How does exercise for health or anti-aging differ from exercise for improving mood?
The problem with exercise for health is you have to wait nine months to a year for results, before your abs and your hips look better. It’s a tremendous commitment. The beauty of exercising for mood is you get the payoff right now. The other kicker is, being in a bad mood is why a lot of people don’t exercise, and this becomes precisely the reason to exercise. Severely depressed people often have trouble just getting out of bed. How can a therapist get patients to take those first steps? What’s important is that we can add exercise to the treatments that work, such as cognitive and interpersonal therapy and antidepressants. We now know that exercise works, but getting people to exercise is an art. Let’s be frank — Americans are abysmal at adopting exercise. So our approach is to use cognitive behavior therapy to target exercise adoption and help people really stick with it. My colleague Jasper Smits and I have devised a number of activity-based treatments that break exercise up into sm
