Why Do We Keep Treating Movement and Exercise as Optional?

Moving our body changes brain chemistry, and brain chemistry shapes how we focus, how we feel, how we sleep, how we tolerate stress, and how we relate to our own limits. Physical activity is often thrown into the wrong category, which can make it seem more optional than it should be.

It’s easy to think about exercise as something we only do for our bodies. The framing is intuitive for sure and makes sense, but it’s also incomplete. What happens when we move turns out to be one of the most reliable ways we have of changing how we feel and how we tackle the day. A lot of the non-physical impacts are rarely used in the way fitness gets marketed to us.

Why Does Fitness Get Sold as a Wellness Practice?

The way we talk about exercise has largely been shaped by the industries that sell it. Gyms sell aesthetics, pharma companies sell “prevention,” and wearables sell numbers. The cultural framing makes movement a tool for changing how our body looks or for extending how long it lasts. Both are worthwhile of course, but both are also downstream of what is actually happening when we move.

The result is that physical activity effectively gets sorted into the same category as flossing or taking vitamins, meaning important but optional. It becomes something to do when the “real work” is done. That sorting misses what’s happening in the brain during and after movement, which isn’t optional at all for anyone who cares about thinking clearly, regulating mood, or staying steady under pressure.

How Does Exercise Affect the Brain?

Physical activity changes the chemistry of our brain in ways that affect us for hours afterward. Several systems fire at once leading to a cascade of effects. When we move, the brain releases brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which is a a protein that supports the growth, survival, and connection of neurons. It functions like fertilizer for brain cells. Levels rise during exercise and stay elevated for hours after we stop.

Movement also increases cerebral blood flow, which means more oxygen and glucose reach the brain during and after activity. Norepinephrine and dopamine rise, sharpening focus and motivation. Endocannabinoids and endorphins flood the system and give us the sense of ease and reduced pain after sustained activity.

The effects show up downstream in incredible ways too. A 2023 review published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found exercise to be effective for reducing depression, anxiety, and psychological distress across populations, with higher-intensity activity producing the largest effects. Rather than siloed to fitness chats, movement belongs in any honest conversation about treating mood too. We’ve been sitting on top of one of the most potent psychiatric interventions available and it was only fairly recently that it started gaining the traction it should. 

What Movement and Exercise Teaches that Nothing Else Does

Arguably, our body is the only domain in which we can’t lie to ourselves about our actual capacity. A failed lift is a failed lift. The mile we wanted to run in seven minutes either happened in seven minutes or it didn’t. The conversation with our own limits is unusually direct and irrefutable, and most of us likely aren’t used to that kind of feedback in the rest of our lives, where the metrics are softer and the explanations, whether accurate or not, more available.

That direct feedback is part of what makes physical activity uniquely useful for the ego. Most domains let us spin failure as something else, maybe it’s bad timing, the wrong audience, or an unfair manager. The barbell doesn’t care about our story and neither does the race course or the track. Pushing ourselves physically is freeing in a way that few other things are, and the realness that comes from facing our current limitations extends into how we handle harder kinds of feedback in other parts of our lives.

We also learn things about ourselves that we don’t learn from sitting still. We can feel how our breath affects us as we push through the challenges, how we respond when we’re tired but there’s more work to do, how fatigue tries to convince us to stop, and whether we tend to overpace or underpace. These are lessons that can be applied throughout all areas of our life. They can show up in contexts that have nothing to do with sport or exercise, but they’re unusually hard to learn anywhere else.

How Do the Effects Show Up in Daily Life?

The effects of regular movement and exercise show up in places that might look nothing like the gym. We might make better decisions in the afternoon because we trained in the morning. We might tolerate difficult conversations more easily because our baseline nervous-system arousal is lower. We likely sleep more deeply and wake up with more energy available. We probably feel less irritated by the small things because our system has a healthy release valve.

A major challenge is that the effects are most visible in their absence. People who move regularly often attribute their focus, their mood, their resilience, and how they think on a given day to other things they do such as diet, sleep, therapy, or the work they have done on themselves. These all absolutely play a role, but it’s less common to hear someone say, ”Yeah, I had a great workout this morning and have been doing it for a while now because it helps me show up better.” They notice the difference only when they stop moving for two weeks and find everything getting worse at once. Exercise is often one of the inputs that quietly does the most work but gets the least credit.

The invisibility of the effects is part of why fitness is hard to motivate around as a category. The reward isn’t only the body in the mirror, which arrives slowly and unevenly. The reward is the afternoon we just had: the meeting we walked into without the usual edge, the email we sent without rewriting it four times, the call with our parents that went better than it usually does, and the evening that ended with energy left over. We aren’t taught to connect those wins to the run we went on at seven in the morning unless we’ve truly lived it, even though the connection is more direct than almost any other variable we track.

What is Movement if not Physical Health?

The conventional category of "physical health" is too small to hold what’s actually going on. Movement belongs in the same conversation as cognition, mood regulation, and self-knowledge. The gap between how potent it is as an upstream input and how casually we treat it is one of the largest mismatches in modern life.

The shift is in the category. Filing movement under cognition, mood regulation, and self-growth changes what we are actually weighing when we decide whether to make time for it. The decision becomes a lot easier when we understand what we’re choosing.

References

1. Cotman, C. W., & Berchtold, N. C. (2002). Exercise: a behavioral intervention to enhance brain health and plasticity. Trends in Neurosciences, 25(6), 295-301. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0166-2236(02)02143-4

2. Erickson, K. I., Voss, M. W., Prakash, R. S., et al. (2011). Exercise training increases size of hippocampus and improves memory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(7), 3017-3022. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1015950108

3. Raichlen, D. A., Foster, A. D., Gerdeman, G. L., et al. (2012). Wired to run: exercise-induced endocannabinoid signaling in humans and cursorial mammals with implications for the 'runner's high.' Journal of Experimental Biology, 215(8), 1331-1336. https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.063677

4. Singh, B., Olds, T., Curtis, R., et al. (2023). Effectiveness of physical activity interventions for improving depression, anxiety and distress: an overview of systematic reviews. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 57(18), 1203-1209. https://doi.org/10.1136/bjsports-2022-106195

5. Stillman, C. M., Esteban-Cornejo, I., Brown, B., Bender, C. M., & Erickson, K. I. (2020). Effects of exercise on brain and cognition across age groups and health states. Trends in Neurosciences, 43(7), 533-543. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tins.2020.04.010

6. Voss, M. W., Vivar, C., Kramer, A. F., & van Praag, H. (2013). Bridging animal and human models of exercise-induced brain plasticity. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 17(10), 525-544. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2013.08.001