), runs nearly every day — three miles on days that he also does resistance training, six miles on the others. “If I don’t do it, it’s not like I feel guilty,” he says. “I feel like I’ve missed something in my day, and I want to go do it. Because I figured out that, while I’m exercising, I don’t have trouble concentrating on anything.”early on, after his third-grade teacher picked up on his disruptive behavior and inability to complete class work.
Jackson’s story appeals to me, partly because he got into exercise for his body image but stuck with it for the therapeutic effect. At first, the running didn’t make a dent in his physique , but he stuck with it because it helped him focus. In his first semester at the junior college, he earned a 3.9 GPA, and, after a year, he was accepted as a transfer student at the college he had originally wanted to attend.
Exercise also helps balance norepinephrine in the brain stem’s arousal center. “Chronic exercise improves the tone of the locus coeruleus,” says Amelia Russo-Neustadt, M.D., Ph.D., a neuroscientist and psychiatrist at California State University. “The result is that we are less prone to startle or to react out of proportion to any given situation. We also feel less irritable.”
Girls didn’t show this improvement, which may be because of a lower incidence of hyperactivity in girls. Both boys and girls improved by another measure related to the sensitivity of dopamine synapses, although boys fared better after maximal exercise and girls after submaximal exercise. In the extreme, engaging in these activities is a matter of survival-avoiding a karate chop, or breaking your neck on the balance beam, or drowning in a swirling pool of whitewater-and, thus, taps into the focusing power of the fight-or-flight response. When the mind is on high alert, there is plenty of motivation to learn the skills necessary for these activities. As far as the brain is concerned, it’s do or die.
And when Kramer tested aspects of their executive function, the subjects showed improvement in working memory, smoothly switching between tasks and screening out irrelevant stimuli. Kramer wasn’t on the trail of ADHD, but his findings illustrate another way exercise might help.
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