The Downside of Exercise on Stress

A recent article in the New York Times explains how exercise allows you, or at least the rats dunked into cold water to deal with stress better.

There is a catch. My clinical experience is that this does not hold true and in fact has the opposite effect if the person is exercising from a place of exhaustion. At my clinic and our Mindfulness Stress Reduction company we saw many athletes who where in what I called the Jim Fixx phenomenon. Jim Fixx with his book The Complete Book of Running help put running on the map. He had us believing it was a panacea for the problems of the day.

Fixx’s autopsy revealed that atherosclerosis had blocked his coronary arteries between 50% and 95%. The man was fit, but he died of a common stress illness – how is that possible? I assuming he was like many of the runners I saw, he was tense and exhausted.

Exercise for a body that is not only tense, but exhausted from too much exercise and stress is a stressful for the body. The body doesn’t have the resources to take the exercise and apply it to building the body. This body is not resilient; it is as if it is in a state of posttraumatic stress, much like the soldier that never can come down from constant stress of war.

I had runners who would take their pulse as they lay in bed every morning. If it was fast, it told them they were tired, so they would run less or slower or not at all that day. These runners understood exercising tired stresses the body.

Further Reading:

1. Stress and Colds
2. Posture of Stress

Tagged as: Complete Book of Running, Fatigue, Jim Fixx, New York Times