The International Journal of Psychophysiology has posted a study that supports existing claims that exercise leads to cognitive benefits. According to the findings of the study, 20 minutes of exercise on a treadmill improved multiple cognitive functions, including inhibitory control, attention, and action monitoring displayed in both anxious and non-anxious individuals.
There are many well documented health benefits of exercise. Certain evidence even suggests that exercise enhances cognitive functioning. Anxiety has been suggested to interfere with cognition, so the mental health benefits of exercise might be particularly relevant for anxious individuals. Anxiety impairs attentional control due to the persistent worry and apprehension that comes along with it.
Study author Matthew B. Pontifex and his team set out to understand if exercise might ease anxiety-related weaknesses in cognition. The team constructed a brain imaging study to analyze how exercise would impact participants’ performances on an inhibitory control task. They compared the reactions of anxious and non-anxious people.
Anxiety tends to disproportionately affect women, so the researchers decided to study only female college-aged individuals. There were thirty seven women who had a high level of anxiety, and thirty three who had low levels of anxiety. Every participant took part in two lab sessions on two different days. During one lab session, the individuals were asked to complete the Erikson flanker task before and after twenty minutes of exercise on a treadmill. During the second lab session, the participants completed the inhibitory control task before and after sitting down for twenty minutes. The participants were randomly assigned to attend either the exercise lab session or the sitting lab session first.
The inhibitory task had participants refrain from responding to stimuli that were not relevant. Electroencephalographic activity was recorded and neural responses were measured according to two components of event-related potentials (ERPs). P3 amplitude served as a measure of allocation of attentional resources. An electrical brain signal that takes place after a person makes a behavioral mistake (ERN) served as a measure of action monitoring.
Both high anxiety and low anxiety participants performed better on the flanker test after they exercised for twenty minutes. This was measured by observing faster reaction times and more accuracy during the task. No one’s performance improved after sitting for twenty minutes.
Both groups saw increases in ERN amplitude after the treadmill exercise, but no increases were found after sitting down. Also, both groups exhibited increases in P3 amplitude after the exercise and not after the sitting. The increase in P3 amplitude was larger among the group with lower levels of anxiety. The increased P3 is thought to reflect the suppression of irrelevant brain activity to improve attention. The study authors believed that the fact that the high anxiety group showed weaker increases in P3 amplitude compared to the low anxiety group suggests that the treadmill activity did not “fully suppress” their anxious thoughts.
These findings point out how exercise can offer cognitive benefits for individuals with anxiety, and those who do not have anxiety. More research will need to be done to find out how the intensity of the exercise, duration, as well as type of physical activity might affect cognition. The study authors note, “there may be other types of exercise that are better suited to optimizing the outcomes of acute bouts such that both affective responses and cognition are enhanced in high anxious populations.”