Dr. Kostrubala has noticed that long-distance running often greatly reduces or even eliminates the typical early morning awakening and insomnia of the chronically depressed person. This particularly painful symptom involves jarring awake to a new day to be faced—a day of anxiety, fears, and hopelessness to be combated. If you have experienced this, you are probably familiar with waking up too early, at what the Swedes call "the hour of the wolf," lying in bed, exhausting yourself with crushing worries, despair, and tears, and beginning the day in a state of emotional exhaustion. Kostrubala has found that as depressed people cultivate the habit of long-distance running, these early morning ordeals often gradually subside and disappear.
A British medical group led by Dr. Malcolm Carruthers discovered that individuals who exercise vigorously produce increased levels of the hormone epinephrine, which counteracts depression. Apparently, strong exercise for even ten minutes doubles the normal level of epinephrine; the effects of the heightened level of the hormone can be fairly long-lasting.
Another study, by psychiatrist John Greist at the University of Wisconsin, revealed that one group of seriously depressed patients benefited more from a ten-week session of therapeutic running than another group benefited from traditional therapy.
To summarize research findings on exercise as a treatment for depression:
* To be effective, vigorous exercise must be done regularly no less than three times a week, and preferably at least five times a week, for periods lasting between thirty minutes and an hour. (Dr. Kostrubala uses an hour as a goal.)
* Although running and running combined with walking are the most commonly used therapeutic forms of exercise, any regular aerobic exercise is likely to produce the same antidepressant effects when done for proportional periods of exertion.
* Studies over the past ten years show that lessening depression by means of exercise is most successful for persons with mild to moderate depression, but vigorous exercise tends not to benefit patients with severe depression.[[2]]
[[2]] John H. Griest and James W. Jefferson, Depression and Its Treatment (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press, 1984), p. 63.
Lessening Anxiety
Therapeutic running also tends appreciably to lessen anxiety. A research study conducted by Dr. Herbert A. deVries of the University of Southern California School of Medicine and Gene M. Adams of USC's Gerontology Center found that fifteen minutes of moderate exercise diminished anxiety more in people aged fifty-two to seventy than did 400-milligram doses of meprobamate, a widely prescribed tranquilizer.