Your Best Career Move could be Going for a Run
The link between physical activity and cognitive performance is too strong to ignore
Throughout human evolutionary history, we moved around, like a lot. For hundreds of thousands of years, humans lived very active lifestyles as hunter-gatherers. Even as recent as 1800, over 80% of the American workforce worked in agriculture, which was pretty physically demanding. Now, the script has abruptly flipped and an estimated 80% of the jobs we do are relatively sedentary service jobs.
This evolutionary mismatch is a large contributor to the increase in chronic disease, with physical inactivity being linked to higher risks of coronary heart disease, type 2 diabetes, breast and colon cancer, and overall mortality1. That said, I’m not a medical expert and I’m not here to tell you that exercise is good for you, because you already know that. Instead, I’m here to tell you that exercise could be the best thing that ever happened to your career.
Learning: Take back your inner child
It’s common knowledge that kids pick things up quickly. Everyone will recall people saying things like “you should learn piano while you’re still young” from their teens and twenties. It is true that children and adolescents learn more easily, thanks to an increased level of neurogenesis (new neurons forming), as well as a lower level of neural inhibition (the neurotransmitter GABA mediates neural stability as we age, which actually helps us hang onto what we already know).
But it doesn’t have to be this way - part of the reason we are slower to learn as adults may be related to our inactivity. An emerging scientific literature is accumulating evidence that physical exercise directly increases our neuro-plasticity: our ability to learn and remember new things. It does so through increasing the production of neurotrophic factors - proteins that regulate neural activity. One such protein that exercise increases is Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF), which literally grows brain cells. It also promotes synaptic plasticity - which is basically your brain using old neurons to form new connections.
One reason this body of research is pretty solid is because it’s comprised of animal studies and human studies. Animal studies have the advantage of more invasive, direct measurement of neural processes (i.e. internal validity), and human studies, while more internally flawed, give us confidence that the evidence we’ve accumulated in animal studies does in fact apply to us.2 The upshot of all of this is that the more you exercise, the better your brain is going to be at adapting to your environment. If you want to pick up a new skill, the #1 thing you should do is intentionally practice that skill. The #2 thing you should do is work out!
Performing: Live up to your potential
A regular exercise habit is one of the top commonalities among successful CEOs. Some research even suggests that a CEO’s level of fitness may impact firm performance. So, if you want to be successful in your career, will working out help you? Some research does suggest that fitter people enjoy higher earnings throughout their career.
Now, I will readily admit that there are some nuances in interpreting causality here. Fitter people are probably more likely to already have had higher socioeconomic status and to be more intelligent, both of which predict earnings as well. That said, there are straightforward mechanisms that can explain the relationships between exercise and job performance: The brain is our most energy-expensive organ, consuming about 20% of our caloric intake throughout the day. Exercising improves blood flow to the brain, increasing the flow of nutrients which directly increases processing speed and executive function.
It’s important to note that most of the research documenting these effects looks at aerobic exercise, or cardio, as the treatment variable. Modes like weightlifting probably do have beneficial effects, but the research literature is more sparse. That said, there is some practical guidance from a literature review from Calderwood and colleagues that suggests the more intense the workout, the better - up to a point. Cardio that is intense but not quite at your maximum capacity is ideal for lasting, positive cognitive effects. But as with everything, moderation is key. Workouts longer than an hour may lead to dehydration and worse recovery.
Thriving: Exercise as a bulwark to minimize work stress
One reason that exercise may be related to career success is that it helps people cope with job demands, which only increase with career level. There is a pretty deep research literature on the beneficial impact of exercise on job-related stress, burnout, and mental health in general.
A randomized controlled trial by de Vries and colleagues showed that exercise decreased students’ levels of fatigue and stress, and increased perceptions of energy and self-efficacy. These relationships were dose-dependent, meaning that the psychological benefits increased with more and more exercise. But even more interesting is that, viewed alongside other research on exercise behavior, there seems to be a positive feedback loop, wherein exercise increases self-efficacy, and self-efficacy further increases the probability that you will exercise again. So get yourself on the exercise positive feedback loop!
Again, the intensity of exercise does matter - according to a pair of studies in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology that utilized various measures of recovery including psychological detachment from work and positive mood. The authors found that only workers who engaged in strenuous exercise (as opposed to moderate or light exercise) experienced increased levels of recovery from work. Authors attributed this finding to the fact that only high-intensity exercise requires enough cognitive resources that an individual can no longer ruminate about work. Therefore, to maximize psychological recovery from work, it is important to prioritize high-intensity exercise, provided that it is done safely.
The benefits of physical activity in the recovery process are not limited to vigorous exercise, however. There is evidence that simple light activities such as walking during the day can bring health benefits. Marjaana Sianoja and collegagues conducted an intervention study, finding that a 15-minute walk during lunchtime was enough to increase concentration and reduce fatigue in the afternoon. These findings highlight the importance of taking small breaks throughout the day, preferably active ones.
We need to stop ignoring the impact of exercise
I hope this overview of the research can help increase your motivation to work out. The path to a healthier, more productive life and career might just start with a single jog. At an institutional level though, given what we know about the positive impacts of exercise, I find it bizzare that it is not discussed more often. The closest organizational psychology tends to come to human biology is probably the literature on stress - which is very robust, but when it comes to optimizing human performance in the workplace through health interventions, practitioners are mostly left hanging.
In 2018, just 24% of adults in the U.S. met the recommended guidelines for both cardio and strength training. This is a detriment to all of us, considering the role that human capital plays in our economy and our lives: the workforce in the U.S. is less adaptable, worse performing, and more burnt out than it could be if we all got moving.
(Lee et al., 2012; Löllgen et al., 2009)
This is covered in https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0149206320940413