Exercise and Our Brain

I am reading the book Spark-The Revolutionary New Science OF Exercise And The Brain by John J. Ratey. The book discusses how exercise builds your brain and how exercise helps overcome stress, anxiety, depression, attention deficit, and addiction. I highly recommend it! It's really helped me to understand why exercise has such a positive affect on my life and especially my brain. Regular aerobic activity activity relaxes the body, so it's able to handle more stress before a more serious response including heart rate and stress hormones kick in. Exercise raises the trigger point of the physical, more serious reaction. While we are exercising, in our brain we are securing the structure of our nerve cells by activating genes to produce specific proteins that protect our cells. Cool, right? Not only are we building muscle, when we exercise, but building our brain!