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Neurological changes can make the positive effect exercise has on your brain more sustainable, research has found. People get additional benefit from the discipline of working out. The very

act of pushing through a workout when you don’t feel like it reinforces your ability to handle uncomfortable emotions without avoiding them. “Exercise in and of itself can be helpful because

it teaches people how to tolerate distress in a way that mimics higher levels of arousal that can feel similar to anxiety,” Norouzinia says. She explains that this exposes a person to

uncomfortable sensations in a way that’s safe. In the mental health field, this practice of engaging feared sensations in a controlled way that’s therapeutic is called interoceptive

exposure, and it enhances a person’s ability to tolerate uncomfortable sensations that they’ve likely previously avoided. This can be helpful for addressing depression, anxiety,

obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), substance use disorders and personality disorders, Norouzinia says — or really any mental health challenge in which a

person is trying to avoid feeling a particular emotion. 4. STRENGTHENING THE MIND-BODY CONNECTION Truly conceiving how exercise is mentally — not just physically — beneficial requires a

radical shift from thinking of the mind and body as separate, experts say. “Basically there isn’t as much of a division between mental health and physical health as our culture and language

can sometimes lead us to believe,” says Marina Weiss, a clinical psychologist at the Center for Innovation in Mental Health, based at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of

Public Health and Health Policy. The brain and body are connected in many ways, for example, through the vagus nerve. The mother of all cranial nerves comes down from the brain through the

spinal column and carries signals from the brain all over the body, including to the heart, lungs and digestive system. It also carries feedback from all over the body back to the brain.

Stimulating the vagus nerve through exercise has been shown to strengthen the mind-body connection and help with everything from treatment-resistant depression to PTSD. 5. INCREASING HEART

RATE VARIABILITY One measure of health is the range our heart rate can safely vary from resting to exertion. Heart rate variability is also considered an indicator for that complex

brain-body interaction — showing how strong that connection is. Exercise improves heart rate variability.   Increasing heart rate variability can help protect us against mental health issues

such as depression, even when we’re faced with other stressors, such as a cancer diagnosis, Weiss notes. High-intensity interval training — bursts of intense exercise followed by intervals

of slower, less-demanding work — in particular, can increase this range in heart rate. HIIT training can be helpful even for adults who haven’t been getting near the recommended 150 minutes

of exercise per week, as a study published in the_ Journal of Exercise Science & Fitness_ found. Just make sure to check with a doctor before starting any new regimen and ease into it.