong entry point for movement  What actually works to crave working out The wild impact movement has on preserving our dopamine levels as they decline with age How long it takes to enjoy working out The step counts of people who were depressed versus the step counts of people who felt full of meaning and purpose And so much more Check out the FREE “21 Days To Change Your Life Plan” we made for our listeners at LizMoody.com/January. If you liked this episode, check out this one: The Science Of Putting Together a Workout Routine To Hit YOUR Goals For more from Kelly McGonigal: Instagram @kellymariemcgonigal Website: www.kellymcgonigal.com Book: The Joy of Movement: How exercise helps us find happiness, hope, connection, and courage Ready to uplevel every part of your life? Order Liz’s book 100 Ways to Change Your Life: The Science of Leveling Up Health, Happiness, Relationships & Success now!  Connect with Liz on Instagram @lizmoody or online at www.lizmoody.com. Subscribe to the substack by visiting https://lizmoody.substack.com/welcome.Buy our cute sweatshirts, conversation cards, and more at https://shop.lizmoody.com/. Use our discount codes from our  highly vetted and tested brand partners by visiting https://www.lizmoody.com/codes.  To join The Liz Moody Podcast Club Facebook group, go to www.facebook.com/groups/thelizmoodypodcast. This episode is brought to you completely free thanks to the following podcast sponsors: Timeline: visit Timeline.com/Liz to claim my special offer. IQ Bar: text LIZ to 64000 for 20% off.  Pique: head to PiqueLife.com/LizMoody for 20% off. Lumebox: go to TheLumeBox.com/Liz for 40% off anytime. The Liz Moody Podcast cover art by Zack. The Liz Moody Podcast music by Alex Ruimy. Formerly the Healthier Together Podcast.  This podcast and website represents the opinions of Liz Moody and her guests to the show. The content here should not be taken as medical advice. The content here is for information purposes only, and because each person is so unique, please consult your healthcare professional for any medical questions. The Liz Moody Podcast Episode 394. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I turned to my friend and I said, I am so sad that we went to the gym already because it's usually something that I look forward to in the evenings. If you had told me five years ago that I would ever say that, I would tell you that you were insane. I used to dread doing any type of workout. I would put it off until the very end of the day. And then often, by that point, I'd be too burnt out and I would skip it all together. I remember thinking maybe I'm just not wired for this. Maybe some people are naturally more lazy and that's okay. I just need to make my people. with it. But it turns out we are all wired for it. I was just approaching it all wrong. Today's episode, and I promise this, even if you do not believe me, is going to turn you into

the type of person who gets excited to work out. Welcome to the Liz Moody podcast. I'm Liz, and as a longtime journalist, I have spent my entire career asking the uncomfortable questions that you want answered to give you the science back strategies that cut through all of the wellness BS so that you can get results, the results that you want, even if you are busy, even if you are tired, even if you are totally overwhelmed. I am so excited to share this conversation with Dr. Kelly McGonagall. Kelly is a Stanford professor, a best-selling author, and somebody who spent decades studying the psychology and the neuroscience of movement. Her work was pivotal in changing my personal relationship with working out. We're going to get into why motivation, willpower,

and discipline are the wrong entry points for movement and what actually works in We're going to get into the hidden benefits of movement that most people do not know about, including its absolutely wild impacts on preserving our dopamine levels as they decline naturally with age. We're going to talk about exactly how long it takes to enjoy working out to crave it. We're going to talk about these step counts of people who were depressed versus the step counts of people who felt full of meaning and purpose and happiness and life and so much more. This is not one of those episodes about powering through and forcing yourself to work out. It's about why we have been thinking about movement all wrong and how to finally,

finally make it work with your brain instead of against it. Also, if you are new to the podcast, welcome. You're joining us in the middle of our January transformation series. We've already covered the real reasons why it's so hard to lose weight in a healthy way and what to do to achieve the results that you want. We've covered tiny shifts that yield outsized results in terms of our health, our wealth and our happiness. Next week, we're getting into why manifestation doesn't work for most people and the three

simple ways that you can make it work for you. And we're also going over how to make everything that you eat healthier and more delicious. Make sure to check out those other episodes and then follow the Liz Moody podcast because all January long, really all year long, we're sharing science back tools to make 2026 the best year of your life. Kelly, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to have you here.

I have a lot of personal challenges around working out. It was one of the last things that I incorporated into my life. So I thought it would be really fun to start off with other people writing in what their challenges were around working out. And then you can give us some science and some advice. Okay. Okay. Let's start with just I can't motivate myself. What are some of the benefits of physical movement that most people might not know about maybe for that little motivational boost? Oh, well, there's actually a lot of great research on this. What motivates people to think they should exercise. There's certain things that motivate people the most to say to themselves, I should exercise. And then there's a whole different category of things that if you make them your reason for exercising, make it way more likely that you'll actually exercise, find something you enjoy, and stick with it. The motivations that do not work for doing anything except making you feel like I should be moving more are those related to appearance and weight. They feel motivating but they actually often are sabotaging. The motivations that actually get people to be more physically active and enjoy it

are to relieve stress or feel better immediately, right? An activity that makes you feel better while you're doing it or afterward. To spend time with people that you like, family, friends, or community, so a social reason, viewing movement as an opportunity to actually enjoy being a social version of yourself. Positive solitude, so you could flip it, viewing movement as a way to spend time with yourself, to take care of yourself, to let go of some of the rules about who you are and how you have to be, and to take on a meaningful challenge or to learn or grow in a way that's interesting to you, that kind of like that workout that's like, I don't know if I could do it. I don't know if I could

learn to do a handstand or if I could finish a 5K or whatever. it is, those are the motivations that actually help. And so I always say when people are thinking about, you know, starting to become more active to ask yourself, what's an activity that might be a fun or stress-relieving break for you? That would give you an opportunity to spend time either with other people or with yourself, or that feels like a meaningful, interesting challenge to take on. People are used to thinking of movement for health reasons. So you'll get all of those benefits. but you don't need to prioritize them, especially if you're not somebody who's thinking, I will make myself exercise today so that I can lower my blood pressure or whatever the health

motivation is. To your first point, I've heard you say that the way that a lot of us reinforce our exercise habit also reinforces our shame habit. Can you speak to that? Yeah, I mean, I think that, and this is not just for exercise, but for any sort of behavior change, people will often view it as a way to fix it. what is inadequate with them, and they view it as I'm doing this because there's something wrong with who I am, or there's something wrong with my body. And sometimes it could be related to

appearance or size. We think that exercise is the thing that's going to make our body okay. Or sometimes it's feeling like our body is betraying us. There's an illness or a disease that's coming that we have to prevent, or we have to slow down aging. And so we can view movement as this corrective force that that's going to give us control over something, a process that we are afraid of. And when you approach movement from those motivations, you are just reinforcing the sense that your body is not your friend. And I feel like a lot of times the way that people approach exercise reinforces this idea that this body is this thing you have to drag around or control or take care of instead of viewing your body as the vehicle through which you engage with life.

and every possible pleasure, every possible challenge, every possible breath, every moment of beauty or fun or surprise, you know, you only get to experience it because you are in this body. And also, I think it's really interesting that even if we can shame ourselves into like going to the gym, into moving, then we're just kind of making ourselves want to shame ourselves more in the future because we're like, oh, that works. Like saying really mean stuff to myself in my head makes me go. to the gym, so I'll do that in the future. And you just, even though you're doing this thing that should make you feel better and better, you're setting yourself up to feel worse and worse.

Yeah, because you're yoking two habits together. So you're yoking the habit of exercise to the habit of self-criticism or shame. And self-criticism and shame can drive behavior. But I don't like to talk of them as being motivating because they really are more a way of controlling yourself. And you get more and more the sense that like who I really am is the one who needs to be controlled, as opposed to feeling like who I really am is also somebody who can experience the authentic benefits of movement, who doesn't need to be tricked or coerced into it, that my body can be a vehicle for experiencing life in positive ways. I think even if you could be successful at it, there's a cost to strengthening that habit of self-criticism or shame. And that's, yeah, to me,

that's not worth the cost. Next one. I find every workout that I've tried boring. Yeah. Well, first of all, we should expand the definition of exercise or movement beyond a workout. One example that I love is there's this program called Rough Tail Runners where you can go to a shelter and you can check out a shelter dog and take them for a walk or run if you're a runner and the shelter is near a lake so you can go out around the park or the lake and people are so nice to you because you've got a dog and then you can tell them about the shelter and they're going to view you as a wonderful human being and you're helping this dog be social and they're more likely to get adopted like that's a really interesting way to move your body and become part of a community and feel good

about yourself. Does that qualify as a workout? I mean, it's not like something you think, all right, how many calories am I going to burn in this? There are a lot of different ways to engage with life through your body. And it can involve going places and doing things that just get your heart rate up a little bit that involve moving whatever parts of your body you're able to move. And so if every workout bores you, you know, I would say, like think about, well, what do you want to experience more of in your life? What's not boring? Do you find nature? you're not boring. Maybe you want to find a way to move outdoors. Do you find competition not boring? Maybe you need to find something that's really hard that you can get better at and then you can

beat other people at. There are probably a lot of different ways to approach this where you could actually start with the not boring part. What do you want to experience more of in your life? And there's probably a form of movement that will actually amplify that pleasure or that meaning. I feel like a core part of your thesis is that we should do whatever movement feels good for us. I hear you say this time and time again. How do you square that with the immense amounts of research around like cardiovascular workouts helping with heart health, strength training, helping with longevity and metabolic health, and the fact that we don't have that much time in a day. So we're really trying to maximize what we're getting for the time that we're putting in.

Yeah. I love this question because I'm sure you've never heard me say, all you need to do is whatever is the least amount. like something that's just so easy. Like there are some people in this space where like, you don't even need to break a sweat. Well, it depends what you're looking for. There's a whole range of benefits. Some are delivered from the least amount of intensity and the shortest duration. For example, the feel better effect. If you have been completely sedentary for a period of time and you do anything, moving

whatever parts of your body you're able to move, that get your heart rate up a little bit, or you're breathing more, you're using some muscles for just a couple of minutes. You will almost certainly be in a better mood and have more energy, and that feel-better effect tends to last for an hour or longer. It has a longer duration effect than like a shot of caffeine. Now, that is something that almost everyone can do. People can even do it in a hospital bed. However, if you want some of the other benefits of movement, um, For example, completely changing how you see yourself, tapping into a will to live when you're really struggling to find meaning in life, changing your brain in ways that make it more sensitive

to joy, easier to connect with others that acts like an antidepressant. You need different doses and different intensities to get some of these benefits. There was a review that was just published that was doing a meta-analysis of lots of studies looking at the dose of movement needed for an antidepressant effect, for people who are actually struggling with depression. The dose required to get a significant antidepressant effect was equivalent to walking for 30 minutes three times a week. So that's a little more than three minutes doing anything you want, but an intensity that's still pretty moderate. And it doesn't even necessarily have to be walking. There's a lot of things you can do that have a similar intensity.

yoga, swimming, playing with your dog or your kids. And that was a sufficient dose to have a clinically meaningful mental health benefit. And if you were to ask me for other things, I could point to a few outcomes where higher intensity and more duration might be a key lever that you want to pull. For example, recovering from addiction. The stimulus required to really change your brain in ways that undo some of the negative brain effects of long-term substance use, for example. And in my own experience for grief, you need more intensity or more duration. You know, I was able to use high-intensity interval training to get that kind of effect. And there's no part of me that has an inclination to work that hard.

Like, I'm not a runner. But because I have now I have decades of experience noticing the effects. of different types of movement on my mental health and my well-being and my physical health, I was able to tune in to recognizing that what I needed was to get my heart pounding harder than was comfortable for me. Does that feel good? What felt good, what still feels good is at the end of the workout when I'm lying on the ground and I'm feeling my heart. It's like some outside force. My ribcage is heaving and my heart is pounding and I'm gasping for breath. It's feels good to know I did that. And I know, intellectually, I know there's a biochemical change happening.

There's more endorphins, more endocannabinoids, more adrenaline, more dopamine, and things that are going to be really a wonderful antidote for something like depression or grief. But in that moment when I'm trying to do 50 burpees in two minutes, I'm not thinking this feels good. I'm not thinking I want to do this. And so I think we need a really a more complex, almost mature understanding of what feeling good means. Sometimes what feeling good means is I feel better about myself afterwards. And often the feeling good that I'm interested in is, okay, you just did whatever your movement is, whether it's a workout or something else. How do you feel about life? Do you feel like you are capable of dealing with whatever challenges you face?

do you, when you interact with someone, are you more likely to give them the benefit of the doubt? It's it easier to connect instead of feeling socially anxious? Do you feel more enthusiasm rather than dread for the rest of your day? That's a feel good that I'm really interested in because I believe that one of the benefits of movement is that it does tend to push us into this biological and psychological state that makes it easier to feel better about life. And again, it doesn't necessarily mean that. lifting the weight is going to feel good to your bicep in that moment. It's a different kind of thing. I'm genuinely confused how masterclass gets literally the absolute top people in every single field to

teach every single one of their classes. I use it when I want to learn things directly, like the cooking class from Thomas Keller has all of the wisdom that you would normally have to go to culinary school for. But also, I'm being honest, this is like a use case I don't hear a lot of people talking about. I'll just watch it for entertainment when I want to do something that's far more interesting than scrolling. Christina Aguilera taught me to sing. Shan Boudrum's Art of Mastering Confidence and Sex Appeal class is 10 out of 10. There's menopause classes with leading doctors. There's script writing with Mindy Kaly. Literally, you name it, they're on masterclass and it is such a good way to get off your phone, but have something that's like not quite as long or hard to

get into as a TV show or a movie and that it just keeps you entertained and interested. And you are learning. There are over 200 classes from the world's best. for just $10 a month when billed annually, and you get unlimited access to every class on the platform so you can learn at your own pace whenever you want on your phone, your computer, or even in audio mode, like a podcast. If you're looking to stop scrolling and start consuming entertaining content that makes you feel excited and helps you learn, Masterclass is it. And the best part, every membership comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee so you can start learning risk-free. Right now, our listeners get an additional 15% off any annual.

membership at masterclass.com slash Liz Moody. That's 15% off at Masterclass.com slash Liz Moody, masterclass.com slash Liz Moody. So how do we motivate ourselves in the moment to lift the weight? Is it that zoom out understanding of what this is going to do for us? Yeah, I think so. So there are two ways to do And I would say this for any type of behavior change too. You have to look for things you can do in the moment to maximize your ability to tolerate it or enjoy it. So for me, music, it's one of the easiest things to change about people's experience with movement. Most people have music that they love that immediately puts them in a better mood or makes them feel powerful. I think people listening might be like, oh, she thinks music is like a fun vibe. But there's actually a lot of science to how

music can help our emotional state and our physical abilities. So we're talking about movement. I wrote a book about movement. I could have written almost this exact same book about music in terms of how it improves mental health, improves energy, helps us connect with other people, helps us deal with difficult situations and emotions. Music does the same thing. And at the immediate level, when you hear a song that you enjoy, it is the fastest way to naturally increase dopamine and endorphins in the brain. So you're going to immediately get this boost in your neurochemistry that makes you feel happier, more hopeful, more optimistic. Now, you could also choose music that makes you feel calm or grateful or uplifted in a different way. Music has so many different feelings to it,

but you can automatically create that feel better effect without any type of, like you don't have to do anything. Like with movement, you have to actually move your body. So there's still that threshold you have to get over. With music, you just have to hear it or feel it, listen to it. And is this unique to each person or are we looking like for a beats per minute type of thing? Well, it's both. Okay. So there are a lot of studies looking at trying to create the ideal song to make people feel a certain way versus just telling people to pick their own playlist. Telling people to pick their own playlist is what works best. There's no like one perfect BPM with a certain type of melody or harmony or like resonance that is going to be better than having

everybody pick their own favorite song. For example, when looking at how music can help people who are in physical pain. And you're always going to be better off listening to a song you love to experience less pain intensity and distress than if I were to create like the ideal pain relieving neural changing song. Although for movement, there actually is a BPM range. that is most likely to make people feel motivated to move and happy to move. It's the 120 to 140. People can just go to Spotify and type in a BPM. Okay. So thing one is add in music. If we're trying to do some type of workout that we maybe don't like, but is good friends. That's right. We're trying to make something that is a little uncomfortable or a little unfun, more pleasurable in the moment. So music,

doing it with someone whose company you enjoy, doing it in a place that inspires you. So for a lot of people, that's nature. I tend not to over-emphasize rewarding yourself. That's a kind of like, it depends on your personality type. If you can think of celebrating movement with something that you really love and you want to give yourself that after you move, that can be a nice way to start to build a movement habit, but really thinking of it is celebration rather than manipulation. Like, I'm not allowed to watch this episode on Netflix until I exercise or unless I exercise. maybe more like, I'm going to move my body today and then to celebrate that I did that, I'm going to do this other thing that I love.

So almost like same thing, but we're talking about it in a different way. Because you don't want to reinforce the idea that who you really are is the person who doesn't want to move your body. You really want to leave room to feel the part of you who wants this, who values it, who's choosing it, and that you're like, oh, I like that part of myself. And I want to celebrate that. Not like that part of myself is so minuscule that she's never going to do it on her own. So I've got to trick her into doing it. That's so interesting because there's so much research on identity and habit

formation. And so you're saying like we need to be able to tap in. Do you think all of us have a part of our identity that does enjoy movement? It's an open question. So I always like to hold room for people's experience that is really different or really difficult. I have I have had a number of people say that they don't think there is any form of movement that they would ever enjoy. But I've never had somebody say it to me in a conversation where I could explore it. So I think things like, would you enjoy a hug? Because that's a movement. Would you enjoy playing with a puppy? Would you enjoy seeing a place that you wanted to be and finding a way to get there through your body, you know, whether you're in a chair or walking or however you're getting there. I feel like

most people, when they're able to connect movement to meaning or movement to the things in life that they value, biologically, human beings, our entire physiology rewards us from moving. And evolutionarily, it does that because it wants us to engage with life, to interact with other people because we are a social interdependent species. Our bodies and brains want us to have the energy and persistence to find food and share food, to do manual labor if we need to. So there's a lot of things in our brains and bodies that reward us for moving. And you know, because you've read my book, people often assume I'm not talking about people with physical pain or physical disabilities or severe mental illness or grief or depression, the things that can make movement really, really

hard either to initiate or to find a version of that works for your body. I want to very explicitly say I am talking about people with severe disabilities, stroke survivors, Parkinson's disease, people of all sizes, people of all ages across the lifespan. It just might look different and what you're able to move and how you're able to sense it. One of the programs that I really love is called Dance for Parkinson's disease. And in a single dance class, you might have people who are very early in the progression of the disease, just a little bit of changes to their movement, but they can still walk and move freely. And maybe they're with their caregivers who have a lot of range of motion and expressivity. And you will see all the way to people who are in a wheelchair

who need the assistance of their caregiver to raise their arm, who are really using their full effort to connect with eye contact and to express with their face. Those are movements and they're experienced as meaningful and they're experienced as dance and beautiful. You know, the question of whether there's a form of movement that everyone can enjoy or whether there's a form of exercise that is accessible no matter what your situation, I do tend to lean on the side of, I believe it's possible. It's so easy to then hear when someone says it's possible to hear what's. To hear what someone is saying is whatever your challenges are, they aren't real or you should, you know. So give people room to have their own experience. I think a lot is possible.

For me, the thing that I struggle with is the stuff that I enjoy doing. So like on the flip side of movement, I did not start working out until very late in my life. But I would say I was even pretty like sedentary. I like to like read a book and lay is my ideal thing. But the types of movement when I can get myself to move are much more like walking, dancing, maybe playing tennis, but I have interviewed enough people on this podcast at this point to know the benefits of like getting my heart rate really up and doing strength training. And so I'm like doing the movement I enjoy and I'm like, this isn't fulfilling the requirements of the movement that's going to have me live the life that I want to live in the long run. So same. Like if I could just

dance all day, I'd be really happy. If that were the only form of exercise I ever had to do, I strength train. Lifting weights is hard. It's not natural. But it's like what you said. If I want to live the life, if I want in the future to have the strength to do things, if I want to live a long time. And I guess I'm the kind of person who just feels like who you are to yourself matters. And if you really truly believed that your future self is going to be so grateful to you for strength training, an hour a week, instead of whatever that hour, another. hour of lying down and enjoying that, which hopefully you also are giving to yourself. I feel like

thinking of these things we do for our future self, our future self is going to be so glad we did them and that we don't have to do everything. You know, you do what you can, but it's also really important to spend time. Like if you love reading, you're not going to regret the books that you read. It's okay also to make tradeoffs and that like movement is included in that. We're not maximizing only for the future. You wouldn't want to spend 10 hours a day, tightly controlling what you eat and how you move and now I have to go into a sleep chamber. You could maximize your day now for some future, but what you're going to remember at the end of your life also, you need these experiences that you value, that become your cherished memories. And a lot of them

might involve things that are not health producing or promoting in the traditional way. Well, that's a nice segue into, I want to double click in on another thing you said, which was that we could do it with other people. Like, that's one of the ways to get ourselves to do these activities that we maybe find a little bit less desirable. And science shows that exercise is one of the best ways to bond with other people. So is this the missing secret to making best friends that nobody's talking about? I think it is.

music also would, you know, music and movement and doing good, working towards a shared goal. Those are really the three. So a dance marathon for charity with your friends is like the holy trifectad. So good. It could be. When we were evolving our brains and our bodies, moving with other people meant doing things to protect ourselves and our community. And so when we move together, if we're in an exercise class or we're taking a walk together or we're moving heavy boxes together, our bodies and brains instantly enter this state. I call it Wii mode because I read a paper by Japanese neuroscientists. They dubbed that term we mode. And I think that's like a really good way to understand what this is where I am no longer totally identified as a me. That's just like me separate. My body. I'm disconnected. I'm independent. I'm isolated. My brain and body, it like reaches out and

forms a representation with you in which I just sense myself as being connected to you, like our brains will actually reach out and connect with each other. So conversation does it too. So we might be experiencing wemo now that we've been talking for a little while where my brain activity will somehow influence your brain activity and your brain activity influence his mind. It's not just even that like we're having a shared endorphin rush or something like that. It's like somehow we've become part of a connected system. Like almost in a Jungian like collective consciousness. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. And our hearts will do it too. Our heart rhythms will align. Our heart rate and our heart rate variability. And people can sense it. There's no way for me to know what's happening in your brain that we know of. But when people are in the state of we mode and there's neural synchrony going on and heart synchrony going on, people will say, I feel so connected to that person.

I feel connected to something bigger than myself. I trust you more. I like you more. We're clearly able to sense this somehow when you move with other people because this is one of the fastest ways to enter. It's a felt sense of connection and belonging that also is not dependent on ways we might usually strive for social connection. So it's not dependent on social status. It's not dependent on approval. It's so interesting.

I love this research because I've used other people to help me get my movement in in the past. So like I've been like, oh, I won't go for a hike by myself. I won't go to the gym by myself. So I'll bring another person in and that will motivate me. But this almost shows that it goes in the reverse way too, where if I want to increase my bond with other people, I can bring movement in. So I'm bringing people into my movement to increase my movement. But I'm also bringing movement into my people to increase my relationship with those people. Yeah.

I mean, a lot of people are lonely. And even people who have close relationships, like maybe they have kids or a partner or family that they're caring for, there often is a real hunger for a type of social belonging that is less role dependent. That's more about there's a place where I can go where people are happy to see me. There's a place I can go where I have an opportunity to help or encourage others and other people will cheer me on, but it's less related to duty or obligation or less likely to involve conflict, emotional conflict. So I think movement communities are a really great way to fill that need, whether it's at a gym or an exercise class or a training group or just people who are doing things together using their bodies. And would it be fair to say

if you have a friend and you want to turn them into a best friend? Yes, move together. If you move with them, something will happen literally in your brain on a physiological level that would increase that best friend vibe? Yeah. And studies show that after moving together, people have different types of conversation too. So part of it's biochemical. But I mean, you also need to leverage that a little bit too. So these studies showing that you're more likely to disclose something personal and feel okay about that if you're going for a walk and if you're not being active. So I think, yes, you should do that. And then also you should notice that, like, after I've taught a dance class, I'm way more social than I am before I've taught it. So I've learned to stay after class and use that

time to connect with people because I'm a different version of myself. And a lot of people experience that. That movement makes it easier to be the person they want to be in terms of social connection. So facilitate the situation and then take advantage of the situation. Okay. I love that. The other thing that I want to talk about is I've heard from you that it takes six weeks of exposure at four times a week to actually enjoy something. So is one of the reasons that we maybe find working out boring that we just haven't done it long enough. So that, let me tell you what that research comes from. It's not to enjoy anything. Sadly, it's to enjoy exercise.

So this comes from me trying to figure out why some people get a stronger exercise high than other people. So human beings seem to be rewarded by our brains for persisting at physical activity. But not everybody gets the same endorphin endocannabinoid dopamine response to physical activity. So I came up with this number based on research showing that if you are not active, you won't always feel amazing the first time you go for a walk or take an exercise class. And you've heard people say like, oh, I feel amazing after a run. it's like, oh, my worries are gone, and I feel incredible. And a lot of people, if they have not been active, this is not their experience. Their brains are not used to rewarding them for activity.

So my question was, how long is it going to take to get to that? And it looks like in both the animal and human research that if you persist for about six weeks, you see meaningful changes, people are enjoying movement more while they're doing it. They feel a stronger positive response afterward, so you're more likely to get that traditional high. And then really importantly, your brain is going to change structurally in ways that make it easier to not just enjoy exercise, but to enjoy any of the pleasures or meaningful experiences in life. So changes in things like how many dopamine receptors you have available in your brain. It's funny, when I first started talking about this stuff, nobody had ever even heard of dopamine. Now I feel like there's a lot

more information out there, but I still think most people don't know that your dopamine receptors die off as you age. Yeah, they declined by up to 13% with each decade, which shocked me. So dopamine receptor availability is pretty important. It's also the case that we can lose availability of endorphin, endocannabinoid receptors, all the receptors in your brain that make it easier to experience positive emotions and pain relief and stress relief and social connection. So as we age, we lose the number of receptors that are available. So even if your brain is producing endorphins and dopamine, you're not going to feel it in the same way because it's not just their presence that matters. The brain chemicals need to hit receptors that then change how they're talking to other neurons.

And it's that change in brain activity that often produces the big effect, the change in how you feel or how you're interacting with people. So yeah, so exercise, it's the only thing that I found that increases dopamine. receptor availability that you can do easily on your own. I found this absolutely fascinating. So just explain very clearly what that means, because it's not just going to impact your enjoyment of exercise. It's going to impact your enjoyment of every single part of life. Yeah. Yeah. And this is why I think exercise of all forms has been shown to have an antidepressant benefit, something that may actually lift you out of depression or it'll certainly help with anything else you might be doing, like medication or therapy. And this benefit has been shown for like every modality. It's really because moving your

body in ways that require you to use energy, there are probably two ways that this is happening. One is this neurochemical. As you get this persistence high, your brain is learning how to reward you for meaningful experiences and pleasurable experiences. But also when you move your body, your muscles secrete all of these chemicals that can move through your body. You're not going to move bloodstream cross the blood-brain barrier and affect your brain in a way that's similar to medications that you might take that affect your brain. And when you move your body, some of the chemicals that get release into your bloodstream, they help new neurons grow, they protect the health of existing brain cells, they protect the health of your brain receptors that you

need in order to have these positive effects. And they increase growth between brain regions that are really important for stress resilience and also important things. Like, you know, learning and memory. And that also has an accumulative effect. So every time you move your body, your muscles are pumping these chemicals out into your bloodstream that act on your brain with a training effect. And the way that I like to think about it is, if you know anything about exercise, you know that your muscles adapt. If I were to lift a heavy weight, you know what you've seen bodybuilders. You lift something heavy enough. Your muscle fibers get bigger. You grow new blood vessels to help feed the muscles.

The muscles change in how they use energy. There's a training effect. It's a physical, functional effect. Same thing happens with your heart. When you do cardio, your heart changes, you know, how strong it contracts, how much blood it pumps, the blood vessels that are connected, all of that. So your brain has a similar training effect when you exercise a real structural, functional change. And I think the reason people aren't aware of this is because not an enough.

people are paying attention to how movement affects their energy, their attention, and their mood. But just like it's really obvious that when you use your body, you are challenging your muscles or your heart, you're breathing more. We feel our heartbeat so we know our heart is working. Your brain is also working when you exercise and your muscles working is having this incredible effect on your brain as well. And so your brain changes as much as your muscles do and as much as your heart does when you exercise, an intensity that is modestly to moderately challenging or harder. So as soon as you cross the threshold of, this is so easy I could do it forever. You have to hit that just a little bit harder than that, at least 20 minutes and more than once a

week. And I'm convinced now that that's probably the threshold at which you'll see this training effect on the brain. That will also make you like exercise more. And in six weeks, which I do think it's important because it's like for me, having the faith and the science that it will come in time if I just keep doing it is really, really helpful. Like, I'm not going to feel it immediately and that's okay. And if I just keep up with it for the set amount of time, six weeks feels very doable, then I will start to have those intrinsic rewards. I think most people do. But there are also some people whose brains and bodies seem to be exercise resistant. it doesn't mean you can experience a lot of the benefits I'm talking about.

And by exercise resistant, I mean they don't get as fast improvements in their muscles or their heart or their body composition or their blood pressure, the physical things we're used to looking at. And they also might not get as strong persistence high or the dopamine and endorphins. But that doesn't mean that they won't feel incredible about themselves after doing something hard. They might still say that the, experience of putting one foot in front of the other when every cell in my body is saying, stop, you can't do this. And the knowledge that I can do it has helped me get through things in life I wasn't sure I could get through. That is just as much a reason for me to say,

move your body than some of the biological or the health benefits. And again, I feel like there are other things we could talk about besides movement. Movement is just really good at doing some of these existential things for us, too, that I'd like the sense that you are capable of handling the challenges in your life or of knowing that you're not alone. Can we recover lost dopamine receptors or are we just preventing them from going away? You know, there are studies showing that you can recover receptor available. This is one of those, you know, sometimes when you want to dive deep into the science and you just cannot, like there's just not an answer for the question you have. One of the questions I had is like, are they gone?

Are they gone, gone? Or are they just not available? But if studies listening in their 60s or 70s, can they get it back? So that's what I wanted to do. Yeah. The research that makes me think whether they disappeared and they're coming back or whether they just became unavailable, which seems to be maybe more like what's happening, is research looking at people who have lost dopamine receptors because of substance use,

which is one of the worst things that you can do for your dopamine system is some substances that really manipulate the dopamine system. There are studies showing that exercise restores the dopamine availability. And that process of destroying the dopamine system, my sense is that the substance use is going to be a harder hit than aging. So if I'm looking for proof of concept, the fact that people who have done one of the things that's most destructive to your natural function and are able to recover

and experience in that recovery less anhodonia, so less feeling like I can't experience any pleasure or joy in life, increased sensitivity to rewards like a sunset is beautiful again. I enjoy spending time with friends and family. I enjoy a good meal. I enjoy being praised or appreciated by others, these ways that we measure the actual benefits of having more dopamine receptors available. I mean, you see those benefits too. So some biological change. and like the really meaningful consequence of that. Well, and the thing that I keep thinking about is all of the people I know, myself sometimes included, who are experiencing that anadonia,

because we scroll so much on social media these days and that impact on our dopamine. And if you're saying that exercise can help us get rid of that feeling and experience more joy and meaning and pleasure in our lives, that's huge. Yeah, and it's interesting because movement is like this huge biological force that even if you were doing something that you hated, you would probably get a lot of these benefits. In fact, there are even some studies where they try to make exercise as unrewarding as possible and see if you can still get an immediate emotional uplift. You do. Even like one study, they had people walk up and downstairs in a dark, cold stairwell, people still felt better. And like, that doesn't sound fun. And one study,

they had the exercise coach be really mean to you. It's like, that's a terrible study. And they still felt better afterward. So, you know, don't look for the instructor who's going to be mean to you, but it still works. Yeah. When you think about strength and resilience, like your ability to feel energized, to recover well, to stay strong as you get older, what do you think that actually comes from? Most people say working out are good nutrition, and yes, of course that matters. But there is a biological foundation underneath all of that that most people are completely overlooking. I have been diving deep into this lately with the team at timeline, and what I've learned has genuinely shifted how I think about my own health. Every single movement that your body makes, every step, every workout,

every muscle contraction depends on energy produced at the cellular level. And at the center of that is your mitochondria. Here's the thing that nobody tells you, certainly nobody told me, starting around age 30, our mitochondria naturally become less efficient. More get damaged, more become sluggish, and over time that impacts your energy, your strength, your recovery, and your resilience. Most of us respond by pushing more. We're like noticing these things and we're adding in more protein. We're trying to fix it with more supplements. We're trying to do harder workouts. And those things do help. But timelines research suggests that we also need to be supporting the cellular machinery underneath. And that is exactly what their supplement mitopure does.

It contains urolithin A, which helps your body clear out damage, mitochondria and support healthier ones so that your cells can produce energy more efficiently. Because this is happening to your cells, it's going to impact your entire body, your immune system, your muscles. One study found that taking mitochondria increased muscle strength by 12% in four months with no change in exercise routine, it's going to impact your energy, your sleep, your skin, your cell health impacts all of this, and urolithin egg keeps your cells healthy. Timeline has done over 15 years of research and testing on this one product, Eurolith A, which by the way, most of us lack the gut bacteria to synthesize naturally. That's why many of us

need to supplement it to get the benefits. This has become a staple supplement for me. It is my top way to support how I want to look and feel as I age. Support yourselves and how you age with mitopure gummies from Timeline. Visit Timeline.com slash Liz and save up to 39% on your Midopier Gummies. That is timeline.com slash Liz. The other study that I want to call out that I heard from you that just stopped me in my tracks was when researchers took people who walked 10,000 steps a day and they had them walk 5,000 steps a day, it decreased their sense of meaning and purpose in their lives. Can you speak to that? So this was a study. They took people who were moderately active. So it wasn't like they were all doing

exactly 10,000 steps a day. And I don't even remember what exactly the average was. I think it might have been around like 9,000. And then they said, we need you to act more sedentary. So you're not allowed to exercise on purpose. I need you instead of like taking the stairs, if there's an elevator and escalator, you better take that. I need you to become more sedentary. So it wasn't like they also gave them a prescription. Like you are only allowed 5,000 steps a day. And when you hit that, you have to sit down for the rest of the day. It was literally people who were moderate. I mean, it was below the standard recommendation. These were not athletes. And then they forced themselves to become more sedentary. I believe the average they hit was in that 5,000 range. And that level of less activity reduced

their meaning in life and made them more depressed. And it was a really, it was a bad thing to do for their mental health. And the thing that I've heard people say in social media that is wrong is that that 5,000 number is how many steps you need to take to not be depressed or to experience meaning in life? No, that was just the average that they had reduced their activity to. And at that level, it was having a depressant effect. So it's not like you just take one step more than that and you're good. It's that when you're active and you become less active, it's really bad for your mental health. And if you are not very active and you're able to boost it even a little bit, it's probably going to be really good for your mental health. And there are many more studies

showing that. There are very few studies showing the negative effects of becoming less active because it's really hard to recruit people for those studies. And I've come across a number of researchers who have said, we can't pay people enough to stop exercising. Which is like a study unto itself. That was the thing that stuck out to me is we're not talking about a huge step different. And if somebody said, take a few thousand more steps a day and you'll experience more meaning in life, I would be like, sign me up. But also, I do want to highlight that I'm not a big fan of tracking. And I think sometimes if we set a goal, that goal obscures the actual benefit.

So we're just trying to hit a number instead of noticing how we feel or, okay. You know, when I hear people say things like I didn't hit my step count. And so instead of going to bed, I just like walked around the house. Yeah. That's probably not the kind of thing I would encourage. I would think more like what are the choices you can make in your everyday life that are actually connected to something you want to do? That's why I like this step challenge though.

Like I do it with my sister often and it's fun first of all because it's bonding for us. If we both get it, then I get to buy us both massages. So I guess I win and lose both ways. But I like it because if I have this goal with my sister and I know if I don't hit my 10K and then I I disappoint her, then I'm much more likely to, like, park far away at the grocery store or go walk to my cafe instead of drive. It makes, it motivates me throughout the day. Is that an okay use of? No, I love, well, first of all, everything isn't okay. You know, I always say you are your own data point. Yeah. You discover what works best for you. Yeah. I just encourage people to track

slightly different things, like how do you feel about your relationship with your sister? And I could imagine that type of challenge. It not only makes getting your steps in more fun and meeting. meaningful. Like it's kind of nice to have a positive thing to bond with with a sibling or a friend. That's not really high stakes. Yeah. But gives you a chance to check, like you're going to check in with each other every day. There could certainly be relationships that would benefit from that sort of challenge. You'd be more likely to check in every day. Checking in every day is going to be its own kind of reward. So there are lots of ways to do this that are probably going to be helpful. The thing that I discourage is whatever is the least helpful version where you are, you've totally, you've totally,

forgotten that movement can have any kind of intrinsic value and you don't feel good about yourself unless you've hit a number that is probably arbitrary. Well, and that goes back to are we training ourselves to be motivated by shame? Because that's not going to be beneficial in the long run. Yeah. Okay. I wanted to ask you, you've mentioned grief a few times. I experienced grief in a big way for the first time in the past year of my life. And one of the top pieces of advice people kept telling me is you have to move. Like you want to sweat, you want to work your heart. Is there science behind that? Yeah. You know, grief is different for everybody, but one of the common changes during grief and particularly complicated grief, that kind of grief where grief is always awful, but sometimes grief is

so intrusive, so disruptive. It feels like a longing and a torture and like every, moment where things are not the way they're supposed to be and things that should be pleasurable, feel painful. Like with that kind of grief where life feels wrong, often what's happening in your brain is you see such a disruption of the dopamine system, right? Because dopamine, people like to talk about it as good and bad in different ways. But it really is our essential moment-to-moment will to live. And complicated grief is so disruptive to the dopamine system.

it actually impairs your ability to initiate action and movement. Everything becomes harder. So one of the reasons why movement is so important for grief is because biologically, a lot of times people are feeling a kind of depression and despair that affects our ability to literally engage with life, a kind of will to live. And often it's accompanied by this kind of an hedonia where things that should be pleasurable just don't feel pleasurable. And it becomes harder also to imagine a future.

that is something worth striving for. The brain pulls us into a past, often that we're either trying to relive, but no matter how much we go to the memory, it isn't the same. And so that's painful. Or we're going to the past to try to change it. Like, what if I had done this differently? Maybe I could have avoided this loss. And so there's such a pull to the past that is painful rather than healing often.

and we need something that physiologically helps us both approach life in the present moment and move forward. And so moving, you know, it's one of those things that can break through that biochemical aspect of grief that also has a metaphorical meaning to it. You know, human beings are really, really good at metaphors, moving forward, facing the future one step at a time, heading in a direction, the lifting something that's hard, carrying something heavy. These things that we do in exercise, they teach us that we can do it. And then often, it's not always the case. I'm thinking about this one woman in my dance class whose husband had died.

And she wrote me this letter saying that she had thought it wasn't possible for her to be happy anymore. But she noticed that she was smiling in dance class. and that was really meaningful for her because she had thought it really wasn't possible anymore to be happy. And it wasn't even that she was feeling happy. I mean, I didn't interrogate her about her experience, but she didn't say, and I was feeling so happy. She said, I noticed I was smiling,

and that made me realize it was possible to be happy. You know, so those things can happen too through movement experiences. Let's go back to the reasons that a lot of people find it difficult to work out, why they don't have consistent exercise routines. By the time work is over, I just don't have any energy left. Yeah, this is real. So there are a couple of ways I could think about problem solving for this. One is mental and one is strategic. I often tell people if you can make time to move earlier in the day, it's really ideal because the way that it changes

your physiology or the rest of the day, you get a lot of benefits that's going to be. You get a lot of benefits that's to give you more energy for the whole rest of the day and make you a better version of yourself. So strategically, somebody who has that problem, I would be really interested in brainstorming. Is it possible to move earlier in the day? Maybe it's not. And so then you have to think about the mindset. And this is the fact that when you don't move your body, you enter a different metabolic state. Well, actually, there are two possibilities here. One is you've been moving all day, doing physical labor that's not meaningful, not fun, and repetitive. That's a separate problem we can get to. But let's go with one possibility, which is that you actually have been using your emotions and

your mind and your mental stamina, but you haven't been particularly physically active. That puts you in a metabolic state that creates an impediment to moving. It's like a threshold you have to overcome. Your body interprets not moving as like a low availability. of energy, and it actually discourages you from moving. You know, I've heard some people come up with explanations for why the body and brain does this. It's, like, important to conserve energy. And so you, like, go into sleep mode or, like, low battery mode so that you don't expend this little energy you have left. And in low battery mode, it's like, you know, if your phone says you've got one percent left, it's not going to want to open a really energy expensive app. So that's a state we're often in

in at the end of a day if we've been doing emotional labor or mental labor or just deal with stress, but we haven't been moving our bodies. You're in a state where your body and brain say you don't have any energy left, so don't do anything. It is not true. I don't want to say it's a lie, but it's a protective state that if you challenge it by moving, you will discover you have more energy once you've started moving. I think it's wonderful to trust your body. But sometimes our body gives us signals that aren't accurate reflections of what's going on, whether it's related to food and appetite, sleep, emotions, movement. Sometimes the signals we're getting are not reliable. And this is a big signal that is often unreliable. So I would say you don't have the energy before you do it.

So give yourself like three minutes, one song, you know, do that three minute feel better test and say you're allowed to stop as soon as you want. And if you have a version of movement that you know is going to be available to you, like maybe you have an app that you use at home or there's a block that you walk around, it's something you can do and say, I only have to do a couple minutes. And then if I really don't have the energy, of course I can quit. Most people find that they do have the energy, that they needed to flip the switch out of that metabolic state. Now, if you actually don't have the energy in the sense that you've been expending physical energy all day, doing like physical labor, you know, maybe you work in a warehouse, something like that. Often, what I would say is, well, why are you telling yourself that you have to work out afterwards? I would say, what do you need? What is your soul need? Who do you need to spend time with? And maybe there's a version of that that is somewhat physically active. But likely you don't need the type of movement. that you might think, and now I have to hit the gym and lift other heavy things,

maybe what you need to do is play or compete or listen to wonderful music or be outdoors or spend time with someone you care about. And then I would say, like, is there a version of doing that that involves some type of movement that feels like it balances what you've been doing with your body all day that has drained your energy? You could also pick it based on emotional effort and energy too. Like if at work you have to put on, you have to be like very happy and upbeat all the time, maybe you need a workout that allows you to scream or be aggressive or be by yourself and be exactly how you want to be. Or maybe the work that you do, you have to be so focused. Things are very serious. You're concentrated. You're controlled. And you need a form of movement where like nobody cares

is what you do and you're allowed to make a mistake. And again, it renews your energy in a different way. You might have no energy because you were that wound up at work or that performative at work, but something that gives you the ability to do the antidote to that is going to be so renewing and energizing. And again, if you expand your mindset of what we're talking about here, it's easier to think about what that activity might be. You mentioned working out in the morning A constant question I get is when is the best time to work out? And you have really unique thoughts on that. I think based on the unique benefits that you see movement having. Can you share those? I think starting at the beginning of the day is great because it's giving you an immediate neurochemistry reset that benefits most people and that you are going to be entering a state where you are feeling better about handling challenges. You are going to feel better able to connect with other people. If you have anxiety, you're going to be less anxious. if you have low mood, you're going to be more optimistic and hopeful. And why wouldn't you want to be able to give that to like everything else in your life or everyone

else in your life? I think that that's a good reason to do it in the morning. People often will experience the benefits for many hours afterwards. But I also think if you're looking for another good time, it's the time you need to reset. I talk to a lot of people who work in law enforcement who need a major, major physiological reset. They do not. not want to come home the version of themselves that they are at work. And exercise can be a really great way if you don't want to be as vigilant. If you don't want to be as, you know, your mindset of always prepared for something to go wrong or the worst possible scenario, you want to be a version of yourself that is open, that is relaxed or playful and loving. Movement is a really great

chance to reset everything, all systems. And so I think, you know, that's just one example, but it might be the case that you are aware of a time in your day where it's really important to reset because you want to be a certain version of yourself or you want to create a boundary so that you aren't taking a certain version of yourself or mindset into the time that you spend with yourself or into your evening or your sleep. So that could be an amazing time to prioritize movement. Yeah, I've been working out in my after. after work period. And I think it's because my job, and I think a lot of jobs these days, we tend to think about them all the time. They definitely bleed into our off work hours. And I'm trying to use it as a

hard stop of like, those were my work hours. And now this is entering my non-work hours. It's been really helpful for me. I hear from a lot of parents who are like, there is simply not enough time in the day. There are not enough hours to work out. What would you say to them? Yeah. Sometimes there are not. Sometimes when people ask this question, I wonder if they want somebody to say, well, you have to anyway. I'm never going to be the person who says that. Well, it's actually, wait, that's really interesting because I do think there's almost like, I have parent friends where I think something they're struggling with is a deprioritization of self. And I wonder if they're looking for somebody else to say it's okay to prioritize yourself at the expense of this other thing. That's a hypothesis one has. Sometimes, you know, there have been periods in my life related to family

responsibilities where I didn't have time to eat. And it was like a crisis mode. And then, you know, there are other periods of life where the responsibilities are maybe a little more negotiable. And there are some choices that you make. And at the expense of, just because you spend time doing something that isn't obviously caring for a family member or obviously for their benefit rather than yours, that doesn't mean it's at the expense of your relationship with them or your ability to be a good parent or family member. We need so many different social and emotional and physical nutrients in our lives. And just like we know parents need to sleep to some degree, nobody would actually argue you should never sleep 24 hours a day. The same is going to be true for

other nutrients. Movement is one of them. So I know that there are people who they have to make that mindset switch, that it's okay to not spend every second of every day, obviously in service of others. But I also think that, you know, we go through different seasons of our lives and we're always making choices and what movement might look like at a certain period in your life. It might be you find a way to move in relationship with other people, the people in your life that you have to take care of. Or you find a way to be more physically active in the tasks that you're doing to take care of your home. There's a great study showing that housework is physical exercise that gives you the health benefits of going to the gym, particularly if you view it that way. And sometimes we are engaging in our life and there are opportunities to move our bodies while we're doing that.

and you could view that as something that is not just bad for you, but that could actually be good for you. There's so many different ways to solve this problem. If there's a parent listening who wants to hear that you are allowed to take time for yourself to move your body, every benefit in the world you can imagine, I'm going to say, please do it. You don't need permission, but you have permission, you have encouragement. But at the same time, everything is a trade-off. You have to ask yourself, what am I going to be glad that I did and what matters most to me? Is there any advice you would give people who generally just don't feel like they have enough time in the day? Because that's something I hear a lot these days especially.

A couple of things. One is it's sometimes real. The advice that I often give is what's the smallest meaningful dose of what you need? And is that possible? Smallest meaningful and possible, that's a really good combination. Like for movement, I always say three minutes, like the length of one song. If you can find a way to move your body in three minutes, you're going to benefit from it. It's a very small dose that makes people healthier and happier.

For a different thing that you need, it could be a different activity, a different connection with someone. What's the smallest meaningful dose that makes you feel like I made a difference today? Or I got to spend time with someone who encouraged me today. Or I got to use my creativity today. and to trust small meaningful doses because there's actually a whole field of research on daily uplifts. And these are really small positive events in your day, like somebody thanked you, like a 15 second uplift, or you notice something beautiful in nature and you appreciated it.

Or I would add to that, like moving for three minutes to a song you love. And there is a consequence of uplifts that is so much big. bigger than you would expect when people appreciate them. So if you see something beautiful nature but you didn't really notice because you're also on your phone, there's not going to be much of a benefit. But if you stop and you're like, oh, wow, that's it. Like, that's all you really need to do. Or someone thanked you instead of immediately thinking, oh, well, I didn't really do anything and they're probably just being nice. If they thank you and you're like, oh, what I did matter. That's good. People tend to be in a better mood for sometimes hours after

they report this event. You know, these are studies where, if you can imagine a really annoying study where you give people permission to text you like 15 times a day at random intervals. And when they do, you have to be like, here's what I'm doing, here's what I'm thinking, here's what I'm feeling. So studies like that is where we get this evidence about the benefit of uplifts. And it also interrupts worry. It makes people feel less anxious. After an uplift, people are less likely to isolate themselves from others, they're less likely to feel like they don't have the motivation or energy to get anything done. You know, all these different ways that people have measured, basically, how are you doing now? And so I think sometimes uplifts just happen to us. Like you can't make

someone thank you, but you can certainly choose these small, meaningful doses of things that bring you pleasure or joy or meaning. And when people don't have a lot of time, I would say, so there's something in psychology called pseudo inefficacy. Have you ever heard this term? I only know about it because I also study compassion. And one of the biggest barriers to getting people to feel empathy or help others is they think that what they do doesn't matter. And the term for that is pseudo inefficacy. Pseudor is it doesn't make a difference. So if you think that listening to me when I'm suffering and you can't fix my problem, if you think that listening to me doesn't actually make a difference. If you don't understand that I now feel like I'm not alone, I feel encouraged,

you're not going to listen to me because you have the false belief that the only thing that really matters is if you can take away the source of my suffering. Or if you think that donating enough money to save one person's life doesn't matter because you couldn't save everyone's life, you won't donate. That's pseudo inefficacy. I feel like a lot of people have pseudo-in-efficacy both for movement and for all sorts of other positive things where they have in their mind a dose that is way higher than what we actually need to make a difference to ourselves or to make a difference to others. You have to learn to trust small moments and small actions more. I think a lot of that speaks to another thing that I heard from a lot of people too, which is I have all or nothing

thinking. So I feel like if I can't get in an ideal workout, I don't want to do it at all. Yeah, that all or nothing thinking doesn't serve us. in a lot of scenarios. Is there a way to kind of turn that off? Is that just about trusting that like smaller doses matter? We have to pay attention. There's a cost to choosing to do nothing. And people often are making only the comparison between like what are the benefits if I do

five minutes versus an hour? And they're like, oh, look at that huge gap. Which may or may not be true. For some benefits, maybe you need that hour. Definitely not for all benefits. But you're looking at that benefit gap. And it's like, oh, that's so big. What's the point?

well, maybe you need to look at the gap between zero and something. Like, that's a pretty interesting gap too that is meaningful, but people forget to look at the zero. That's super helpful. Look, I'm never going to make everything that I wear organic. But your sheets, your pillows, your comforter are literally touching your skin for eight hours every single night. That is a third of your life right there with one simple swap. And if your bedding is worn out, it's trapping heat or it's made with questionable materials,

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So it's easier than ever to make the switch. And if you want to grab their premium starter kit, you can use code Liz Moody for 15% off at branch basics.com. That's code Liz Moody for 15% off the premium starter kit at branchbasics.com. And when they ask you where you heard about us, please make sure to mention the show. That is at branchbasics.com and use code Liz Moody. Okay, let's talk about price. What if the thing that brings us the most joy is like a group fitness class, but it's really expensive. Yeah. Find a different way to move with other people. There are venues. There are places where you can move with people for free. Or you can start your own movement community. Community centers, places of worship often have free movement classes. Running stores,

sneaker stores often have like free walking and training groups. I would say don't get too attached to something that's expensive. Sometimes people get attached to it because they think it's necessarily going to be better or there's like, I think there's an identity. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. But the real medicine often is just doing something with a shared goal with other people who are in a better mood because they're doing something meaningful or fun. And so I would say it's the same thing that you make choices. If you can't afford it, you can't afford it. So focus on what makes that appealing or meaningful to you and find another version. There's probably a version that's available to you. It's the same advice I give to older adults. There's a lot of a sense that I can't do

what I used to do. There's, I used to love moving before I couldn't run. I couldn't dance. I couldn't. And they have an idea of what I couldn't play a sport anymore. They have an idea that there's an ideal movement and an ideal way to do that movement that requires being free of injury or certain type of fitness. And often you have to let go of the version that feels really perfect or ideal and ask yourself, do I value about that? And what's the version that's available now? And for most types of movement, there's going to be a version that is free or inexpensive. And there is going to be a version that's possible, even as your body changes, even if you're in a wheelchair, even if you have a fear of injuring yourself, there's still a version that's available, like a mature happiness. That's like a psychological

term, mature happiness means finding a way to be happy while holding the complexities of loss and change that happen. I'm listening to you and I'm like, yeah, that sounds important. And that sounds really hard to be like, I used to love to play basketball with my friends and now my knees won't let me do that. I'm like, I'm feeling grief for this person you're describing. Yeah. It is not easy. It's much more about self-inquiry. You have to ask yourself, what did I feel like when I was playing basketball. You don't just have to figure it out yourself. You could ask other people in your life. Like, is there anything you're doing right now that makes you feel like this version of yourself, however I felt when I played basketball? You have to go online and ask what exists. Is there

an older adults or an adaptive fitness competitive sports league for this in my area? What action can I take? How can I do this or choose this? Gosh, it's so different than the conversation about how do I manipulate myself into exercising for 10 minutes. I realize it's a really different way than a lot of us have been trained or modeled to think about movement. We're kind of circling around this, but I want to address directly because I heard a lot of people had chronic pain or chronic illness that just makes it hard to be consistent. I think you're the perfect person to speak to this, both because of your knowledge of the research, but also because you are a person who experiences chronic pain. What advice would you give that person? There is a version of movement that's going to work for you based on what you value and what you're willing to tolerate.

And so I always think that people who have chronic illness will particularly know what I'm talking about here, that there is a real energetic cost to doing any activity, mental or physical, even when there are benefits to that. So you're making priorities about what the benefits are to different activities and the necessity of them. and when you have chronic pain or illness, it's going to be different than if you don't. If you don't have any chronic pain or illness or injury, there may be no cost to exercise until you are over-training. But if you do have chronic pain, illness, or injury, there may be a cost that you can't make it go away, no matter how skillful you are or the best personal trainer you have, you may have less energy temporarily, or you may have, you may feel like you have less resources to give in other directions.

You have to consider even more carefully. Is this an activity that I enjoy that's changing how I feel about myself that is increasing my strength or my energy for other activities in life? You have to pay more attention to that because it's not a given that if you just get on the treadmill, you will feel better and you will have more energy. It's more important to pay attention to how you feel while you're doing it after you do it and about yourself after you do it. The other thing that becomes that people with chronic pain

that particularly will understand is your body can give you signals that aren't accurate. And one of the tricks to learning how to exercise or move your body or play sports with chronic pain is you have to develop real curiosity about how true different signals are. You may get signals from your body of discomfort that are not related to hurting yourself.

They are not going to make your pain worse. But you're feeling something in your body that you could label as pain or discomfort. And you have to be both curious in the sense that you're willing to challenge yourself, but also you can't be foolish in the sense that you treat all signals like they're meaningless. And so there's this dance that you have to do with yourself where you're increasing your zone of tolerance, out of curiosity to see, but you're not doing it so fast and so indiscriminately. that you try a workout once and then you can't walk for a week. But you have to listen to your body in a different way than sometimes people who avoid movement from pain or illness or injury

because they're trying to avoid discomfort sensations in the moment. The problem with that is you get a different kind of pain from not moving. And it's almost like a tradeoff likely experience. This is true for aging too. If you choose to avoid injuring yourself ever, you will have a different kind of pain in your body that comes from not being active. And if you maintain physical activity that supports your physical health and your mental health, you will likely experience injuries. It's really hard to get exactly that right thread where you're active and getting the benefits and never injuring yourself. And so whether you have pain or whether you're just aging as we all are, you have to decide what kind of discomfort you're willing to tolerate because there's

not really a choice you can make where your body is going to feel good all the time, and you don't have to put in any effort or discomfort in order to experience the benefits that you want. And I just want to say quite clearly for anybody who's listening and they're like, well, that's fine for her to say, but maybe it doesn't apply to me. Like you said to me before we even did this interview that you experienced chronic pain quite literally every day. I mean, every day of your life. And one of the biggest triggers for me as a child was exercise.

You know, we talk about being exercise intolerant. I was the kind of exercise intolerant where anything that increased my heart rate gave me incredible, incredible headaches, eye pain and nausea. I was like physically unable to experience adrenaline and that kind of acceleration without pain. That, as it turns out, was trainable for me. And the more I avoided it, the more true it was. Same thing with going upside down, getting my head below my heart was another trigger. I thought, that was going to be permanent. Turns out a yoga practice actually completely got rid of that part. Like leaning into the pain. Yeah, sometimes. Many people with chronic pain will say that different types of movement are one of their biggest triggers. Some of that is going to be workable. Some of it's not.

I was really surprised that now, like getting my heart rate up, I don't experience any of that kind of pain that I used to that I thought was so fixed in my nervous system. But yeah, no, I have a lot of empathy for people who have, who really feel like it's hard to move either for psychological reasons or physical reasons. And I never expect it to be easy. Like for me, I'm surprised. If you, if somebody were just not moving because they hadn't thought to or they, I mean, being in a body is hard. And that includes having a brain in a body. Being a human is hard. And I'm only so passionate about this, this particular medicine, because it seems so intimately connected in how the human system works. Are there other hurdles that you've heard from people that prevent them from getting

movement in? We haven't talked about negative experiences with movement, whether it's early on in life, not being athletic enough, not being fast enough, being shamed in gym class, whether it's associating exercise with body control and weight loss and self-destroachment. obstructive behaviors, whether it's going to a gym and having someone ridicule you or heckle you, or ogle you, which I hear from a lot of women. Yeah, whether it's not feeling safe being out on the streets by yourself at night to go for a walk or a run. There's a lot of things that I would think of as being about safety, emotional safety, and physical safety.

And with chronic pain or injuries, there's that physical safety aspect too. The environment of movement is not neutral for a lot of people. Again, it's the kind of thing where you have to say, I value this enough to try to find a version where it's going to be the right version for me. So I'm going to find a place where the people there treat me the way that I want to be treated or I feel like I want to be a part of this community and that's possible or whether it's finding a place moving at home or moving out in the world in a place where you do feel safe and comfortable. Lots of people tell me that they prefer to move at home because it's private, because it's pragmatic. But you should start with a

place where you actually already feel safe or at home or welcome. There's really interesting research behind the reason we get a runner's high. Can you explain that? Oh, okay. So the runners high, you want to move for 20 minutes at like a moderate intensity. The actual biological runners high is primarily driven by endocannabinoids. That's a brain chemical that acts a lot like endorphins, but at a milder intensity. So endocannabinoids, they shut down internal suffering, pain signals, stress signals, anxiety, rumination. They're going to shut down some of the thought traps we get into. And they enhance anything that's pleasurable. So something beautiful is more beautiful. Somebody smiles at you or gives you a hug and it feels better. It feels more interesting

to take on a challenge. All the good stuff in life gets amplified and the bad stuff gets quieter. So that's the traditional exercise high. The traditional exercise high is not an endorphin rush unless you're doing it to music, moving with other people or doing something intense, which is, it's a great high too. My favorite forms of exercise all involve an endorphin rush, in part because it's really good medicine for me to get that extra like, that extra boost that's a little bit more euphoric and a little more increasing your sense of power. But the reason we seem to have it, I mean, this is all theory, but anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists think it's because humans, our current brain and bodies, are adapted to having to search for food and to go out

and hunt or forage and to go out into spaces, into distances that might be a little bit uncomfortable to persist at that. And so the idea is that your brain and body, once it recognizes you're doing a task like that, it's going to create a brain chemistry that makes you feel more hopeful, more optimistic, that you feel better about the challenge that you're doing. And also, that makes it easier to connect with other people so that like even when you bring that food back, you're more likely to share it with other people rather than hoard it to yourself. You can get it from any type of movement that requires that kind of persistence. So it's not just running.

But it's not walking and it's not sprinting from my understanding of your description in the book, which was interesting to me. It was jogging. Well, okay, so there's a lot of different ways that you can get brain chemistry boosts from exercise. I was talking there very specifically

about the endocannabinoid boost that people often describe in very specific ways. Like feeling high at the end of a run? Well, no. Depends. Okay. If you're really running hard, there's probably endorphins going on with that. This was a particular, this is a, the question of that particular kind of uplift you get where it just, it feels like life is better.

It's not necessarily the crazy intensity, euphoria of like an endorphin rush. And it can be done through hiking or like speedwalking. Sprinting pushes you into a different kind of neurochemical response. Is that more the endorphin? More the endorphins. more myokines, which include lactate. It is a metabolic byproduct of muscular exertion, and it travels to your brain, and it works like an anti-anxiety molecule. That is a really clear effect of lactate. Often higher intensity exercise has a better effect, even though people with anxiety

avoid it, because it feels like anxiety. Your heart is pounding, you're sweating, it's hard to breathe. And so many people will dislike those sensations so much that they don't get to the point. where they're actually experiencing significant anxiety relief. I mean, this is one of the things you'd have to experiment with. There are therapies that teach people how to tolerate sensations associated with anxiety so that they can get the benefit of doing things that produce those sensations. Well, this is what you did, right, where you went to the workout classes, the spin classes to like help with your fear flying.

Did I write about that? No, I just, yeah. In my research dive, I found that. Talk about ways of using exercise that are not. obvious. So I've had a fear of flying. Like my whole, I don't remember ever thinking that flying was a good idea. I didn't take my first flight until I was in my 20s. I never got to the point where I wasn't like feeling a panic attack, even the thought of having to book a ticket, let alone walk onto a plane or sit on a plane. And when I decided that my life was going to require me to get on planes to see

family and then for work and then just also to experience life, like to see places. I thought I have to deal with this. And I was not interested in dealing with it in a way that I thought would be bad for me, which was trying to make myself unconscious on the planes. Yeah. I knew that that was a possibility. I also knew for me personally that was going to be a very bad habit to teach because so many things make me anxious. It's like I don't want a solution that requires me to be unconscious. I thought, Where else in life have I ever felt trapped? Like I'm having a panic attack. I can't breathe.

I really, really want to get out of here and I can't. And my heart is pounding. And I remembered spin class that I've been to. I was not a fan of spinning or cycling. I thought I'm going to join a gym that has a cycling class and I'm going to take cycling classes and I'm going to use it to train myself to tolerate staying in a place where I'm trapped and I can't get. get out and I'm breathing hard and I'm sweating and my heart is pounding and I hate every second of it.

And I did and I would be on that bike and I'm thinking you're training yourself, you cannot get, you can't leave the plane. So no matter how bad it gets on the plane, you're training yourself to be here on the plane. And because I was choosing it because I actually could get out if I wanted to. It was like it was psychologically it worked for me. I wasn't actually trapped. And that is what allowed me to start flying. It was that. It wasn't some like cognitive therapy to think about flying differently. I just personally, I needed to train myself to tolerate that, those sensations. Which like that struck such a nerve for me when I was thinking about my own anxiety. I do think that I have used pushing myself to my edges a little bit in my workout as a way to tolerate the discomfort

of my anxiety. And I hadn't quite put that together until I heard you tell that story. And I could imagine someone else doing this in a way that's really unhealthy. Yeah. Like you could push yourself and push yourself or maybe you dissociate. Like you learn to tolerate discomfort by dissociating, which is not what I was doing in that moment. Instead, what I was doing was focusing on the music. And then on the planes, I listened to cycling playlists so that when turbulence hit or initially I used to be afraid of takeoffs, which I'm not anymore because I so trained myself, I put on my cycling music.

I think we'll be able to date this. It was that song, let's go. is like Calvin Harris, let's go. I listen to that for so many takeoffs and now I enjoy takeoffs. And I also learned to love cycling and I became certified to teach cycling. It's amazing what will happen with, I guess that was that six-week training effect. But I do think it's a powerful use of movement is to teach ourselves that we can handle more than we think we can. With all the caveats necessary, but we are more powerful than we think. I can handle much more discomfort. than I thought I could. And that's been a really powerful lesson to teach myself. So circling back,

if we're looking specifically for the endocannabinoid high, that is like a hike, a jog, it's like not too intense and not too unintent. You don't have to move your body in that way. Every form of movement has its own benefit. You don't need to engineer a workout to give yourself a runner's high unless you want to experiment with, is it possible for my brain to reward me in this way. That's kind of what I want. I'm like, that sounds fun. Yeah. How do I get that? And the way. And the way. way to get it is you have probably have to move for 20 minutes or more. Okay. How much longer is up to you and add an intensity that challenges you, but is not everything

you can do like you're dying, like sprinting or me with my high intensity interval training where I'm on the ground gasping. It is you could probably talk while you're doing it. Yeah, I don't know if you could sing a show tune while doing it, but you could probably talk. That's a good intensity. And you're going to get more of. of the endocannabinoid high or the persistence high,

if the task is also intrinsically meaningful to you. You understand the value of it. You have a why for yourself. And it could be because I want to improve my health. It could be because I love being outdoors and I feel connected to nature. It could be because I view this as a form of self-care. It could be the activity or it could be the motivation for the activity. Could be I want to play with my kids.

Yeah. It could be I intrinsically enjoy. doing yoga or lifting weights. So the activity can be meaningful for the sake of the experience you have or the reason you value the outcomes of doing it. And if you have that, your brain understands the activity as meaningful

and it's more likely to reward you for it. I think that's such a good thought starter and exercise that anybody listening right now can do is the next time that they're going to move, think about a real meaningful why for them and then associate the movement with that. whether it's intrinsic, extrinsic. And treat it like an experiment.

Like, do that and then see if you feel a little bit better than you usually do. Especially if you're somebody who doesn't always feel amazing after every movement session, that's a real experiment you can test. Think about your why. And my hypothesis is your brain is going to understand the activity as meaningful and valuable, and so it's going to reward you faster or more strongly for it. The person who is likely listening to this episode wants to move. They want to feel that motivation. They want to feel that reward. And maybe they have been struggling to get there. Is there anything else you would say to that person?

There's something I wrote in the book. Could I read from the book? Yeah. There's no training formula you have to follow. There is no one path or prescription except to follow your own joy. If you're looking for a guideline, it's this. Move. Any kind, any amount. And any way that makes you happy. Move whatever parts of your body still move with gratitude. Move by yourself and in community. Move in your home. Move outdoors. Move to music or in silence. Set goals that are personally meaningful. Take baby steps, then conquer a big stretch. Seek out new experiences and explore new identities. Pay attention to how activities make you feel and how they change you. Listen to your body. Give yourself permission to do what feels good.

Revel in metaphor and meaning. Look for places, people and communities that inspire you and make you feel welcomed. Keep following the thread of joy as long as you can. It's funny. I'm getting emotionally moved by that. It's not because of what I wrote. People are going to think I'm so self-indulgent. They're going to think, like, Kelly's like, wow, she's so moved because she thinks she's a great writer. I'm just remembering because the next thing in the book is I write about the amazing people who talk to me for this book. And I hope if people, I know at the end of the interviews always ask people about their books. So the thing that I love about this book is that when I ask people to tell me what movement meant to them, they revealed such beautiful things about who they were as human beings.

Their ability to overcome obstacles, their ability to kill. connect with people, their ability to find meaning after experiencing tremendous loss. And I felt it was such a privilege to get to hear people express such a beautiful sides of themselves. And I guess if I could say something to the people who feel like I just haven't found it, I guess me crying is maybe the thing that I want to share with people. It's that this is about something different. If you have been trying to force yourself to exercise for your body composition, you know, for weight loss or whatever it is, the thing you think you have to do. I'm saying that movement is something more than that because movement is how we engage with life through our bodies.

And that's my actual hope for people. I don't need you to work out tomorrow. I want you to have a different experience of your body and for movement to be something that makes your life more meaningful. So. Can you leave us with just one homework assignment, something that anybody can do as soon as they turn off this podcast to begin to experience these benefits? I want you to ask somebody you know who has a movement that they enjoy or they love to tell you about it. It'll show you something. And also that person is going to love you so much for being able to talk about it. And it's a really great example of not just how to approach movement, but how to approach other human beings. Some part of you will resonate, even if it's not the activity.

I don't run, but I get really inspired listening to runners because some part of me resonates with the part of them that has found their thing, the thing that makes them come alive or that gives them courage and confidence or that gave them community. So you want to talk to people who love movement so that it can wake up, that part of you so it can resonate with that quality of being human, even if it's not the activity. Can you tell us a little bit in your own words about your wonderful book and anything else that you want to highlight? This particular book, The Joy of Movement, I wanted to write a book that really was about how human beings experience joy, all the different ways that people

experience joy. So every chapter is really about one of the things that makes life worth living, making a contribution to community, learning and growing, social connection. Music gets its own chapter because I really do think it makes life worth living. Being in nature and connecting to nature. Overcoming obstacles and particularly overcoming obstacles together rather than by yourself. So every chapter is about something that when people talk about what makes life meaningful worth living, it's the science of why those things matter and told through the lens of how movement makes those things possible. So if you're looking for a book that's going to make it easier for you to fit in a workout, right?

This is not that book. This is almost, it's a way to view something really beautiful about human nature and to understand physical activity as something that gives you access to those different parts of your human nature. It's a beautiful book and this was a beautiful conversation and I really appreciate it, Kelly. Thank you for having me. Unfortunately, that is all for this episode of the Liz Moody podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, I would so appreciate if you would share it with somebody that you think would love it too. It is my goal to get as much life-changing information out to as many people as possible. And you sharing episodes with people is 100% the thing that makes that happen.

I would also love to hear from you in the comments, any thoughts or questions or opinions that you have on this episode. And remember, you can get our free 21-day plan for nutrition, movement, and mental health at lizmoody.com slash January. We are in the middle of our full January transformation series where all month long we're breaking down the science of real sustainable change to make 2026 your best year yet. I know it's a big promise, but we are going to make it happen. So make sure that you're subscribed to the podcast on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts, on YouTube,

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