Our everyday activities like simply walking to the neighborhood store or climbing stairs can extensively enhance the private well-being during the pandemic times, particularly in people susceptible to psychiatric disorders.
It is a known fact that exercises help in improving the physical and mental well being of a person. While the impact of everyday activities on a person’s mental health has hardly been studied so far, like it is not yet clear which brain structures are involved.
Recently, researchers from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the Central Institute of Mental Health (CIMH) in Germany studied the brain regions which play a central role in this process. “Climbing stairs every day may help us feel awake and full of energy. This enhances our well-being,” the authors wrote in a paper published in the journal Science Advances.
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Professor Heike Tost from CIMH in Mannheim, Germany said, “At present, we are experiencing strong restrictions of public life and social contacts which may adversely affect our well-being. To feel better, it’s going to help to climb stairs more often.”
About 67 people were subjected to ambulant assessments to work out the impact of everyday activity on alertness for seven days, so as to succeed in the conclusion.
Alertness and energy were verified to be important components of well-being and psychic health of the participants. These analyses were combined with magnetic significance tomography at CIMH for an additional group of 83 people.
“It was found that the ‘subgenual cingulate cortex’, a neighborhood of the cerebral mantle , is vital for the interaction between everyday activity and effective well-being,” the authors wrote.
It is during this brain region where emotions and resistance to psychiatric disorders are regulated. The authors identified this brain region to be a decisive “neural correlate” that mediates the connection between physical activity and subjective energy.
“People with a smaller volume of grey brain matter during this region and a better risk of psychiatric disorders felt lesser filled with energy once they were physically inactive,” Tost said.
“After the everyday activity, however, these persons felt even more crammed with energy than persons with a bigger brain volume.”
Professor Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, Director of CIMH, said: “The results suggest that physical activity in lifestyle is useful for well-being, particularly in persons vulnerable to psychiatric disorders”.