Can Breaking a Sweat Can Boost Your Social Life?
The physical and mental benefits of working out are well known, but there’s another way regular exercise may improve your health: It can strengthen your sense of community. In turn, that can make it easier to maintain existing friendships, make new ones, and reduce loneliness.
Why? Well, we’ve evolved to be together. And we’ve evolved to move. Which is why there aren’t just physical benefits, but social benefits of exercise, says Arran Davis, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for the Study of Social Cohesion at the University of Oxford.
Our ancestors evolved to forage and hunt together, he says, so our brains reward us when we’re physically active, especially when moving together. Exercising together gives us a way to collaborate, he says, which makes us connect. It also releases endorphins and endocannabinoids (some animal research suggests that the latter may be the chemical responsible for the famous “runner’s high”) that we feel simultaneously, which makes us like each other.
Excerpted from Peloton
