Skip to main content

Exercise May Help Ward Off Addictive Tendencies!


Everyone knows that going to the gym and working out helps to build up energy, and get your body in shape, but did you also know that exercising might help prevent an addiction to drugs or alcohol? According to the Associated Press, recent studies are displaying clues which imply that physical activity may trigger those areas of the brain that can get hijacked by substance abuse. The National Institute on Drug Abuse reports that teens who exercised daily were half as likely as their friends to indulge in smoking and 40% were less likely to experiment with marijuana.

The government is pushing hard for more research to be done to explore these findings. If you take a look at many drug treatment centers, most include exercise as a part of their daily regiment. Exercise is, in essence, used as a distraction for the brain. Brown University took a group of smokers to the gym three times a week and found that with the inclusion of exercise in their everyday lives, the smoker’s chance of quitting the habit had been doubled.

At this point, the research and findings are not solid enough to truly prove that exercise has an affect on halting substance abuse, but the outlook is positive. The biggest problem is not whether this theory actually works, but how in our technology driven society we can get teens and adults back out into the streets to play some basketball rather than staying inside glued to the couch playing video games. The nation as a whole is becoming more sedentary and this is one of the largest problems this theory may face in its future studies.

If more people will get off their couches and start becoming more active, there is a strong possibility that we may be able to train our brains to ward off substance abuse, without seeking any additional help. But thankfully, if self-therapy doesn’t work there is always a drug treatment center within reach to get healthy.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Soy Products Can Reduce Sperm Counts!

By: Heather Hajek Published: Friday, 25 July 2008 www.healthnews.com C alling all men who want to become fathers! Soy products may reduce a man's sperm count. Based on a recent study, men who consume soy products may have lower sperm counts than those who don't. The study was based on a small group of men who visited the Massachusetts General Hospital Fertility Center from 2000 to 2006. Even though the study found that some of the men who ate soy products on a regular basis had lower sperm counts, the researchers conducting the study are not saying that soy products were the cause of the lower sperm concentrations. The men who had soy products in their diets recorded lower sperm counts than those that didn't, but their counts were still within the normal range. Researchers don't deny that during the study men who consumed soy products had lower sperm counts, but they want people to realize there are other factors other than soy products that may have played a role in th...
Post a Comment
Read more

Obesity linked to quantity of sleep!

P eople who sleep fewer than six hours a night - or more than nine - are more likely to be obese, according to a new US study that is one of the largest to show a link between irregular sleep and big bellies. The study also linked light sleepers to higher smoking rates, less physical activity and more alcohol use. The research adds weight to a stream of studies that have found obesity and other health problems in those who don't get proper shuteye, said Dr Ron Kramer, a Colorado physician and a spokesman for the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. "The data is all coming together that short sleepers and long sleepers don't do so well," Kramer said. The study is based on door-to-door surveys of 87,000 US adults from 2004 through 2006 conducted by the National Centre for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Such surveys can't prove cause-effect relationships, so - for example - it's not clear if smoking causes sleeplessn...
Post a Comment
Read more

Biggest explosion!

Thu Feb 19, 3:58 pm ET WASHINGTON (AFP) – The US space agency's Fermi telescope has detected a massive explosion in space which scientists say is the biggest gamma-ray burst ever detected, a report published Thursday in Science Express said. The spectacular blast, which occurred in September in the Carina constellation, produced energies ranging from 3,000 to more than five billion times that of visible light, astrophysicists said. "Visible light has an energy range of between two and three electron volts and these were in the millions to billions of electron volts," astrophysicist Frank Reddy of US space agency NASA told AFP. "If you think about it in terms of energy, X-rays are more energetic because they penetrate matter. These things don't stop for anything -- they just bore through and that's why we can see them from enormous distances," Reddy said. A team led by Jochen Greiner of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics deter...
Post a Comment
Read more