Exercise Relieves Stress, Even When You Have To Do It

It doesn’t matter if the main motivation for your exercise is guilt; exercise is still good for you, as long as you don’t overdo it. That’s the conclusion of researchers at the University of Colorado, who (OK they worked with rats, not people) looked at the reactions to stress of animals in four groups. Group one was allowed to exercise whenever they felt like it; group two was forced to exercise, but only as long and as hard as is natural for rats, group three was forced to exercise in unnaturally strenuous ways (on a mechanized treadmill), and group four basically hung out, enjoying the scenery. As Gretchen Reynolds reports in the New York Times, when the researchers later exposed rates to stressful situations, they found that the treadmill runners and the sedentary animals were extremely anxious, “but the rats that had exercised on the running wheels, whether they could control their exercise regimens or not, proved to be quite resilient.” They were, Reynolds writes, “happy, well-adjusted guys.”