By Sandee LaMotte, CNN Updated 10:32 PM ET, Thu October 3, 2019
(CNN) It turns out that
overworking your brain with either physical or mental exercise may lower your
ability to delay self-gratification. And that may set you up for
poor choices in your eating habits, self-care and finances.
A new study published Thursday in the journal
Current Biology asked elite endurance athletes to overtrain for three out of
nine weeks, and compared them to a group who did a normal 9-week training
program.
Not only did those overworked athletes perform
worse on a cycling test administered at the end of the overtraining, MRIs of
their brains during behavioral tasks showed more fatigue in the cognitive
control part of the brain system.
"Cognitive control in this situation is
the capacity to maintain exercise despite things like muscle pain," said
study author Bastien Blain, a research associate at University College London.
"And what we found is there is an intellectual component involved in
exercising and it has a finite capacity. You cannot use it forever."
In other words, your brain will burn out and
affect your body's ability to exercise. But that's not all. Overworking that
part of the brain also reduced the athletes' abilities to resist temptation of
an immediate reward.
"For example, they were asked whether
they preferred $10 now or $50 in six months," Blain said. "And those
who overtrained were more likely to choose the immediate reward, which is
interesting. It could provide a mechanism to explain why some athletes are using
drugs to improve their performance."
Blain had done a similar study in 2016 on mental burnout.
A group of 58 adults performed hard executive tasks over a 6-hour period, then
underwent MRI imaging and were asked if they would choose $5 now or $50 later.
Just as with the physical burnout, researchers found overworked brains were
much more likely to choose immediate self-gratification.
Perhaps less is more?
One caution about the exercise study is that
it only looked at endurance athletes, said Dr. Marc-Andre Cornier, who is
associate director of Colorado University's Anschutz Health and Wellness
Center.
"This is potentially very important for
the higher end athlete who is overdoing it," Cornier said. "But does
this have anything to do with the average Joe going to the gym? You can't
conclude that from this study."
In fact, a preliminary study done by Cornier found
that regular moderate exercise -- an hour on the treadmill four to five times a
week -- was associated with reducing the brain activity in regions associated
with impulse control and the desire to eat.
"What we found is that 6 months of
exercise in certain people who were otherwise sedentary altered the brain
response to food," Cornier said. "Those people ate less and they lost
weight. And the more we saw that change in brain activity due to exercise, the
more weight they lost."
But not everyone's brain responded to
exercise, Cornier found. Some people just continued to exercise and overeat.
Why?
"We don't know yet," Cornier said,
adding that a study is underway to ferret that out. "Is it genetically how
they've been wired?"
The good news is the brain can be rewired, so
there's hope that these newer imaging studies can try to pinpoint the parts of
the brain that might be targeted, with interventions or even drugs.
"The brain is plastic and you do form new
connections," Cornier said. "I think that's exciting because it makes
you think that we can do something about some of these chronic behavioral
issues like food intake or depression. But why one individual would be
different than another is the million dollar question."
https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/26/health/exercise-impulse-control-burnout-wellness/index.html
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