If you've ever heard that exercise can give you energy, this is the basis of that statement, right? Many people, in fact, myself for many years thought, okay, I definitely have to sleep well in order to have energy and focus. That's absolutely true, still true, will always be true. I should maybe have some caffeine, be hydrated, you know, well-nourished, all this stuff in order to have the energy to exercise.

But it's also true that exercise gives us energy and this is how it gives us energy. When we move our body, the adrenals release adrenaline and the adrenaline acts through two different so-called parallel pathways within the body. But again, it doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier. So then there's a series of what we call signaling relays or circuit relays up to the locus coeruleus and then a sort of analog, it's different, but an analog to epinephrine, norepinephrine is released within the brain.

And lo and behold, we have elevated levels of both bodily energy and brain energy and focus that we can devote to that exercise, but also to the learning that comes after that exercise. So the next time you're feeling a little tired and you don't want to work out, remember, exercise gives you energy through the pathways that I just described.

Now, anytime I talk about the adrenals, people start talking about adrenal burnout. They say, oh, you burn out your adrenals. You know, there are these crazy theories that you'll hear out there. You know, coffee burns out your adrenals, not true. You'll hear that if you exercise too much, it might burn out your energy or your adrenals.

Look, you have enough capacity within your adrenals to survive relatively long famines, to survive long bouts of challenge, stress of many, many different kinds, short challenges, and so on. You're not gonna burn out your adrenals. There is something called adrenal insufficiency syndrome, which is a real syndrome. There are diseases of the adrenals, but that's not what we're referring to here.

You have plenty of adrenaline in your adrenals that you can deploy through movement, through exercise, to get the elevation and arousal attention and so forth that we've been talking about. In fact, there's a set of biological pathways that were just recently discovered that will allow you to understand how to use movement in order to engage your adrenals so that then those adrenals can release adrenaline, impact your vagus, impact the organs of your body, the locus coeruleus, and elevate your levels of attention and focus.

And a lot of the core components of these pathways are highlighted in a paper that I absolutely love, another paper I absolutely love. This is from Peter Strick's Laboratory at University of Pittsburgh, which is entitled "The Mind-Body Problem, Circuits that Link the Cerebral Cortex to the Adrenal Medulla." What they discovered is that there are essentially three categories of brain areas, all of which communicate with the adrenals and can cause them to release adrenaline to create this elevation and arousal and attention.

Those three brain areas include areas of the brain that are involved in thinking, what we call cognition, areas of the brain that are related to what are called affective states, which is just kind of a more general category that includes emotions. Okay, if you saw the Huberman Lab podcast episode that I did with Lisa Feldman Barrett, she explains beautifully the distinction between affective states and emotions, but these are brain areas that basically relate to what we are feeling or how we're perceiving our environment and how we're reacting to it, these sorts of things.

And then there's a third category of brain areas that most robustly communicates with the adrenals. And these are a collection of brain areas that are all involved with movement of particular areas of our body. These areas are broadly referred to as the motor network. So these are areas of the so-called cerebral cortex, which are on the outer portion of the brain.

And they send these wires down the spinal cord. There's a little relay in the spinal cord, it's called the IML. If you're interested in the anatomical details, I'll put the link to this paper in the show note captions. In any case, these brain areas that are involved in motor movement, send axons, those wires, down to the spinal cord.

Then from the spinal cord, they send a relay out via what's called the cholinergic preganglionic neurons. Basically what ends up happening is that acetylcholine, which is a neuromodulator, is released from these neurons that originate in the spinal cord onto the adrenal medulla. And then the adrenal medulla, the so-called adrenals, same thing, adrenal medulla, adrenals, releases adrenaline.

That creates these effects in the body, on the heart, the muscles and other tissues. And then as described before, that adrenaline also acts on the vagus, the vagus up to the NST, the locus coeruleus, and we have this elevation and alertness. So this paper and papers that came subsequent to it really explain how it is that the movement of our body, AKA exercise, allows us to have this elevation in arousal and alertness.

It's a loop, okay? The adrenals release adrenaline. They do these things by these two parallel pathways I've been talking about. But your decision to engage these motor areas, to move particular areas of your body, is what deploys that adrenaline. Now you might be thinking, well, duh, okay? When I exercise, there's adrenaline release.

In order to exercise, I need to move my body. And these brain areas control the movement of my body. But it's not a duh. It's actually very profound because it turns out that the specific brain areas that best activate the adrenals are the brain areas that control the muscles closest to the midline, the core musculature, and the brain areas that are involved in generating the sorts of movements that we would call compound movements, at least in the context of resistance training, or that are responsible for moving multiple joints at the same time.

So what this means in the practical sense is if you are feeling sluggish, you want energy, or you're simply exercising, both for bodily effects and for brain effects, you need the deployment of adrenaline, of epinephrine. You need the deployment of norepinephrine in the brain. And by the way, anytime you have a deployment of norepinephrine in the brain, almost always there's a coordinated action of release of dopamine, which most people have heard of by now.

Dopamine is involved in motivation as well as movement, et cetera. So the simple takeaway here is if you want to get the arousal that comes from exercise in order to use that arousal, to leverage it towards better cognition, brain health, et cetera, the key thing is to make sure that you're doing exercises that are compound exercises.

So these would be the movements. You can look these up, just say compound exercises. You can put that anywhere, and you'll see that that includes things like squats, deadlifts, bench presses, dips, pull-ups, rows. And yes, of course, you want to train your whole body so that you have symmetry of a function of strength, and you want to offset any injuries and things of that sort, or aesthetic reasons, perhaps.

But the idea here is if you want energy from exercise, you want focus, you need the deployment of the neurochemicals that we've been discussing, most notably epinephrine and norepinephrine. And through the identification of this motor network, as well as the affective and cognitive networks that converge on this area of the spinal cord and then send communication to the adrenal medulla, you can essentially control the levels of arousal that your body and brain produces.

So in describing this, my hope is that you'll no longer think about exercise as just elevating your heart rate, or you no longer think about exercise just as moving your body, but rather that the movement of your body is creating specific neurochemical outcomes, both in the body and the brain that create the arousal that initiates the improvements in focus and attention that allow you to learn better, and that contribute generally to brain health and longevity.

And by the way, for those of you that are interested in things like psychosomatic disorders, trauma, and how trauma can, quote-unquote, be stored in the body, not so much stored in the body, but how it can impact the body, and then how the body itself can impact the brain, this paper has also been used as support for the idea that indeed those affective areas, those emotional areas, those cognitive areas have a route by which they can communicate with the adrenal medulla to cause the release of adrenaline when we have specific thoughts.

It was always known that if we have specific thoughts, it can, quote-unquote, stress us out, our heart rate can go up, et cetera. This paper also provides a reasonable anatomical substrate for that phenomenon. You know, I never want to make too much of any one single paper or finding, but I will say that after I read that paper from Strick and colleagues, and through some of the subsequent discussions about that paper that I overheard at meetings and so forth, it really made me think differently about exercise.

And now, anytime that I'm feeling tired, provided that I'm not chronically sleep-deprived or something of that sort, I remind myself that if I start moving my body, in particular, if I engage core muscles, that was one of the key findings in that paper, that the areas of the brain that control the core muscles, as well as do compound movements, I move multiple joints, I start, you know, warming up in a way that includes some, you know, maybe even just air squats or some running in place or jumping jacks, things of that sort, that the increase in energy that I'm perceiving is real.

It's based on the same neurochemical outputs that would occur had I gone into the gym or to the run or whatever workout with tons of energy, it would just have increased the level of adrenaline further. So this idea that we can actually control our body with our mind, and to some extent, our mind with our body, that's absolutely true.

And this is one of the tools that I find particularly useful anytime I want to overcome that wall of kind of resistance to not doing the physical exercise that I know I and basically all of us should be doing. (upbeat music)