Exercise May Work Out the Kinks
Exercise can be a painkiller. In research by Daniel Clauw and his colleagues at the University of Michigan, healthy college students who exercised regularly found that their feelings of pain and fatigue increased slightly when they quit for just one week. If healthy young people feel more pain when they don't work out, long-term inactivity may be even more harmful to anyone who is already hurting.
It's understandable that injuries and accidents often lead people to stop working out. But continuing to avoid exercise may make pain worse—and also interfere with mood and sleep. Beyond the psychological uplift of fitness, exercise may literally act as a painkiller by raising levels of important neurotransmitters such as dopamine.
Right now, insights into the psychological side of pain can only reduce, not eliminate, the need for drugs. But the growing understanding of how the brain's pain network connects with cognitive and emotional reactions provides promising insights. In combination with other kinds of treatment, psychological approaches may help to restore the pain system to its true purpose: alerting the body to danger rather than trapping the mind in agony.
