as she walked on that cold day, the metaphor became fact by pfv.

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Is Exercise the Best Drug for Depression?
Jed Diamond, Ph.D. has been a health-care professional for the last 45
years. He is the author of 9 books, including Looking for Love in All
the Wrong Places, Male Menopause, The Irritable Male Syndrome, and
Mr. Mean: Saving Your Relationship from the Irritable Male Syndrome .
He offers counseling to men, women, and couples in his office in
California or by phone with people throughout the U.S. and around the
world. To receive a Free E-book on Mens Health and a free
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I love to walk. I live in the country and find walking the hills is relaxing and
peaceful. But I also like to walk in town. I find a whole new world opens
when I do the 10,000 step walk (5 miles) through Willits. I usually run into
just the right people Ive been wanting to talk with. I dont need to schedule
an appointment or drive to their office. The wisdom of the universe guides
our encounter.

As a mental health professional, I often use walking therapeutically. I find that

men and boys do much better when we walk and talk than when we sit
looking at each other in an office. Maybe it has something to do with our
hunter/gatherer roots. For men the only time that someone was looking
intently at them was when they were just about to be eaten by a stalking
tiger.

Men, in particular, enjoy side-to-side communication rather than face-to-

face communication. If you want to talk to a guy, go for a walk, dont sit him
down for a honey, we need to talk moment.

But walking doesnt just make us feel better. New evidence indicates that it
may be good for treating depression, perhaps as good or better than all
those anti-depressant drugs we are taking. In his wonderful, easy to read
book, Walking Your Blues Away: How to Heal the Mind and Create
Emotional Well-Being, Thom Hartman says, Ive identified a specific healing
mechanism and process that nature has built into the human mind and body
that enables us to process trauma in a way that is quick, functional, and
permanent.

Its not the latest drug hes talking about. Its walking. Theres even good
scientific evidence accumulating which explains why it works. In its simplest
form, says Hartman, this mechanism involves rhythmic side-to-side
stimulation of the body. This side-to-side motion, or bilateral movement,
causes nerve impulses to cross the brain from the left hemisphere to the right
 hemisphere and back at a specific rate or frequency. This cross-patterning
produces an organic integration of left-hemisphere thinking functions with
the right-hemisphere and brain-stem feeling functions. This integration is
necessary precursor to emotional and intellectual healing from trauma.

Now a recent article in Time Magazine offers new evidence for the therapeutic
advantage of exercise.

By LAURA BLUE Laura Blue Sat Jun 19, 1:30 am ET

At his research clinic in Dallas, psychologist Jasper Smits is working on a somewhat

unorthodox treatment for depression. It is not yet widely accepted, but his treatment is
free and has no side effects. Compare that with antidepressant drugs, which cost
Americans $10 billion each year and have many common side effects: sleep disturbances,
nausea, tremors, changes in body weight.

This intriguing new treatment? It's nothing more than exercise.

That physical activity is crucial to good health - both mental and physical - is nothing
new. As early as the 1970s and '80s, observational studies showed that Americans who
exercised were not only less likely to be depressed than those who did not, but were also
less likely become depressed in the future.

In 1999, Duke University researchers demonstrated in a randomized controlled trial that

depressed adults who participated in an aerobic exercise plan improved as much as those
treated with sertraline, the drug that was marketed as Zoloft, and was earning Pfizer more
than $3 billion annually before its patent expired in 2006.

Subsequent trials have repeated these results, showing again and again that patients who
undergo aerobic exercise regimens see comparable improvement in their depression as
those treated with medication, and that both groups do better than patients given only a
placebo. But exercise trials on the whole have been small and most have run only for a
few weeks; some are plagued by methodological problems. Still, despite limited data, the
trials all seem to point in the same direction: Exercise boosts mood. It not only relieves
depressive symptoms, but appears to prevent them from recurring.

"I was really surprised that more people weren't working in this area when I got into it,"
says Smits, an assistant professor of psychology at Southern Methodist University.

Molecular biologists and neurologists have also begun to show that exercise may alter
brain chemistry in much the same way that antidepressant drugs do - regulating the key
neurotransmitters serotonin and norepinephrine. At the University of Georgia,
neuroscience professor Philip Holmes and colleagues have shown that over the course of
several weeks, exercise can switch on certain genes that increase the brain's level of
galanin, a peptide neurotransmitter that appears to tone down the body's stress response
by regulating another brain chemical, norepinephrine.

The result is that exercise primes the brain to show less stress in response to new stimuli.
In the case of lab rats and mice, that stimuli include being plunged into very cold water or
being suspended by the tail. And while those are not exactly problems that most people
face, the thinking is that the human neurochemical response may well react similarly,
with exercise leaving our brain less susceptible to stress in the face of harmless but
unexpected events, like a missed appointment or getting a parking ticket. A little bit of
mental strain and excess stimulation from exercise, in other words, may help us to keep
day-to-day problems in perspective.

Researchers also wonder whether this interaction between body and brain may,
evolutionarily speaking, be hard-wired. "It occurs to us that exercise is the more normal
or natural condition, and that being sedentary is really the abnormal situation," Holmes
says.

Humans (and lab rats) never evolved to be cooped up, still, all day long. Our brains
simply may not be built for an environment without physical activity. Research has also
suggested that exercise may be an effective treatment not just for depression, but also
against related anxiety disorders and even substance dependence.

Other scientists have found that, in mammals, exercise also boosts the production of
brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a substance that supports the growth and
maintenance of brain cells. In depressed patients, BDNF has been shown to help repair
brain atrophy, which can lift symptoms of the disease.

Back in Dallas, Smits says his exercise treatment appeals to patients for two main
reasons. First, exercise doesn't carry the same stigma among patients (and some
providers) that depression medication and psychotherapy do. Second, the mood-
enhancing benefits of exercise can kick in fast - a lot faster than, say, its impact on weight
loss or cardiovascular health. "By and large, for most people, when they exercise 30
minutes - particularly when it's a little bit more demanding, and they get their heart rate
up - they feel better," Smits says. "You get an immediate mood lift."

That effect doesn't reflect the longer-term changes in the brain that Holmes studies. But
Smits uses the immediate mood boost as a way to motivate patients with depression
(which, of course, manifests in a chronic lack of motivation) to get moving. Instead of a
barrier to exercise, Smits suggests, depression becomes a reason to exercise. "You feel
crappy, so you get on the treadmill, and you look back and you say, 'Wow I feel much
better,'" he says.

Yet for all the potential clinical benefits, the big questions about exercise treamtent
remain unanswered: How much? How long? In which patients? In their recent book for
therapists, Exercise for Mood and Anxiety Disorders (Oxford University Press, 2009),
Smits and co-author Michael Otto at Boston University suggest precise exercise doses
that they hope will aid psychologists and primary-care doctors in prescribing exercise as
treatment, which can be administered in combination with other treatments, of course.

Smits and Otto recommend the familiar 30 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic

exercise, like walking, five times per week, or 30 minutes of high-intensity aerobic
exercise three times a week. These doses, which are regularly recommended for physical
fitness, are the only ones that have been well tested for depression. "But we can't say at
this point that more wouldn't be better," Smits says. "Or maybe less would be better. We
really don't know." Too few tests have been run. It is also unclear whether anaerobic
exercise, like weight lifting, would have the same mood-lifting effects - or whether
exercise works as well in severely depressed patients as it does in sufferers of mild or
moderate depression.

For now, then, data on exercise are only suggestive. The clinical literature on
antidepressant drugs is massive, since large-scale, rigorous studies are required for
market approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The trials on exercise
have all been smaller, perhaps in part because it needs no government approval. "If you
look at FDA standards [for evidence], it's not clear that exercise would meet that
standard," says James Blumenthal, the Duke University professor of medical psychology
who ran Duke's 1999 exercise study, as well as a 2007 follow-up with more than 200
patients, which Blumenthal believes is the largest-ever such trial to date.

But the evidence is mounting, and it's hard to argue with a free treatment that is exempt
from side effects for a pervasive and debilitating mental health scourge - especially when
so many other health benefits of exercise are incontrovertible. "I think that we have
reason to be optimistic. For people who at least want to consider exercise as a possible
treatment, and for whom exercise is safe, it's definitely worth a shot," Blumenthal says.

View this article on Time.com

Related articles on Time.com:

Does Exercise Treat Depression as Well as Drugs?

Exercise to Protect Aging Bodies
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The Myth of Moderate Exercise
Mild Exercise May Counter Dementia