Exercise Improves Mood
November 9, 2022
Does exercise improve mood, or are people who exercise naturally happier? It’s a classic chicken-or-the-egg question. But the connection between mood and physical activity is already well documented. And in my case, running not only boosts my mood — it may have saved my life.
I was always one of the faster runners in my class, routinely winning the 50-yard dash and clocking solid mile-run times at my elementary school. When I started playing soccer at 10 years old, my natural speed made up for my inexperience dribbling a ball. During summer vacation, Dad and I raced each other on the beach after dinner, drawing start and finish lines in the sand with our toes, our “track” bathed in floodlights on the condos that dotted the dunes.
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t love to run. But in my teens, running became much more than the simple act of moving my legs.
Running for Mental Health
A quiet, shy kid, I felt content reading alone in my treehouse or filling reams of paper with drawings and short stories. I had a tight group of friends, but large social gatherings made me anxious, and I was more at ease around adults than kids my own age.
When I started middle school, I still loved reading, writing and drawing, none of which made me cool. In fact, playing on the school’s soccer team often felt like my only ticket into a social circle, and even it wasn’t without heartache. When I was a seventh grader, a popular older girl who scored almost as many goals as she had friends decided to make picking on me during practice her personal mission. Decades later, I haven’t forgotten the time she pulled my shorts down, though I’ve certainly recovered.
Meanwhile, I struggled with the cafeteria’s caste system — while seats were unassigned, my classmates always sat at the same tables, and the tables clearly became more “popular” toward the back of the room. I went to the eighth-grade dance with a few other dateless friends and, while I had no interest in dancing, I wondered why no boys ever asked. I recounted the scene in my memoir, Run to the Light:
“My friends and I stood near the punch bowl and refilled our cups whenever we thought we’d been standing for too long. One of the girls dared me to talk to my crush — a forward on the boys’ soccer team — but instead I watched him flirt with two cheerleaders from a safe distance.”
Ninth grade brought on another reboot: Our middle school fed into two high schools, and my buddies went to the other one.
But I still had running. And as a teenager, more and more, I turned to the sport for solace.
Running for Survival
I was 15 the afternoon Mom called me into her closet and confided that she was pregnant. Freezing rain pelted the streets, but that didn’t stop me, an immature, angry teen, from tearing out of the house on foot. The rain mixed with my tears as I ran. Ironically, that baby — my sister, Taylor — would compel me to run again years later, though for different reasons.
Later, for most of my four years of college, I battled various degrees of depression. As a freshman, I couldn’t play soccer due to an ankle injury, but I covered almost every square inch of the UNC campus on foot, at a furious clip.
A 2019 Harvard study showed that even short bursts of exercise can help keep depression at bay. But it’s not a stretch to say that exercise saved my life. When I reached the edge of the cliff, running and my grandmother’s love kept me from falling.
Running for Understanding
I still can’t explain exactly how I spiraled out of control as a college freshman. That’s common for people who suffer from depression, a stigmatized condition with no single root cause.
But when my sister struggled with Batten disease, a rare, fatal neurological disorder, I knew exactly what was wrong with me. Beginning with Taylor’s diagnosis in 2006, up until her death at 20 years old in 2018, I experienced constant highs and lows. This run, recounted in Run to the Light, was just one of many:
“By the time I pulled into my driveway, I was afraid I’d put my fist through a wall if I didn’t clear my head. So instead of going into the house, I went for a run outside, even though I’d already completed a hard workout earlier that night and the temperature was still dropping.
“I was angry at Batten disease for making Taylor feel incompetent at school. Angry at the world for harboring a monster like Batten disease. Overwhelmed by my love for my sister. In the darkness, my heart pounded so hard that I half-expected to hear it between the slap, slap of my shoes against the pavement. In spite of the cold night I sweated, the droplets mixing with tears as I ran.”
If you’ve read the book, watched my TEDx talk or Googled me, you know running became a great weapon in our family’s fight against Batten disease. Running generated fundraising dollars and volunteer support for our nonprofit, Taylor’s Tale, as well as local and national media.
Running couldn’t save my sister. But when she died six days after my son was born in 2018, it helped me heal in ways I still can’t explain. Call it magic or the intervention of a higher power, but amazingly, I began running two weeks postpartum and, 43 days after giving birth, completed a half-marathon while blindfolded in two hours and three minutes.
Does running help reduce stress, depression and anxiety? Science says yes. But running has done all of that and so much more for me. I’ve suffered my fair share of common struggles as well as devastating personal loss.
Yet each time my feet pound against the pavement, I beat back the tide.
