Episode Highlights

• John’s background and how he became interested in the benefits of exercise
• When scientists began to measure the effects of exercising on mood and other cognitive functions
• Exercising can help prevent the decline of cognitive function by 10-15 years
• How do activity, movement and exercise change our brains?
• When we move we are activating our “thinking brain”
• Exercise does the same thing as a little bit of Prozac and Ritalin combined
• Our brain cells grow as we use them and move around (read: you can make yourself smarter just by moving!)
• A Duke University study (and many others) found movement/exercise can relieve the symptoms of depression
• Once you exercise consistently for 2-3 weeks you will see a noticeable change in your mood
• Exercise builds enzymes that help reshape and build the brain
• How exercise can help mitigate the symptoms of ADD and other attention issues
• Continuous exercise and movement can help bring stress levels down to a manageable level
• BDNF is an antidepressant and antianxiety protein in our brain — it grows with movement!
• Endocannabinoids may be more important than endorphins
• Studies on how children learn better when they move
• You don’t need to get to the gym! Short exercises throughout the day will do the trick
• Brain shrinkage: how being overweight and sedentary can actually shrink your brain
• This all comes down to: movement makes you smarter!
• When children were studied, those who tested higher on physical fitness tests were smarter
• When starting an exercise program don’t focus on long-term goals, focus on how you feel every day
• Easy wins to get you started: 7 minute exercise and make gradual progress

Useful Links

• www.johnratey.com
• Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain
• Driven to Distraction
• Delivered from Distraction
• A Classic Case of Post Production Burnout
• The 7 Minute Workout
• More Resources for Moving More »

About Guest

John Ratey, M.D. is the coauthor, with Edward Hallowell of the books Driven to Distraction, Answers to Distraction, and Delivered from Distraction. He is also the author of Shadow Syndromes. In 2001 he published the book A User’s Guide to the Brain, in which he describes the human brain as a flexible muscle, which works on a “use it or lose it” basis. He is the author of Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain (2008), which describes the positive benefits that exercise can have for people with ADHD. In 2014 he coauthored the book Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization with Richard Manning which discusses new evidence & case studies about the benefits of living according to the needs of our core DNA in the areas of: food, exercise, sleep, mindfulness, being outside, being with others, and our central nerve well-being.

Transcript

Zack Arnold: I’m here today. with John Ratey, the clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and I swear to God, if I had Elvis on the other end of this microphone, I would be less excited than having you here, John. So, thank you so much for being on the show.

John Ratey: Well, with that introduction, I love being here. It’s great. That’s great.

Zack Arnold: Well, as my audience knows, I’m a bit of a brain science geek. I have no formal training or formal education in any of it, but when a lot of people in their free time will go to the movies or go to the bar, I’m sitting reading books about neuroscience. So, your book specifically sparked the revolutionary new science of exercise in the brain, was one that I came upon, I don’t know, maybe three or four months ago, and it was an absolute life changer in the way that I look at brain health and movement, because I’m developing an entire online learning program to help people learn how to move more throughout the day in their environment, and not always think to themselves, well, I have to get to the gym five days a week to be healthy, and the two are really not that connected, so the reason I wanted you on the show today was to explain to people how exercise works with the brain. So, before we get started, can you just give us a little bit of a background in kind of your, your official background as in psychiatry and medicine, and how you got interested in this topic specifically?

John Ratey: Yeah, I guess it starts. I was an athlete all my life, so I was always aware of the benefits, but not consciously aware of the benefits of exercise and what it did for me. But then, in my training in psychiatry, I was – it came to Boston, and I’ve been here ever since, in the middle of the 80s, when the Boston Marathon was getting legs, as it were, and Bill Rogers was running, and we had won the US had won a silver or gold medal in the Olympics in 70 or 82 in the marathon, so we were more aware of running and began to see patients who had to stop running in the 80s, and so they had to stop running because of an injury. What we saw was first they came out and they were depressed, then a number of them showed up with what we call attention deficit disorder, and that led to a whole career in writing about, exploring, talking about treating attention deficit disorder, and knowing full well that one can self medicate, and these people were doing it. They had never known they had it until they had to stop running because of an injury. They had, they had to stop their seven miles a day, which was a constant, steady part of their diet, and all of a sudden they couldn’t get anything together. They had a harder time managing their, their feelings. Temper tantrums arose. They would forget things, they would insult people, and things that were never part of their life before. And so it became very apparent to me that exercise was really powerful. Also, brought that same time we were beginning to learn that exercise scientifically had an effect on mood and on anxiety and on stress. We were beginning to measure the effect of exercise there, and, and that’s sort of been was very calmly interesting, and people in science and medicine were, you know, every month there’d be about 10 papers in the literature on exercise in the brain, but it really took off in the 90s when a study was published looking at running mice, and compared it to non-running mice, for seven, they’re talking about teaching them to run in a running wheel, having them go seven days, 10 days, test them before and after their test scores went up 20 to 30% they looked at their brains, their brains were thicker in the top part of the brain. In the cortex, where a lot of our thinking really occurs, and at one part of their brain was bigger, and this led the hippocampus, which is sort of the center for memory and learning, and it was bigger, just with for a mile 77 to 10 days is a long time, but they were trained, they, they had really made their brain grow, and they were smarter. They had this, this stuff called BDNF, was higher, two to three times as high as it was before they began. So, this, this was a revolution. This really was the start of the revolution. This was in the mid 90s, and from that time to now, we have learned so much about the brain and its exercise effect on it, such that every week I get sent over 100 articles, every week 100 articles from the National Library of Medicine, or abstracts of the articles to that talk to the new articles published on the effect of exercise on the brain, so we know that it started as a way to help us talk about preventing Alzheimer’s disease, preventing what we call cognitive decline, which is what happens as we age and we prevent that by exercising and it’s one of the sure fire ways of doing that and that’s what this study showed that it improved the ability to think and learn of these mice but it also helped preserve their nerves in their brains over time, and this has been repeated again and again and again, both in animals and in many, many times now in humans, and we actually see if we, if we’re middle age and you begin to exercise and you’ve never exercised before, you can prevent the onset of cognitive decline by as much as 10 to 15 years, and in some cases, some centers show that you cut the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease in your life in half if you stay with it, if you stay with exercise, and that really was the revolution, that’s what I, because that just was like, wow, we are seeing exercise change the brain. Wow, this is incredible. And then we let into its effect on all the emotions, all the brain functions got better as well. As we, so I say that exercise helps with regulating our emotions and optimizing our brains to learn.

Zack Arnold: All right. Well, then let’s just jump right in, go right down the rabbit hole, because my assumption, up until a few years ago, and I know it’s clearly the common assumption of most people in society, is, well, I know that exercise is good for me, and I know I’m going to be able to burn calories, and if I burn more calories than I ingest, that I’m going to lose weight, and there’s this thing called runner’s high, but, but that’s really all that exercise does. So, can you just dive a little bit deeper into the actual neuroscience behind how activity, movement, and exercise are actually changing your brain?

John Ratey: Sure, what happens when we, and it really goes back to evolution. When we evolved as hunter-gatherers over 200 300 million years, we developed our big brains, and our big brains developed to help us be the best movers that we could be, that we were the evolutionary victors, because we could plan, predict, we can sequence, we can abstractly consider things. Our working memory expanded, and we use those same cells that we added on over millions of years. We use those same cells to think with, to imagine, to sequence, to write papers with to figure new activities out new challenges we used our moving brain such that our thinking brain is really the evolutionary internalization of our moving brain so in other words that when we move we’re activating our thinking brain, and this all points to the big, big, huge benefit of what movement does. Now, along the way, what happens when we begin to move, our brain cells fire. In fact, we use more brain cells in moving than in any other human activity, and when the brain.. what we mean by using them, that means the brain cells are firing, and they’re releasing neurotransmitters, and the popular ones are dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin. Most people have heard of serotonin because of Prozac, and dopamine, perhaps because they pay attention to the stimulants and addiction. Is, but early on we were fascinated with norepinephrine, because it had so much to do with mood and mood disorders, and so when you’re moving, you’re increasing the concentration of these chemicals, these neuro chemicals. So I say, and have said that a bout of exercise is like taking a little bit of Prozac and a little bit of Ritalin or Adderall or whatever the popular stimulant is of the day, because it does the same thing, it releases and increases the concentration of these neuro chemicals, as well as a whole array of other actions on the brain that are all positive because we evolved expecting to move our hunter-gatherer forebears were moving 10 to 14 miles a day, so our genes are sort of expecting us to move and move quite a bit, but we’re not doing that, we’re sedentary, and so when we begin to move, we activate all the good stuff that says, okay, we want to grow this organ, and a big move in thinking really in neuroscience. About 15 years ago was starting for us to start to think of the brain as a muscle, as like our muscles, that the more we use it, the better it gets, the more we use it in a way that’s targeted, the better it gets. So, the more we’re learning it, it gets better. But when we’re moving, we’re really using our brains, so they get sort of.. think of a, you know, each, each of our 100 billion brain cells as, as a bicep, and you’re doing curls on your biceps to get it stronger and tougher and more resilient. Well, that’s exactly what happens to our brain cells, that’s what we see. They get better, they get tougher, they get, they improve in what’s called their neuroplasticity, which is a huge concept that we didn’t know about before, before 1988 really, that our brain cells actually grow, they get bigger as we use them, and so this is what I call now the high point of optimal living, is getting our brains to the highest level of neuroplasticity that you can, because you’ll deal with the emotional regulation to get there, as well as you’ll optimize those brain cells to grow, and that’s the only way we learn, is for our brain cells to grow.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that was really the big discovery for me, the game changer was the word neuroplasticity, because I just always assumed that you’re born, you are who you are, your IQ is fixed. And then I found out, wait, I’ve been spending all these years trying to, you know, sculpt my body and go to the gym and worry about my waist size, but then I thought, wait, I can do the same thing, but with my brain, and I don’t have to deal with all this brain fog and lack of attention, because I’ve been very open with the fact that I’ve suffered from suicidal depression, add, and it’s something that I still fight with every single day, but really, what manages all these things for me is constant movement throughout the day and exercise, which you mentioned, Prozac and Ritalin and Adderall, and you said, well, it’s kind of like taking a hit of that, but can you actually go a step further, because there is actual science that shows they are equally effective on a chemical level, isn’t that the case?

John Ratey: Oh, yes, yes, certainly, with mood, mood, I mean, Hippocrates, 300 years BC, wrote in the first medical texts that we have, talking about various diseases, and he talked about depression, and he said the best way to treat depression is to go for a walk, and if they convey, patients come back and they’re still depressed, he’d send them out again, you keep walking, you keep moving, and now we know what goes on. We know that the brain changes when we’re moving, and it changes greatly. So, studies have been done all over the world, started really in a big scientific way at Duke University Medical School, when they began to observe their cardiac rehab patients, who were exercising for maybe the first time, that had a heart attack or were in danger of, they put them on treadmills, and the psychologists and psychiatry department began to say, hey, we’re seeing these people get less aggressive, less type A, more type B. They are less depressed, they’re less stressed, and they, so they began to do studies, and studies came out almost yearly, looking at a group who they started exercising, who was depressed. Well, in 1999 they published a landmark study, really. 100 people who were came into Duke over a four year period complaining of mild to moderate depression. They volunteered to be in the study. They divided them into a bunch of groups, one group essentially getting exercise, and all these people were sedentary, exercise three to four times a week for 40 minutes, coming in, getting up, getting their heart rates up to about 75 80% of their maximum, eventually, and another group who were given increasing doses of Zoloft, one of our Prozac-like wonder drugs for depression. Well, after four weeks, all the people in both, and all the groups that they looked at, who were having the intervention, did about the same. They dropped their depression level down to become undepressed. They followed these people out for 10 months, and those people who continued to exercise did not have any reoccurrence of their depression, whereas the people were on drugs, who were on medicine, did there were a number of people who had a recurrence of their depression, probably because they stopped taking their medicine, which often happens when you’re using antidepressants, but no one’s ever, they didn’t drill down for that, but since then, I mean, there was scientific evidence, and that’s been repeated with placebo, and really carefully done. University of Texas did another study, but now studies all over the world, in England, and now in Asia, and Korea, and China, they are very much looking into this and finding the same kind of effects, so that you do have an immediate effect, like people that were as depressed as you say you were back being suicidally depressed at one point, about 30 minutes of exercise will make your mood better up to about two hours. You’ll feel better, you’ll feel less stressed, you’ll feel more vigorous. It doesn’t last until you do this repeatedly, you know. Is do it again and again and again, and you get it going for two to three weeks, and then you see you can see these changes in your mood and your stress level and your self-hate, and all this stuff that goes along with being being depressed.

Zack Arnold: Well, and I think that to go even a little bit further, talking about how you said, well, you can’t just exercise for 30 minutes and that replaces the pill, you kind of have to do it more often, speak a little bit more to the idea that with an antidepressant, it’s it’s it’s taking care of the problem momentarily, but it’s actually blocking the brain’s ability to fix itself, which the brain is very, very good at. The most people don’t realize that there are so many mechanisms in the brain where you know, talking about things like neurofeedback, where you can actually just show the brain, here’s what it feels like to be in an optimal state, and it will rewire itself. So, just explain a little bit how, when you’re taking the pill versus exercise, the difference between the temporary versus the more permanent fixes.

John Ratey: Well, I think with the permanent fixes, I mean, what we know is that you begin to, when you constantly are stimulating the brain cells themselves to in the movement paradigm, in the movement activity, you are causing those brain cells to get bigger, meaning you’re in better, you’re getting more enzymes made to make more neurotransmitters and to make more receptors on the other side of the synapse, you don’t have to know the structures, it’s just that you make them bigger and better, and so you build the brain that way, so that you know that you’re going to achieve being less depressed and less likely to get depressed in the future, especially if you keep it up now. A pill, yes, they’re wonderful, they’re magical. When they first came on board, and they still are, they save lives and help people, and help people, hopefully, to get to the point where they begin to exercise, and then eventually not need the pills to as they begin to really change their brains, and so you know it’s, it’s not like these are replacements, these are both, and it’s not either or, it’s not a simple thing with the patient, you, you need the medicine sometimes, and you need to change your brain as well. Now, in another issue, attention deficit disorder, which I’ve written a lot about, because I have it too, and my partner, Ned Alow, has it as well, and that’s why we wrote the book Driven to Distraction, and so we always saw that X. Exercise was a huge component of good management and good treatment, and there are studies coming out galore all over the world, Taiwan, South Korea, a bunch of places in the US, a bunch in Canada, showing that exercise with people, kids, adults with learning issues, that is, with attention issues, or with reading issues, they get better with chronic exercise, maybe even replacing the medicine in many cases. In some cases, there’s no question you have to use medicine, but it depends on the severity, like you say, you’ve been managing your own ADD, as I do with exercise, you know, and when I don’t exercise, much more likely to be add-ish, so that promotes sort of a self-generating need to exercise to keep myself under wraps.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I’ve certainly been on that hamster wheel as well, no pun intended, where I was on Adderall for a certain period of time, it must have been nine or 10 years ago now, when I was, I’d come out of the suicidal depression, and I had kind of balanced myself, but then all of a sudden I’m thinking, I just, I cannot focus on anything, I have these crazy amounts of anxiety and stress, and the description that I gave to my doctor, and this is where he just clued in, is like, I know what’s going on. I said, listen, I feel like I have this machine inside my chest, and it’s just spinning and spinning and spinning and spinning and spinning and spinning, and I can’t turn the machine off, and I’m either going at 150 miles an hour or I’m going zero miles an hour, and I don’t have a middle speed. Those are the only two speeds that my brain worked, but he said to me, and this is where I realized that I was working with a very different doctor. He said, “You need to start exercising, and I’m thinking, “I just assume you’re going to give me a pill, but he had a much more holistic approach to it. So, what I started to learn, and this is really where my journey with brain health began, and it’s so counterintuitive to most people, but when you have attention issues, and I would guess there’s a fairly large amount of people listening to this and in my industry that deal with this, you think, oh well, I’m bouncing off the walls and I’m hyperactive and I have so much energy, but your brain is actually functioning on a lower wavelength and it’s trying to catch up, so can you explain the mechanism a little bit that’s going on with attention issues?

John Ratey: Sure, I think we know it from many different angles. We know it from the wave issue that, as you mentioned, but we also know it from at the synapse. At, you know, we have 100 billion nerve cells, and, and some of them are involved in the attention system to regulate our attention, and they are very sensitive to the medicine that we use the stimulants, but they’re sensitive to coffee, to nicotine, to all the drugs, cocaine, all the drugs of abuse as well, and what we see is that when we build up and make them tougher, that our attention system gets better, so that we actually see this in animals, and we see this in humans, because we test for the holding their attention, sort of maintaining their focus, as opposed to being distracted and not staying with it, being frustrated and giving up or throwing a fit, you know, if there’s exercise involved, they will have a much better result of staying on it, staying with it, getting through it, and medication helps, but exercise helps quite a lot.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, I found that exercise actually worked for me way, way better, and I had a pretty extensive background in athletics growing up as well, and I had done martial arts and basketball and baseball and football, and I’d done all these different activities, and it was funny, I had the same experience where you talked about with the runners, where they stopped running and started experiencing all of these symptoms that they had never seen before, the same thing happened to me in college, where I was super active all the time, and then all of a sudden it was just all about studying, and I just literally stopped everything, no exercise, wasn’t paying attention to diet, and within probably a couple of weeks I couldn’t even function, and I’m like, what is going on? I’ve always been a high performer and always had plenty of focus and energy, and I had been consistently active every single day for almost 10 years, and just cut it off like completely out of my life, and had that same profound effect, and then did the same thing to myself when I moved out to Los Angeles and started working, and that’s when I had the suicidal depression, because I literally was not moving at all, like I would wake up, get out of my bed, walk to my office, because I was working from home, and that was it. If I had a Fitbit back in those days, I probably would have had less than 1000 steps a day, and it almost killed me because I wasn’t moving. So, I’ve definitely had that experience, and kind of going one step further with the idea of ADD and ADHD. Another thing that I dealt with a lot, and this is something you talk. Talk about in the book is how people with add are stress junkies, and they need to put themselves in a place where, in order to focus, they need to be under immense pressure, and that’s the way that I lived for years, where I would intentionally procrastinate, procrastinate, procrastinate, until I had so much work to do in such a small period of time, I just became a laser-focused machine and knocked everything out, which is great until you deliver it, and you completely crash. So, can you talk a little bit about those mechanisms?

John Ratey: Sure. What you’re doing with the stress, I mean, you know, exercise is stress on the brain. Okay, and intense exercise is intense stress on the brain, and you, so you’re getting the same kind of effect in a very different way, in a much more manageable way, as you did with the old procrastination theme of waiting to the last minute, so you, you know, the sword of Damocles is over your head, and so you have to stay with it, you, you’re, you’re impelled to stay with it, you, your brain is turned on, and what we’re seeing with exercise and play and being in movement is that our brains are really turned on and turned on in a healthy way, as opposed to getting the stress hormone and all the adrenaline up for too long and too intense, and then you crash when you’re done with exercise. You’re doing it more gradually, and you go into recovery period rather than crashing. And then recovery period and recharging that leads to growth. That leads to growth. Just think about it for your muscle, and think of the brain as a muscle when you exercise, when you’re doing squats or lifts, or whatever you do, you’re really damaging your muscles, you’re really stressing your muscles to a big degree. But then you go into recovery period and repair period, and your muscles get bigger, they get tougher, you can with lift more, you can do more. In the same way with our brains, it’s, you know, you’re stressing and straining, you’re demanding more from your brain cells, they respond, they grow, they get tougher. All is good.

Zack Arnold: I want to transition back to the idea of exercise and brain growth again, because you had mentioned very briefly earlier in the show something called BDNF, and I want people to really understand how powerful daily movement and exercise can be for the growth of their brain, and you’ve actually called BDNF, which is brain-derived neurotrophic factor, miracle growth for the brain. So, what does this mean, and how can I get Miracle Grow for my brain?

John Ratey: Right, right. We wish we could. In fact, my colleagues in psychopharmacology say leading into the mental hospital now they would like to have a like a spray shower spraying out this this BDNF on patients as they walk through the doors because it’s so good for everything that the brain has to do, and then repair and recovery from the mental illnesses, or whatever, and so basically BDNF was discovered in the mid 80s, and it is a factor that we now know is produced when we use our brain cells, that is, use provides a feedback loop to turn the genes on to make more of this stuff. And what does this stuff do? Well, this stuff causes our brain cells to be healthy, does it through a variety of different channels that we know about to be perky, to be ready to grow. The interesting thing is that we knew about this in the mid 90s, and we talked about it in relationship to aging and keeping our brain cells healthy, and that was a big drive. How can we increase this BDNF to make sure we don’t have brain erosion and leading to Alzheimer’s disease. Well, in depression we see the same thing occurring as we do in rapid aging, if you will. You see the brain shut down, it’s not as plastic, and then this is what you, the word you love, neuroplasticity, meaning that our nerve cells can grow, and if you have the fertilizer there, they grow, it grows better, it grows quicker, it’s more responsive to the whatever your need is to use those brain cells for, and it really has a magical effect on the brain, and, like, for instance, in depression, we really, about 15 years ago, were beginning to say, oh, when you get depressed, your, your brain is less neuroplastic, in fact, when you’re. Depressed, you can’t learn much. You’re not paying it, not only not paying attention, you’re not taking things in, in from the environment nearly as much. Well, consistent with that is your BDNF is much lower, your stress is overwhelmed, your BDNF, if you will, or it just shuts it down. So then they began to look at our antidepressants and saw that our antidepressants raise our BDNF, and in fact, and, but, but even early on was hard for the people in who was studying depression to say exercise had this magical effect of raising BDNF actually two or three times more than our antidepressants or antidepressant drugs that we use, and nowadays when we’re, when the drug companies are looking for a new antidepressant, the thing that they look for is this going to not raise serotonin or dopamine or norepinephrine like we used to, but is this going to raise our BDNF levels? Because BDNF is an antidepressant as well as fertilizer, it’s an antianxiety agent as well as optimizing our brains to learn to grow to change, so it is really sort of it is what I said it was. It is sort of the miracle grow. It is the magic to regulate our brain. Now we know there’s so many other growth factors, so many others that we activate when we exercise, when we use our brain cells, and when we use our muscles. Now we’re learning this whole transfer of information from our bodies when we’re using our muscles up to our brain, not just BDNF, which we make it all in the brain as well as in the body, but all these other growth factors that when we’re using our bodies, when we’re exercising, when we’re moving, when we’re standing, we are demanding that our muscles grow, demanding that our muscles, our muscles are stressed, so we send out these factors, these growth factors to help us build our muscles better, use insulin better, so that we bring more glucose to the issue, to where it’s needed, and these factors go up to the brain and are very key and crucial for brain health to activate our brain to make it feel good, you know, we, you mentioned, or people mention, always the endorphin story. It’s not just about endorphins, it’s about the neurotransmitters. It’s sort of the endorphins, which are made both in the body and in the brain to help us deal with pain and to make us feel satiated, make us feel satisfied. But also we know there’s another substance that we’ve only discovered 15 years ago, or so, called the endocannabinoids, which means our body and our brain’s own marijuana factors. The endorphins are morphine factors, so all the heroin, oxycontin, all that we have receptors in our bodies and in our brains, and we make it to help us deal with pain and disappointment and craving, and so, but we also have this other thing called endocannabinoids, and their papers coming out now saying this may be even more important than the endorphins in making us feel good when we exercise, but there’s a whole group of factors when we’re learning about new ones every year that are important in making our moods better and making our brains work better, but exercise is always at the center of it.

Zack Arnold: Well, one thing that you’d brought up that really struck home for me is the idea of depression and retaining information and learning new information, because this is something that I experienced really, really acutely, and I’ve actually gone through this twice. I had the bout of suicidal depression about a decade ago, and I wasn’t – I didn’t have suicidal depression, but I went through a massive about a month or two of absolute burnout and complete crash, and this is less than a year ago, and I wrote about this in a blog post, so I can link to that in the show notes, but I found that I might, I have almost no memory of what happened during that time, because I wasn’t retaining information, when I would read something, I would be like, I have no idea what I just read, I didn’t understand any of that, and where I’ve now applied that in a positive way. Is as a film editor for a living, what I have to do is ingest very large amounts of information on a regular basis. So, for a regular episode of television, for example, it’s about 42 minutes on TV, but it’s over 30 hours of material that I have to wade through, and I’ll watch three. Or four hours a day, and when I didn’t have any energy, and I was dealing with depression, I would just stare at the TV, and I’d be done, and I would think, I have no idea what I just watched, and I just wasted an hour or two watching this footage, but now what I’ve done is developed these habits, so I am moving intensely, only for maybe 60 to 120 seconds at a time, but right before I start to ingest material and watch it, and it has a huge effect on my ability to retain information and remember it. We’re going to be weeks later, and I can just recall where something was and almost have this moment of, wait, how did I know that? Where did that come from? Like, it’s a really bizarre experience. So, how, how are just these small bouts of intense exercise linked to this, because I don’t want people to think, well, all this is great, but I’m not going to exercise for 60 minutes a day, I just don’t have the time,

John Ratey: Right. Well, it’s so interesting. Just this past month, a bunch of studies have come out from the Netherlands, okay, looking at kids in schools, because that’s where exercise is really, we’re bereft of it in most of the world. We’re taking it away, so people, we think this is going to help raise test scores. In the Netherlands, they’re looking at kids while they’re moving in the classroom, having them do jumping jacks and push-ups and squats and calisthenics and dance and all that and learning while they’re moving, okay, and small bouts for four minute bouts of exercise, they learn better when they’re moving and they learn better when they’re done and they’re moving right beside their desk, so they don’t even have to move, for instance, in my book, in the one of the chapters I talk about a woman who was dealing with people remodeling her house, and they were way, they were a year late in finishing, and she was getting very, very stressed, and she didn’t have a kitchen for so long, etc. So she began to drink, and so I suggested, and she had been an athlete, and I suggested, well, why don’t you start jumping rope when you feel like you’re going, you know, you’re overstressed. So she did that, and she actually put four jump ropes through her fairly large house, and so that she would, whenever she would have these cravings or this load of stress, she did four or five minutes of jump rope, and I called her jump rope lady in the book, and she was able to stop drinking, was, and then went back to the gym instead of playing tennis again, and did you know her usual, which had been co-opted by the stress of having her house really redone in a very, very large way, and it, you know, is a terror of the too much work for the construction industry at that point. One doesn’t need to get to the gym, you know, walking the stairs, getting up and doing there’s a great app for your phone, the seven minute exercise that you can look up, and that’s what it’s called, and it gives you exercises to do for 30 seconds and 10 seconds rest, and you go through a lot of different muscle groups, and you really get energized from doing this in just seven minutes. It’s not to replace a full gym workout, but people that say they don’t have enough time. This is, this has been amazing, and I’ve had people who are doing it once they start, you know, almost every day, or in fact every day, just to make sure they get that exercise break in. And so one doesn’t have to go to the gym, I mean, you know, and come on now, with the YouTube and everything, you can go and be led by an exercise or CrossFit as their daily wad or their workout of the day on that doesn’t necessarily involve weights that you can do, you can be driven by that, or you know, variety of different offerings every day, and that are already on there, so that you can, you can choose one and do it fairly quickly. These are not like 60 minutes of exercise, and so, what does this do? Well, this causes your brain to acutely change the chemistry changes in your brain.

Zack Arnold: Well, and I’m very glad that you brought up the seven minute apps, because this was kind of the beginning of my brainstorm to create this entire online learning system, because I had been reaching out to hundreds of people in my industry via email, even via phone, having lunches or dinners with them, and I heard over and over. Oh, yeah. No, I’ve got, you know, a collection of videos bookmarked on YouTube, where I have a seven minute app, but I kind of never use it. I’m thinking, huh, all right. Well, having the routine, that’s great, but people actually have to learn how to develop the habits, the routines, and build the motivation and develop their work. Why, so they can then plug in those routines, so that’s actually what my online learning course is all about, is it’s leading you to the point where the routines just become habit, and you don’t have to think about it, but I’m so glad that you’re reinforcing the idea that yes, first of all, exercise is great for you, you should be exercising, you should be running, you should be going to the gym and doing strength training and high intensity, but if you work 16 hours a day on a project, you can’t just think it’s all or nothing. I’m either going to the gym or I’m just sitting all day. If you can incorporate these little bits of movement throughout the day, it has a huge impact not just on burning calories, but on your overall brain health, which is ultimately what you need in a very creative and stressful industry, so I’m very, very glad you brought up the apps, and I’m trying to build something that takes it one step further, so people don’t just say, well, yeah, I’ve got it, I just never use it, or I forget about it, or I set alarms and I ignore the alarm, so that’s kind of the step that I’m taking on, but now that we’ve really spent a lot of time talking about brain growth and brain health, I want to go in the opposite direction, and I don’t believe in fear tactics, but I believe in sharing the truth, and this is where I really realize I need to focus on this a lot more, and that is the idea of brain shrinkage and shriveling, and how when you are inactive, or if you are obese, it’s literally lowering your cognitive function and shrinking your brain.

John Ratey: Yeah, no, that’s that’s what we know, and we’ve known about it, and we’ve talked about it, but now we’re, it’s out there, so the world knows that this being our sedentary lifestyles, and there’s being sedentary and being inactive really creates the right environment for your brain to shrink and go away, for your cells to erode, for them to get thinner and not as connected, and them not to give it to get as tough. It’s just like the atrophy that you see with your muscles when you don’t move them, you see the same thing with your brain cells, so, and being, I mean, the this whole revolution started out in California, you see, Irvine, in the 90s, when they looked at these mice running and their brains were thicker and their hippocampus were bigger, and all that, but what they showed was that this is a way of preserving our brains, keeping our brains from shrinking and going away, and it was all driven by the realization that the boomers who were coming on were going to be entering the 60 plus in a big wave, as we’re doing now, and we need to really try to understand how to stop this inevitable brain decline, and, and so forth. And now we have lots of evidence showing that the healthier you are, the fitter you are, the smarter you are, the healthier you are, the more optimal your weight is, the better your brain works, and the better it’s going to work for a longer period of time.

Zack Arnold: Just so, so I can absolutely clarify with 100% certainty, I have a clinical psychiatrist at Harvard that’s saying movement makes you smarter, is is that accurate?

John Ratey: Oh, yes, yes, it absolutely is. And I’ll give you a great example, and that’s a study that came out of Sweden a few years ago, looking at an epidemiologic study looking at 1.2 million boys over a 26 year period. They keep all these records there, and they tested the kids when they entered high school at the age of 15. They tested both the boys and the girls. They tested them aerobically, that is how much endurance they had. They tested their muscle strength, they tested their IQs, and their performance on cognitive exams. Well, the boys all were retested when they were 18 and entered a compulsory military service, and what they found, that is, if you improve your fitness level, if you got better aerobically, your IQs went up. You, they followed these guys after the military service, those that improved during high school, their fitness level, their aerobic level, their ability to endure activity, they had a higher academic standing, meaning more degrees, and then eventually the same group had a higher socioeconomic standing. So, what does this mean? This means that being fit made their brains better, made them smarter, and this held, which was really great for somebody in the sciences. This held for 650 sets of identical twins. So, if one of the twins, they started out the same, but if one of the twins got fitter in high school and the other one didn’t. Their IQs got higher, so when you see something like that, you go, “Oh my god, this is real, as real as real could be. And their conclusion on the study is that the Swedish government is that used, we should be increasing the time spent in physical training, physical activity, not just sports, but physical activity for all, because it made our country smarter, and it’s beginning to happen, although it’s in fits and starts, but it really is true that you’re in California, you know, since 2000 you’ve tested in the schools in grades five, seven, and nine, a million kids a year, and evaluated them on a thing called the Fitness Gram, which is basically six different fitness standards. Well, what they found and what they find every single year, the more fitness standards you meet, the better your scores are on those horrible no child helped at all tests that all these kids have to take the no child left behind tests. Better the scores are the more fitness standards you meet, the better your scores are going to be. So it’s a straight line graph of increasing scores in both math and language arts.

Zack Arnold: Well, it’s funny that you brought up the, then I love the way that you put that, the no child helps at all. That’s pretty amazing. So, clearly I know where you stand politically, but I think it’s, it’s, it’s funny where you talk about the idea of being more sedentary, is actually shrinking your brain and slowing down your cognitive function. This is not scientific, but I think, and this is me going off on a complete tangent, but if you look at what’s happening with our society today, especially in the political sphere, and I’m not saying anything about any particular candidates on any side, but you just see the degradation of human decency and humanity in talking about the real issues, and I firmly believe that that has a level of connection with our lack of movement and mobility in this country, and how everybody is so sedentary.

John Ratey: Right, here’s something that, despite what’s happening in the political arena now, you know, and despite ISIS and all the other hate out there, I think what’s happening that I see and what I know is happening because I feel it, I’m involved in so much, but just this past couple years it’s finally getting to the point where we’re approaching a tipping point where you know you’re starting a whole wellness kind of thing for the brain and for people in general. This is happening everywhere. It’s happening. People are being more attuned to it. Look at the huge growth of CrossFit and huge growth of SoulCycle, and you know, one in 10 of us in the states are having a yoga class this week. 10% of the people in the United States are in one yoga class. This week, that’s incredible. When you think of yoga, you know, a lot of people aren’t doing it, but there’s a lot that are. That’s the point, and, and that means that they’re appreciating the body, mind, brain interaction, and we’re seeing this happen, and the kind of new trying to use technology to help us do what you want to do to make our brains work better for us. It’s happening. It is happening. I’m going out to California, and next week I’ll be flying out there in your, in both Southern California and in Silicon Valley, meeting with groups, two groups that are committed to using artificial intelligence, and another one just, just the knowledge, and how to, how to get people, the elderly, moving, but how to remind people what they want to do, and your particular thing about about the seven minute exercise, and reminding people the movement to move better and move more often started a long time ago, but really was picked up at the University of Michigan about 10 years ago, and studied, and now written about that the focus shouldn’t be on long-term goals, like exercising to lose weight is not going to be great if that’s all you do, it’s not going to happen that much, it does, about 15% will come from your exercising, but it’s really about diet change for losing weight, but that’s not the effect that is important to hold on to. What’s important to hold on to is how you feel that day that you’ve exercised. It’s looking at it and remind. Like you said, people forget about it, but reminding yourself what you felt like, why you do it, how much better you are today, how much more editing you can do, for instance, how much more you can do, how much pleasanter you are, you know, how much more loving you are, and more civil, like you’re implying, and all that is true, and so we need to remind ourselves of this constantly.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that’s really what I’m trying to emphasize as well, is that if you look at it only long term, you’re ultimately going to fail, because you’re thinking, well, I had this one day where my exercise calendar said I should do a 60 minute hit workout and need this many macros of protein, carbs, and carbohydrates and fats, and well, I just didn’t do it today, so I give up, and what I’m trying to teach people is it’s not about the long term goal, it’s about establishing a system, because if you have a system in place where it’s, well, I’m going to do this in the morning, I’m going to do this at 11 o’clock, and I have all these apps talking to each other, and I just.. I’m kind of automating all these things for myself. You miss one day, who cares? The system is still in place, and you start tomorrow, and your goal is, I just want to feel better. I want to have more clarity in my work. I want to be able to work faster and more efficiently, and the side effect of all those is you feel much better and you lose weight and you get in better shape, so it’s kind of the reverse psychology model of really breaking it down into a system and not looking at I’m gonna lose 90 pounds in 90 days, like that thinking is just crazy, and we have proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that does not work, and that’s why people make so much money off of it, because people are looking for the next quick fix. So, that being the case, I want to be very respectful of your time, because we’re just about done. But before I lose you, if somebody’s listening to this and they’re convinced now that movement really is going to make a difference in their lives, where it’s a couple of really small things that they can do to get started right away without heavy investment or being overwhelmed.

John Ratey: Well, no, but that’s that’s where I think what I mentioned, the seven minute exercise, get it on your smartphone, whatever it is. It was developed at the Human Performance Institute in Orlando with Jim Laura, who’s sort of the first sports psychologist, really, and it’s a wonderful group and wonderful the leaders in this area, and they develop this, and it’s, you know, in the New York Times, and all over, all over, it’s very popular, and it’s free, it’s free, put it on your smartphone, and it will lead you through a series of different exercises, jumping jacks, push-ups, squats, lunges, and, and it’s, it’s, it’s only seven minutes, so it ends quick, you know. It’s not something that you fail at, so, and then, then, of course, you know, for most people, you got to walk before you run, so we’re, you know, there’s so many programs out there, the walk run program, and just was reacquainted with that by the Disney people, they’re they’re all into getting people to do a marathon, but it’s walk run, walk a little bit, run a little bit, then walk, so you’re not over straining your muscles, as well as not, you know, you’re building up your wind gradually, you walk, so you can run, so you know, so you entertain these things gradually, you don’t think that you’re going to go out and run a 5k if you, if you’re just sitting on the couch all the time, you know you’re not going to do it, so you walk a 5k you can probably do that, but if you can’t, you just walk a little bit, and then you see yourself, and using the technology that we have today is just amazing, what we can can do with the Fitbit and all that, we can know what our heart rate is, know what our number of paces, yada yada yada, and you can, I see a lot of progress with people with the Fitbit, because they’ll get, you know, there’s this magic 10,000 steps, they’ll get their 10,000 steps in, they’ll go out and when they come home and say, “Oh my god, I’ve only had 6000 steps today, so they’ll go out and they’ll walk around the block until they hit that 10,000 steps or near enough, so you can use these digital markers to help guide you, but you still have to be committed to it, and I would say read my book, Spark, because it will turn you on to the incredible benefits of exercise for your mood, your addiction proneness, your stress level, your ability to forestall cognitive decline in aging from your brain’s perspective, but you know it. Is a reinforcer of all good habits.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, I’ll put a link in the show notes to Spark, which is the whole reason that I found you. I will put Driven to Distraction on my reading list, but I may get distracted and not read it. I don’t know, I may forget and get caught up in too many things.

John Ratey: Well, no, but listen to it, listen to it.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, no, that is how I do it. I actually have a very hard time reading. Reading comprehension was always my lowest scores in school. Just a horrible time reading, but if I listen, it’s literally like photographic memory, and I pick up so much information. But if I read, I retain nothing. So it is actually how I found you, and how I just.. everything is because I’m in my car for two to three hours a day, and that’s how I get all my information. But I will definitely link to your books and your website as well. And I cannot thank you enough for being on the show today. I really hope that this has helped people realize that exercise and movement are about a lot more than calories in, calories out, and making their way smaller. It’s actually about making your brain larger and feeling better. So, this has been a tremendous pleasure. Thank you so much.

John Ratey: Thanks for having me on, Zack.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Episode Credits

This episode was edited by Curtis Fritsch, and the show notes were prepared and published by Jakin Rintelman. Special thanks to Krystle Penhall and Sarah Furie for helping to spread the love!

The original music in the opening and closing of the show is courtesy of Joe Trapanese (who is quite possibly one of the most talented composers on the face of the planet).