Exercise Helps With Addiction Recovery
Exercise helps with addiction recovery because it helps the brain! Thanks to new brain research, we now understand that exercise actually helps with healing the brain. Given addiction is a chronic, often relapsing brain disease, healing the brain is critical to addiction recovery. So here’s to exercise and here’s how it works!
Exercise Helps With Addiction Recovery Because It Helps the Brain
Whether it’s a long walk in the woods or a half-hour on the treadmill or a rousing round of hula hoop with the family, exercise — in any of its many, many forms — can help with recovery for loved ones of an alcoholic or alcohol abuser and for the alcoholic/alcohol abuser themselves. That’s quite a claim, to be sure, but when we keep in mind that recovery – whether it’s for the alcoholic/alcohol abuser and/or the family member – is all about rewiring our neural networks, Dr. John J. Ratey’s new book, SPARK, The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, is a thrilling read. Really!
Exercise in its many forms can helps with addiction recovery.
Dr. Ratey’s book gives us the latest on the role of exercise in brain function. To give a very, very broad brush stroke summary of that role, exercise helps with the brain’s “infrastructure” and its three key regulatory neurotransmitters: dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine. These three neurotransmitters regulate the brain’s signaling processes and everything else the brain does. Serotonin, for example, influences mood, impulsivity, anger and aggressiveness. Norepinephrine, on the other hand, helps with the signals that influence attention, perception, motivation and arousal. [SPARK, 37]
Dopamine is key to the neural networks in the brain’s pleasure/reward center and can be deeply compromised with repeated alcohol abuse. According to Dr. Ratey, exercise “boosts dopamine” and “…chronic exercise increases dopamine storage in the brain and also triggers the production of enzymes that create dopamine receptors in the reward center of the brain….” [SPARK p. 121]
There is SO MUCH great information in this book, but I found the role of exercise in helping with stress, anxiety, depression, ADHD and addiction, especially exciting. Remember: a dual diagnosis is common for just over half of alcoholics/alcohol abusers. So I suggest you pick up a copy of SPARK, The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain and give your version of exercise a try.
Lisa Frederiksen
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This is a great article about another wonderful way to cope with addiction recovery. That is a hard time for the person recovering and their loved ones. What better way than exercise together and help all parties involved. We also wrote an article about exercise helping recovering addicts http://www.allaboutaddiction.com/what-do-i-do-now-addiction-recovery-help-by-active-replacement-part-i/
[…] that can benefit us – our lives. Here are two links to previous posts to get you started: Exercise and the Brain: One Way to Help With Recovery and Don’t Forget the […]