Have you ever found the effects of exercise to be a bit addicting, at least for a short period of time? Then may have been repeatedly high on exercise. But what is the exercise high? And what is responsible for it? What can we do to reproduce this feeling on-demand?
The Exercise High is a powerful state of mind that can temporarily erase stress, pain, and anxiety. Try to recall a time where you had just finished an energetic workout session. Responsible for these thrilling sensations is a cocktail of happy hormones: Endorphins, ECS, Serotonin, and Dopamine.
Getting “High” from Exercise
Try to think back. Can you picture a scenario? When you were in this state, did you happen to reflect back on your worries and stressors, or on specific that day or that week where you felt down? Did thinking about those things, while your body was still suffused with the exercise high, make them seem small and rather unimportant? Were you wondering why those things seemed like such a big deal at the time, and why you allowed them to so negatively affect your mood?
If you did have these thoughts, I suspect you also wondered how beautiful life would be if you could always feel the way you did then, during the exercise high. Besides the wonderful feelings of that moment, wouldn’t it be amazing to also, whenever you wish, rapidly extinguish depressive symptoms, sky-rocket your confidence, and provide yourself with a better night’s sleep? As well as so much more.
All of those things are possible. In fact, they are well within your reach. But first you need to understand how to achieve them. So let’s examine the physical mechanisms at work in the body that bring about the exercise high.
Hormones: Your Body’s Secret Language
Did you ever wonder what’s going on underneath that skull of yours when you are experiencing the exercise rush? Let me simplify it for you.
Your body communicates through hormones. Hormones are chemicals carrying messages that travel within the bloodstream or between nerves to relay information. Different hormones have different functions and elicit different feelings, with the goal to stimulate certain behaviors.
For example, let us take ghrelin. Ghrelin is your hunger hormone. It’s released when your body detects no food in your stomach and signals you that you should eat. After it is produced by your stomach, it travels to your brain. There, it is interpreted causing you to make your way to the fridge and make yourself a peanut butter-jelly sandwich. Once you have eaten, your body rewards you with a sudden rush of dopamine for listening to what your body has been trying to tell you. This is because you just performed a survival-enhancing activity.
Similarly, the so-called “happy hormones” are the ones responsible for the Exercise High. These primarily include endorphins, endocannabinoids, serotonin, and dopamine. All of which have evolved over millions of years and can be reproduced through the right bodily environment. It may surprise you that they activate the same receptors in the brain as commonly used recreational drugs. But all that without the detrimental side effects.
Hormones Involved in Producing the Exercise High
These “happy hormones” are produced by your innate reward mechanisms as a reward for benefitting your survival. Various systems within your brain evolved to help endure often risky and stressful activities. Activities that enhanced the likelihood of you and your community having food that day. Or gathering enough resources to build essential tools and shelter.
The mixture of these hormones within the brain is what provides us with the unique feelings of the exercise high.
High levels of these hormones may make you feel like you are on cloud 9. You can’t help but to smile and have a more positive outlook on your life. On top of that others feel that you are more enjoyable to be around. Some people describe it as a state of flow, helping one to focus one’s attention on the mission at hand only without any distraction. It is frequently experienced by competitive athletes and gamers.
Some runners describe it as a wonderful state where the spirit is free, and flying about two feet about your body. A good example of this is when you become so absorbed by an activity that you enjoy, you lose track of time. Like that time when you spent time with your loved ones and realized that you missed eating your lunch. This experience can take many forms. However, all of these experiences share the absence of worries, anxiety and an elevated sense of being/feelings.
And the same goes for exercise. The magical feeling of the exercise high is caused by the interplay of certain hormones produced during and following exercise. Those exercise reward systems primarily include your endorphins, hormones from our endocannabinoid system, dopamine, as well as serotonin.
How They Get You “High”
Each one of these has a distinct function and provides a different feel-good sensation. But only through effortful exercise can you get all these hormones to activate together. This and only this produces the exercise high. Only when they all come together you will experience the unique exercise high.
Imagine you could feel this way on demand. Think about the possibilities and the direction your life could take. Let me show you how you can fulfill your potential by repeatedly experiencing the exercise high and get you started on your journey towards the best feeling version of yourself. Let’s get you high on exercise.
Personal Experience
Below you will find the methods that will teach you exactly how to do this. You will discover how to experience the wonderful effects of the Exercise High through my methods. You will learn how to live a life filled with feeling like the best version of yourself and in turn transform your life for the better. I have spent the last six years of my life obsessed with this. I can’t stop studying it. I can’t, for some reason.
Having been searching for it for so long, and making some fascinating discoveries, I created a magnificent obsession. I have read about 35-40 books, listened to just as many audiobooks. I attended online seminars and invested thousands of dollars and years of my life learning these secrets. Then I tested the hell out of all of them. With myself, and with every single one of my clients. This is the best of the best. And I don’t know of anybody else that is doing it. If you apply it, this shit works. Are you ready?
To make more sense of what we just talked about, let us dive a little deeper into each one of the four primary hormones. Because once we know what is happening at the cellular level, we can make sense of the broader beneficial effects on your entire system.
Exercise High Hormone #1: Endorphins
To help you understand the role of endorphins, let us start with a hypothetical story. Pretend you are an antelope on the African plain. You are relaxing, munching on some vegetation, pretty much minding your own business, when suddenly a starving lion springs out of a clump of bushes and starts to chase you. Instantly, you react and start running for your life. Unfortunately, the lion gashes your hind leg with its claw. You abruptly change directions, faking out the hard-charging lion, and escape into safety.
A bit later, after you’ve recovered your breath, you examine your hind leg and are startled to see just how deep the lion’s scratch marks are. It’s a physical injury that under normal circumstances would have had you drop everything and writhe in pain.
What saved your life was a rush of adrenaline and endorphins. These hormones worked together to temporarily mask your pain and provide you with the drive to exert the maximum effort that was required to save your life.
Endorphin Effects
Endorphins (“endo” for “endogenous” (produced within the body) plus “phins” (referring to the opiate pain reliever morphine) are powerful chemicals primarily produced by the pituitary gland. Your pituitary gland is a small bean-sized gland responsible for regulating important functions such as growth and reproduction. They have evolved to mask physical pain during emergency situations and to reward you for performing an activity that increased your ability to survive. Additionally, they can provide a strong calming effect, strengthen your body’s immune system, relieve stress, and enhance pleasure.
We modern humans, no longer running for our lives from predators, most commonly associate endorphins with the feeling of joy that follows a good exercise session. A state commonly known as “runner’s high” or “exercise euphoria.”
If you have been feeling down for some time, it may be because your endorphin levels have taken a hit. This often happens as a result of lack of movement, too much time spent indoors, loneliness, having too much stress, or a poor diet. Common symptoms of an endorphin deficiency include fatigue, exhaustion, lack of drive, and irritability.
Natural Endorphin Boosters
The good news is that there are many ways you can boost your endorphin levels and experience their great positive effects on your well-being. Although alcohol and pain-relieving medication such as oxycodone, codeine, and morphine can reproduce it, we should do so naturally and in a healthy way! Here’s a list of effective ways you can naturally increase your endorphin levels:
Natural Endorphin Boosters | |
physical activity / exercise | dark chocolate / spicy food / glass of wine |
balanced nutrition | volunteering |
spending time outside | going to the sauna |
sexual intercourse | massage / acupuncture |
In my book, we’ll discuss in depth how to develop your own personal game plan for incorporating the items of this list into your own personal wellness plan. But for now, let’s continue our tour of the “happy hormones.”
Next we’ll examine the group of hormones responsible for the deeply satisfying calming effect of the exercise high, the endocannabinoids.
Exercise High Hormone #3: Endocannabinoids
Your endocannabinoid system (ECS) is a complex network of cells found densely packed all throughout your brain and body. Hormones released from this system are responsible for, among other things, regulating your sleep, appetite, digestion, metabolism, muscle formation, mood, memory, fertility, and liver function.
In an article published by Harvard, the ECS was described as “essential and mysterious”. This is referring to the vital yet not completely understood role the ECS plays in most aspects of our moment-to-moment bodily functioning.
Endocannabinoid hormones can be found through the body. This includes various organs, in muscle tissue, and within your circulating white blood cells. After they are released, they bind to receptors within your brain and body to stimulate their respective effects.
Endocannabinoid receptors outnumber almost any other receptor type in the brain. This is part of the reason why the ECS is primarily responsible for creating the “high” you feel from exercising.
Effects of the ECS
Acting like the traffic police, endocannabinoids are responsible for the upregulation and downregulation of certain functions. They do so by binding to their respective receptors. When this is done in combination with the triggering of opiate receptors (your natural pain-killer receptors, activated when you take pain-killers like morphine) and increasing the production of serotonin (a further happiness hormone, discussed below) by increasing the availability of amino acids responsible for their production.
You can think of the ECS as a switch that affects the regulation of many of your bodily processes. This includes things such as your energy balance, appetite stimulation, blood pressure, pain, memory and learning, as well as your immune response.
Here’s the key: The more the ECS is stimulated, the more these processes will work in your favor. Thereby giving your body and mind the ability to mask pain and elevate your mood. Besides that, they can induce the feeling of calmness and relaxation that is commonly felt following the cessation of exercise.
If you suffer from chronic pain or if you engage in moderate to heavy alcohol use, you may be putting yourself at a disadvantage when it comes to the production of these hormones. Chronically decreased production of these hormones endocannabinoids has been shown to increase the likelihood of developing certain physical and mental conditions. Including major depression, fibromyalgia, migraine, generalized anxiety disorder, PTSD, IBS, and ADHD.
Natural Endocannabinoid Boosters
So how exactly do we stimulate the ECS to release endocannabinoids? You guessed it. Physical activity and exercise! If you get your body moving, your ECS will naturally produce these hormones. Hence increasing your focus, helping with your concentration, decreasing anxiety and stress levels, and rapidly improving your mood.
But while physical activity and exercise are the most effective means to stimulate the ECS, there are other approaches you can take:
Natural Endocannabinoid Boosters | |
physical activity (particularly yoga) | dark chocolate, coffee, herbs & tea |
balanced nutrition | foods containing essential fatty acids |
acupuncture / massage | breathing exercises |
cold exposure | meditation |
Exercise High Hormone #3: Serotonin
Now that we have learned about the molecules responsible for the relief of pain and the stimulating of relaxation and calmness, let us peel back a layer. Let us talk about a hormone responsible for a deeper sense of well-being and happiness: serotonin.
The serotonin hormone is important for regulating your mood and maintaining a level of emotional stability. It can also help to increase your self-esteem. This is likely why we feel so good about ourselves following exercise.
Serotonin gets released following exercise and is likely also the reason we feel more social following activity. It promotes positive social behaviors such as physical connection and cooperation and tends to decrease negative antisocial behaviors such as aggression and social isolation.
On top of that, additional serotonin gets released when we feel socially respected, triggering us to perform actions to increase social respect. Due to its great effects on stabilizing our mood, it is frequently the primary target for medicines used to treat anxiety and depression. This includes SSRIs (medications that decrease the rate of serotonin absorption in your brain) like Prozac and Zoloft.
Serotonin is a chemical generated by the brainstem, a crucial brain region also responsible for controlling your breathing and heart rate. Its primary function within the brain is to act as a messenger and to communicate between your nerve cells. Besides stabilizing your mood, it also plays an important role in your bowel movements, sleep, wound healing, and sexual function.
Functions of Serotonin
Serotonin plays an important role in stabilizing your emotional and mental well-being. As a consequence, a deficiency in your levels of this hormone typically generates feelings of anxiety and depression.
The good news is that serotonin levels can be restored effectively through exercise! Harvard professor John Ratey is a well-known psychiatrist, as well as the best-selling author of the book Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain.
In his book, Ratey states that “exercise is like taking a little bit of Prozac and a little bit of Ritalin—it focuses your mind and boosts your mood.” In other words, he states that performing regular exercise can replace the need for powerful medication to restore your regular levels of serotonin.
Natural Serotonin Boosters
Here’s a list of the most effective methods to stimulate serotonin production (it’s more than just physical activity and exercise):
Natural Serotonin Boosters | |
physical activity | meditation |
sunlight | massage |
healthy diet (eggs, cheese, turkey, nuts, salmon, tofu, pineapple) / supplements | spending time with loved ones |
meditation |
And now on to the final stop of our whirlwind tour of the “happy hormones,” the one you’ve probably been waiting for: dopamine.
Exercise High Hormone #4: Dopamine
Dopamine is another hormone that serves a variety of functions. It is important in reward, motivation, memory, attention, and movement control. As you may already know, when high levels of dopamine are produced, emotions of pleasure and reward are generated. This results in a feedback loop that urges you to repeat a given behavior.
From a biological perspective, dopamine is a happy chemical that rewards you for overcoming a serious challenge, or gets triggered when you are about to meet a survival need (e.g., climbing a tall tree to grab fruit, or catching a fish when you are out fishing).
Dopamine’s reward mechanism played a key role in motivating our ancient ancestors to continually undertake important and often challenging activities that promoted their survival.
It’s important to note that an activity’s level of difficulty plays a key role: In order to increase the release of dopamine, we need to make sure that the activity stays challenging (it has to be of significant intensity) and is beneficial to our survival.
Despite being a feel-good hormone, dopamine does have a darker side. People can abuse the chemical’s release and reward mechanism by performing activities that provide us with a false sense of reward.
Examples of such activities include gambling, shopping, playing video games, using narcotics, and abusing recreational drugs. These activities release a huge amount of dopamine, which can lead to addiction and potentially lead you down a dangerous rabbit hole.
Natural Dopamine Boosters
Low dopamine levels, on the other hand, have been related to diminished drive and excitement for items that would normally thrill most individuals. People suffering from depression, in particular, frequently experience a loss of drive and attention.
Although depression is commonly associated with a shortage of serotonin, research shows that a lack of dopamine also contributes to this condition.
We are indeed fortunate that healthy exercise is able to regulate our four feel-good hormones. Here’s a list of more wholesome, dopamine-boosting activities you can try, in addition to your exercise routine. None of these will provide you with a sense of false reward!
Natural Dopamine Boosters | |
physical activity | meditation |
nutrition (high protein, low saturated fats, probiotics, minerals and & vitamins) | sexual intercourse |
listening to music | sunlight |
Exercise High: Putting It All Together
I hope it’s now clear to you how this cocktail of happy hormones can revolutionize your health and well-being, day-in and day-out. And that the simplest, most effective way to stimulate their production is through exercise. That’s how powerful exercise is. Furthermore, you may have noticed the other important beneficial effects that your happy hormones have on your physical and mental well-being.
All this goes to show how movement is one of the most reliable and healthy ways to make us feel great, stabilize our mood, and help us discover the best version of ourselves.
It seems abundantly clear that Mother Nature wants us to move.
But how did we evolve this well-oiled system? How vast is the spectrum of mental health benefits that physical activity brings? And why does exercise reward our mood to such an astonishing extent? For that, we will have to go back millions of years.