Study says active children are more resistant to stress – Canadian Running Magazine

Adults are constantly encouraged to exercise as a way to combat daily stress, but does the same advice apply to children? According to a recent study, the answer is yes. Researchers at the University of Basel in Switzerland discovered that active children are more resilient and cope better with stressful situations. In other words, if your child is worried about an upcoming math test, consider incorporating active play into their study plan.

Stress in children

We don’t always take into account the stress our children suffer. Maybe it’s because you’re worried about adjusting to school or an upcoming spelling test, which seems trivial compared to the pressures an adult faces. Or maybe it’s because we’re so caught up in our own stress that we don’t always notice when our kids are having a hard time. Whatever the reason, we know one thing is true: sometimes kids feel stressed, too.

If you’re a parent, caregiver, or teacher, your instinct may be to try to reduce or eliminate your children’s stress. Of course, this isn’t always possible (or healthy for the child). This new study, published in Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, suggests that encouraging your kids to get up and move around may be the best way to help them help themselves.

The study

To understand how exercise affects children’s resilience to stress, researchers fitted 110 children between the ages of 10 and 13 with a sensor that tracked their daily movements for a week. After that week, they brought the children to the laboratory twice: once to perform a stressful task and once to perform a non-stressful task (as a control). After each test, researchers measured cortisol (also known as the stress hormone) in the children’s saliva. This indicated the level of physical stress the children experienced while completing the task.

The results revealed that children who practiced more than an hour of physical activity per day produced less cortisol while performing stressful tasks than children who practiced less physical activity. This was true even during the control task, which took place in an unfamiliar environment and still produced some stress for participants.

“Regularly active children appear to have a reduced physiological response to stress in general,” says the study’s lead author, Manuel Hanke.

How does exercise increase resilience?

Just like adults, when children exercise, cortisol levels naturally increase. Researchers believe that children who regularly increase their cortisol levels when they exercise learn how to deal with these elevated cortisol levels.

“When children regularly run, swim, climb, etc., the brain learns to associate a rise in cortisol with something positive, says project director Sebastian Ludyga. This positive association, he says, helps prevent cortisol levels from rising too high in all stress-inducing situations, including taking a test.

The lesson

Adults aren’t the only ones who feel stressed. Children also tend to have a lot of things to do, so if you want to help your child deal with daily stressors or deal with the pressure of an upcoming exam more effectively, make sure they are getting plenty of physical activity .