“Yabba Dabba Doo!” .. If that phrase rings a bell, then you have probably watched the Flintstones in the past. Before we look into exercise, as well as everything that impacts the mental benefits that we can reap from it, let us take a large step back. In fact, let us go back in time millions of years ago, long past the stone age. In order to make sense of how and why we experience substantial mental health benefits from physical activity and exercise (through the Runner’s High), we need to know how and why we developed the way we have. Let us talk more about the evolution of the runner’s high.
Hunters and Gatherers
During a period that occurred roughly 6-9 million years ago (called the miocene era) we evolved from chimpanzees to humans. Throughout this time, we transitioned from moving on four limbs to walking on two limbs (i.e. turning from quadrupedal creatures to bipedal creatures). Evolving into bipedal creatures allowed us to slowly gain the abilities to walk, run, hunt and gather for essential resources.
Current evidence suggests that the hunter and gatherers’ era started back about 2-3 million years ago among the early hominins in East and South Africa. The hominins are a group of people composed of present people, extinct human species, and all of our forefathers and mothers. Instead of scavenging meat left behind by other predators, hunters and gatherers actively tracked down and slaughtered animals for food and created methods of storing vegetation for later consumption in order to survive. As you can imagine, the hunting and gathering lifestyle persisted for quite some time. In fact, only up until roughly 11,000 – 12,000 years ago, we walked 12-15 kilometers each day as the human lifestyle was based on hunting animals and foraging for food.
Natural Selection
Throughout this time, our already complex brains grew largely in size by continuously re-wiring and gradually adapting to overcome new challenges that we were exposed to through the process of evolution.
Charles Darwin is likely the first person that jumped into your mind after reading that. As you may know, Darwin was an evolutionary biologist who wrote “On the Origins of Species”, which has been used in many classrooms since the early-mid 1800’s. His work contains some of the most widely accepted and considered fundamental concepts in science. Within it, he described the scientific theory that populations evolved over the course of generations through a process called natural selection.
Based on the process of natural selection, characteristics that were beneficial for survival were more likely to be passed on to our offspring. Over time, this allowed us to continuously evolve into smarter, more capable beings. One particular part of the brain, named our prefrontal cortex, is a noteworthy structure that evolved drastically during this time.
Our Prefrontal Cortex
A more capable prefrontal cortex allowed us to better communicate, as well as develop senses of morality, intuition, as well as insight. A further area of the evolved brain named the motor cortex helped us to improve our motor skills necessary to help build tools, create shelter, construct weaponry, as well as fabricate clothing.
Survival of the Fittest
The process of hunting and foraging food was often not simple. Although certain foods were readily available for us to be gathered and consumed, we often had to risk our lives. This included having to make difficult decisions. We always had to watch out for other predators, which had the same thing in mind as we did.
We could not travel too far away from our community, as we had to keep some energy reserves for our return. The further we left our community and the longer we searched for food, the more energy we had to expend and the more resources we had to gather in order to get this energy back.
How did we do it? What was is it that kept us alert, energized, motivated and gave us a positive attitude when things got more challenging during our quest for survival?
The answer is through the feelings of the Persistence High.
Persistence High
Generally speaking, the “Persistence High” (referring to the exercise high), is our internal reward that derives from positive feelings and emotions for staying persistent in an activity that benefits our survival. You may recognize the effects of it from the experience of your Runner’s highs. From here on forward, we will use the terms persistence high and runner’s high interchangeably.
The experience is composed of the intoxicating feeling of pleasure, calmness and determination during and following physical activity. It helps to mask our mental and physical pain, elevate our mood, keep us calm and our minds clear and sharp, as well as provide us with feelings of joy and pleasure. While it is naive to believe that we did not gain great levels of pleasure from being physically active before evolving into hunters and gatherers, it is arguably the time we would have benefitted from it the most.
Purpose of the Persistence High
Whether it was hunting for food, looking for resources, building shelter or any other activity that needed to be completed, it helped us to persist, rather than give up when things became increasingly more difficult. As we gained the ability to walk using only two limbs, communities developed more rapidly, which led to those hunting having to go for higher quality resources that involved greater risk.
The persistence high helped us to endure our exploratory search for resources. It helped to further motivate us to start and commit our time to those activities. And these feelings became even stronger the more often we performed these activities. This is in part how our communities grew and continued to evolve throughout time.
But the persistence high had an even bigger, longer-term purpose than keeping us persistent in activities advantageous to us. Additionally, it made us become more social and it enhanced our ability to develop stronger emotional bonds with our peers. Try and relate it to yourself – you may have noticed that following physical activity, you felt less anxious, particularly when it came to being social. Besides helping us to create stronger social bonds, it also increased the likelihood of us sharing our findings with our community rather than keeping it all to ourselves. Thus, in our evolutionary pasts, humans may have survived in part because physical activity was pleasurable and rewarding to us.
Hormones – Our Body’s Secret Language
Primarily responsible for this rewarding feeling is the cocktail of feel-good hormones discussed in the first chapter of this book.
- Endorphins, the first hormone that is produced in the creation of the persistence high, helped us to mask pain and experience pleasure.
- Endocannabinoids followed and aided in regulating our levels of stress, as well as down regulating our sensations of pain.
- Dopamine made us feel a sense of reward and pleasure.
- Serotonin helped to provide us with a deeper sense of satisfaction and optimism.
How to Recreate the Runner’s High
In today’s day and age, we do not necessarily have to hunt and gather our food anymore. So how can we recreate this feeling that has kept hominins thriving for millions of years? We have to attempt to recreate the physiological environment that our bodies were subjected to during our time spent scavenging and hunting. To learn about actionable steps on how we can recreate the rewarding runner’s high during cardiovascular or strength training sessions, I recommend that you check out this popular article I wrote.
The Joy of Movement
Let me introduce you to Kelly McGonigal. McGonigal is a famous author, psychologist, and educator, whose mission is “to help people experience hope, joy, and meaning, even when things are difficult” by being a psychologist and bestselling author.
McGonigal is responsible for coining the term persistence high in her most recent book, “The Joy of Movement”. In it, she explains how physical exercise can be a powerful antidote to the modern epidemics of depression, anxiety, and loneliness. McGonigal states that the powerful psychological effects of movement are a result of many different brain chemicals including those that are responsible for energy, alleviate worry, and help you bond with others.
The Purpose of Movement
McGonigal states that the entire purpose of the brain is to produce movement. Movement is the only way we have of interacting with the world. This is why our biology includes so many ways to reward moving. At the most fundamental level, a rewarding movement is how your brain and body encourage you to participate in life. If you are willing to move your muscles give you hope, your brain will give you orchestrated pleasure and your entire physiology will adjust to help you find the energy, purpose, and courage to keep going (source).
Kelly has been someone I have learned a lot from and have been looking up to for years. If you would like to learn more about the development of hormonal changes throughout evolution, and how we became dependent on it to flourish, bond and survive, I highly suggest that you check out her book (“The Joy of Movement” – Kelly McGonigal).