to frightening me with endless ‘what if’ thoughts, or happy to torment me with repeated flashbacks to my worst experiences, simply could not compete with the need to concentrate while moving fast. I’d tricked it, or exhausted it, or just given it something new to deal with.
Much research has been done on why running clears your head so effectively. Scientists seem intent on finding out why it works. I’m glad they are – I’d like to know exactly why running changed my life, but honestly I’m mainly just happy that it has. Studies have found that there is an increased activity in the brain’s frontal lobe after activity – the area linked to focus and concentration – in subjects with mild cognitive impairment and in elderly participants.[4] [5] Research on animals has shown that exercise produces new neurons – cells found in the hippocampus, associated with memory and learning.[6] It’s all fascinating stuff. But to my mind, none of this can adequately convey the rush that exercise promises to give you – that’s the main interest to most of us – the so-called runner’s high. (People with more experience with drugs than I have had will have to judge whether it is comparable to a more, er, recreational experience.) That an hour or so of energetic movement a day might fix our stressed and gloomy heads is understandably alluring, especially to those of us who’ve struggled with depression or anxiety for a sustained (read intolerable) period of time.
This is what I was beginning to dip my toes into. Weeks after my marriage collapsed, I was still sick with it all. At work, I would regularly go into the toilets and cry quietly. At home, I would put on my pyjamas the moment I got in and mindlessly watch whatever the TV had to offer. When I went out, I drank too much and would cry again (less quietly this time, to the delight of my friends). But when I ran, I left it all behind. Nobody could give me the dreaded sympathy head-tilt or an excruciating hug. Nobody even looked at me. I melted into the city, another tiresome runner in hi-vis. At home, I felt desperately lonely. I’d taken to sleeping like a starfish to head off the inevitable moment in the morning where I’d roll over and be met with a cold empty space, a reminder of all I’d lost. But when I headed out in the morning to run, I didn’t feel alone. I soon found that I was setting myself little challenges – go two minutes further today, run down that busy road that you’ve avoided for years tomorrow. The more I did it, the more I found that I was rediscovering the city that I lived in and yet barely understood – for so long a place fraught with imagined danger for me. I ran down Holloway Road looking at the tops of the faded old buildings that housed convenience stores and supermarkets. I discovered railway lines that ran like arteries through built-up estates, hidden from plain sight. I ran along the canal and found an expanse of brambles, wild flowers and baby ducklings swimming along next to me. The panic attacks were fading away. Not once did I feel the need to find the exit; my feet were in control and I was running purposefully, not running away. I was taking things in for the first time without my mind screaming warnings at me.
It would be taking things too far to say that I felt childlike when I ran, but it definitely gave me a sense of lightness and abandon that I only really see in young people (and drunk people, but they then have a sense of regret which I hope children don’t experience). This shouldn’t be a surprise; from an early age we are encouraged to skip, hop, dance, run and play team sports. As Louisa May Alcott wrote: ‘Active exercise was my delight from the time when a child of six I drove my hoop around the Common without stopping, to the days when I did my twenty miles in five hours and went to a party in the evening. I always thought I must have been a deer or a horse in some former state, because it was such a joy to run.’[7] We instinctively know that the young need to use their bodies, and not only for their physical health. Studies on this in the UK are somewhat limited, and usually cross-sectional, but a NICE study on children and exercise remarked on the results of one survey which reported a higher risk of depressive symptoms among 933 eight- to twelve-year-olds classified as inactive, and among children not meeting the standards for health-related fitness compared with those who were considered active.[8] Analysis of clinical trials looking at exercise and its effect on depressive symptoms in teens aged thirteen to seventeen seemed to show that physical exercise is an effective treatment strategy.[9]
I never gave myself the chance to learn this when I was younger. It would be simplistic to say that this was all because of anxiety, although it was certainly a contributing factor. I was chubby, rather unpopular and viewed sport as a hideous popularity contest. I hope that things have changed since I was at primary school, but sports were also determined by gender. You almost never saw girls on the football pitch, and it was perfectly acceptable for us to gather in sedentary groups around the playground as the boys burnt off their energy kicking a ball about. The divide is still marked – a 2013 study found that half of British seven-year-olds don’t get enough exercise, and the gap between boys and girls was one of the most worrying revelations.[10] Professor Carol Dezateux, one of the lead authors on the study, said of the findings: ‘There is a big yawning gap between girls and boys. We need to really think about how we are reaching out to girls … The school playground is an important starting point. Often you will find it dominated by boys playing football.’
The rate of exercise drops by as much as 40 per cent as children move through primary school.[11] And this decline didn’t stop for me at secondary school, where we were marched down to a sodden field to play hockey (I told you it was gendered, netball was the only other option). I would inevitably be picked last and then proceed to stand as far away from the action as possible. As we got a bit older, our options for exercise were an unaccompanied walk round the local park, or aerobics. Given that the park contained a) boys and b) cigarettes, guess where I went?
Women in Sport recently conducted research into the variation between girls’ and boys’ levels of exercise, and they found that just 12 per cent of girls aged fourteen got enough physical activity every week.[12][13] Despite this dismal number, 76 per cent of fifteen-year-old girls said that they would like to do more physical activity but were discouraged by the sports on offer to them. The other (and to my mind, sadder) reason that they gave for not participating was that they thought that sport was ‘unfeminine’. I remember that feeling clearly – a sense that exercise was just not dignified or elegant. It involved sweat and grunting and angry screwed-up faces, and could well end up in embarrassment, a thing all teenagers wisely (or perhaps just instinctively?) avoid like the plague.
As children leave full-time education, exercise rates can decline further. Sure, some will make time for a run or a gym session, but it gets harder. If you end up going to university, it’s unlikely you’ll be making time for sport when there’s so much work to do and terrible fancy dress parties to attend. There’s a reason why people gloomily talk about the ‘Freshers’ Fifteen’ – the old but accurate cliché that you put on weight in the first year of studying. This mirrored my experience, where activity meant getting out of bed past midday and possibly walking to the local shop for fags and crisps. A fairly normal experience for a student then, except that, unfortunately, this is also the age when some anxiety disorders are known to manifest themselves most severely – for example, OCD usually develops before the age of twenty.[14] While aspects of anxiety will be present in kids from a much younger age (phobias show up in children as young as seven), early adulthood is the perfect time for more serious aspects of anxiety and depression to hit, and hit hard. And that shouldn’t be surprising to anyone – after all, this is the time when the carefully regimented structures of education and family fall away and you are mostly in charge for the first time. Some thrive with the new responsibilities that they’ve been given, but many will not. I did not.
Having managed to leave school with most of my childish worries lying fairly dormant, I was knocked off my feet one day at university, when, completely out of the blue, I had a terrible panic attack in a courtyard. I was so unprepared for these feelings to rear up on me again that I deployed my trusty ostrich manoeuvre and tried to ignore it. Instead of questioning why it had happened, I simply avoided all thought of it. But the feelings of rising panic increased in a frighteningly short period of time, and within a fortnight I had developed a new symptom which horrified me more than any I had previously experienced: disassociation. The clever (not a compliment) thing about anxiety is that the moment you’ve got a handle on one thing (night sweats,
