There’s a simple recipe to turn frustration into new skills on and off the bike.
How we feel on our rides
Have you ever noticed that this [me riding my mtb] almost always makes you feel like this [high fiving]?
Even on days when I feel like this:
“I don’t know if I want to go for a ride today,”
… and I make myself do this .
I end up feeling so much better.
Here’s the thing: this mood boost, it’s available to everyone. But why? Why do our rides make us feel so good, and is there some kind of long-term benefit we’re getting that we don’t even realize? Let’s take a look at why going for a ride is so good for your mood, but also why I think it’s the domino that sets off a chain reaction of behaviors that build on that great feeling and could put us on the road to becoming super agers, or at the very least still doing this into our 80s.
You know, like North Shore Betty:
“And my plan is to ride black through my 70s, ride blues through my 80s, and greens in my 90s. That’s my goal.”
If you want to capitalize on this feeling, there are five key things to focus on, according to the experts. But there’s something even bigger—a long-term benefit we’re getting, and I’ll get to that in a bit.Obviously, our feel-good prescription starts with a generous dose of exercise,
What happens when we mtb
which has an immediate effect on your mood. Just a single ride elevates our heart rates and releases the feel-good chemicals.
Here’s NYU Dean and neuroscientist Dr. Wendy Suzuki:
“Every single time you move your body, you’re releasing a whole bunch of neurochemicals in your brain. Some of them make you just feel good: serotonin, dopamine, noradrenaline, endorphins. Yeah, I feel good if I go out for a walk. I feel better than if I had been sitting here for eight hours. But the other thing that gets released every single time is growth factors. I like to call it a bubble bath of neurochemicals that happens every time you move your body.”
When she wanted to find out how much is enough to get these benefits, she ran an experiment on low-fit people.
Listen to this:
“If we ask you to move your body in an aerobic way for two to three times a week—and we collaborated with a spin class, so clearly very aerobic—and what we found was, in those people that did successfully do two to three times a week of 45-minute aerobic activity, their mood got significantly better, their memory function got better, and their ability to shift and focus attention got significantly better. So that gives a little bit of a guideline for low-fit people: two to three times a week can start to give you some of those cognitive changes.”
She also discovered from that study that once people started, they wanted to do more. It has a motivating effect. The question is, for people like us who are already relatively fit, do we continue to get those benefits? Wendy wanted to find out, so she ran an experiment on mid-fit people who were allowed to go to the spin studio as much as they wanted—like seven days a week. And here’s what she found:
“The bottom line from that study is every drop of sweat counted. That is, the more you change and you increase your workout up to seven times a week, the better your mood was, lower amounts of depression and anxiety, and the better your hippocampal memory was with the more you worked out.” Again, this was for three months. So I love that too because it gives power to those of us that are, you know, regularly exercising and wondering, do I really need to? I mean, is it really going to help me? And the answer is yes.”
Every drop of sweat counts, kids! I love that. The more we ride, the better. The more brain benefit, in really critical ways, and I’ll get to that. I think that when you have a sport like mountain biking that you love and you want to be good at, it’s different than just going to a gym for a workout. I want to get on my trainer in the winter; I’m less likely to slack off. And because we’re getting almost daily cardio, we tend to sleep better.
Sleep
Dr. Matt Walker, a neuroscientist whose expertise is sleep, confirms what I’m sure you’ve experienced:
“If you are physically active during the day, you can boost the quality of your sleep, particularly your deep sleep at night. It seems there are some subtle differences in terms of whether you’re doing aerobic versus anaerobic. So let’s say, versus, you know, doing a spin bike class for an hour versus lifting resistance or doing resistance training for an hour or strength training. There’s subtle differences, but net, that overall, the big picture is that when you perform exercise, you drive a response from enhanced sleep, particularly deep sleep at night.”
If you’re still not prioritizing sleep—and I mean near the top of life’s priorities—you may want to take a listen to this. Sleep is so important for the normal functioning of the brain.
“I like to scare my students by saying that, you know, in torture situations, if you deprive a person of sleep for too long, they literally die. You cannot function if you are deprived of sleep for too many hours in a row. It’s that critical. Yet we don’t—we happily, you know, watch too much Netflix at night and get only five hours of sleep when we could have had eight.”
“So, what’s happening exactly? Why is it so important? Well, there’s so many different things. I’m going to say two. One is that we now know that in regular, healthy sleep, there is activity in the hippocampus that helps you strengthen the memories that you have formed in that previous day. It’s called consolidation, and it’s so important. If you shorten that, if you don’t get enough, you are not consolidating your normal, everyday memories. And second, it is the time during sleep when all the metabolites—all that garbage that your brain is producing, because all biological cells produce garbage—get kind of cleaned up through the cerebral spinal fluid that is flowing through your brain. And if you do not get enough sleep, you build up garbage metabolites in your brain. It’s like you have a gunky brain. And do you feel like I feel like I have gunk in my brain when I don’t sleep enough? That is exactly what is happening.”
And because I know that many of you don’t want to hear this next one, I’m going to let Wendy tell you:
“Alcohol—I mean, yes, long-term alcohol can cause significant and named brain diseases. Moderation, even moderation now, studies have shown, is not very good. And the reason why it’s not good is that alcohol disrupts your sleep. Even though people drink it to go to sleep faster, the sleep is much more superficial and is not deep, and it’s not the healthy sleep. So that is not good overall for your sleep depth and health, and therefore brain health.”
Food & Mood
You already know that you on sleep is a far happier and more optimistic version of yourself than you on poor-quality sleep. It’s pretty obvious. But this next one, maybe not: it’s diet, or wait, maybe food and mood. That’s really the next domino to fall for us cyclists. We ride, then we sleep better, and chances are, we eat better. I’ve cited this study before where participants are put on an exercise program, but they were told explicitly not to change their diet. But what they found was that people chose to eat healthier anyway. So chances are that because you mountain bike, or gravel, or road bike regularly, you’re already more conscious about what you’re eating. But if that’s something you could improve on, here’s what you need to know. In the book Good Energy by Dr. Casey Means, she writes about the gut-brain axis. It’s also referred to as the second brain, and this is going to blow your mind. The connection is vital in depression because the gut microbiome plays a significant role in making our neurotransmitters, which control our thoughts, feelings, and regulate mood and behavior. Imbalances in these neurotransmitters contribute to depression, and get this: more than 90% of serotonin, the hormone that regulates mood and contentment, is made in the gut, not in the brain.Good Energy reveals how ultra-processed foods cause our blood glucose levels to spike, impacting our moods and contributing to depression and metabolic dysfunction. Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, who’s an amazing neuroscientist, psychologist, and probably the leading expert in emotion, nails it here:
“If there was only one thing that you could pick, I would say get a good night’s sleep on a regular basis. If you could pick two more, I would say eat healthfully, like stop eating pseudo food. Don’t get me wrong, like I love French fries. I love French fries. They’re like—it’s like God’s most perfect food. I mean, really—but eat healthfully, like eat real food and get exercise. And if you do those three things, I know I sound like a mother, and so feel free to roll your eyes at me, but as a neuroscientist, those are the—actually, before you start with all the, you know, mentalizing Jedi tricks, you could just start with this and that would actually take you pretty far. I mean, it’s pretty simple, right?”
But then she adds a fourth part of the prescription, and it’s something else I think that we often get from cycling, and that’s number four: social connection.
Social Connections
I always say that Strava is where my people are. Mountain bike, gravel, road, even those crazy people who run. Yeah, right on, buddy, love you! These are happy people. The people we meet on our trails are happy people, and if you’re new to cycling, these people will welcome you to their group ride. I promise you, and we need that. This book, this book, this book, and this book—and probably a thousand others— all say if you want to age well, if you want to be strong and healthy and still riding into your 80s, you need a good social network. In isolation, we die, we’re told, but the why of it is often kind of vague. I love how Dr. Feldman Barrett describes it with Dr. Huberman here:
“The ideal situation is one in which we are not taxed, where maybe even people and just being around them, or just knowing that they are in our lives, provides a sort of deposit to, yeah, it’s a savings. It provides a savings.”
I need to pause here for a sec. Lisa has an incredible metaphor she calls the body budget, kind of like your personal financial budget, so your brain can manage your body’s energy requirements. I can’t fit it into this video, so I’ll share it in next week’s email. And if you’re not getting our weekly email, sign up, because this is brilliant. We always try and share brilliant finds to make your life even better. Okay, let’s continue.
“I would say the best thing for a human nervous system is another human, and the worst thing for a human nervous system is also another human. And so you really want to be around the people who make you the best version of yourself that you could be. But I would say the research on, you know, social isolation and loneliness and so on shows us that we are the caretakers of each other’s nervous systems, and it doesn’t matter what your opinion is, like, it doesn’t—you know, it just, but we just—that’s how we evolved as a species. And so you get to decide what kind of a person are you going to be? You know, are you going to be—are you going to be a savings, or are you going to be a tax?”
I love that, and I’ve just met so many happy, well-adjusted people through mountain biking, and more recently through road and gravel, who add to my emotional balance sheet. But here’s a hard truth about social connection: as we get older, we have to be able to hear one another. Hearing loss cuts you off from other people and leads to faster cognitive decline, according to Dr. Suzuki. But what I didn’t know—and many studies show—is that physically active people like us are less likely to suffer hearing loss as we get older. Didn’t know that. And we’re also more likely to hang out here, because being in nature feels good. This is my happy place. Studies show that even a 10-minute walk through a city park helps to relieve stress and anxiety, but more time in nature, that’s less urban, does even more good. You’ve experienced it, I’ve experienced it, so I’ll leave that one there.
Beyond mood: The BIG brain payoff
Because now that we understand why our rides make us feel so good, and the cascade effects—like better quality sleep, a positive outlook, and better eating habits—that positively impact our moods, and how our passion is an opportunity to make friends with people who love to do what we do outside in nature, well, it turns out that the mood boost is just a start. Because I think that this is the most important thing to understand: I want to round-trip back to those chemicals that get released on our ride.
“The other thing that gets released every single time is growth factors. I like to call it a bubble bath of neurochemicals that happens every time you move your body. What that growth factor does is it goes directly into your hippocampus and it helps brand new cells grow in your hippocampus. The hippocampus is only one of two total brain areas where new cells can grow. That’s not the same as synapses, which are connections in the cells that are already there, but the hippocampus can grow new cells. And this is really important because many people know that the hippocampus is attacked first in Alzheimer’s dementia. So, exercise is not going to eliminate that disease state, but if you start with a huge, fluffy hippocampus, it’s going to take that disease that much longer to actually damage enough of your hippocampus so that you start seeing those telltale signs of memory impairment that come with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia in general. Same thing with the prefrontal cortex. Your prefrontal cortex can grow with physical activity. That’s not neurons, but new synapses can grow. Age and neurodegenerative disease states can damage cells, but also take away synapses.”
Okay, I did not realize that as we age, our brains shrink. They get physically smaller. The hippocampus is where memories are stored, and the prefrontal cortex is how we focus and make decisions. Our rides help make both of them big and fluffy, as Wendy says, because our brains release BDNF or brain-derived neurotrophic factor. Turns out that this has a massive effect on how your brain ages. We could even turn out to be super agers—what Dr. Feldman Barrett defines as adults 65 years and older whose memory abilities are on par with those in individuals decades younger than them. And get this, you guys, in her master class, she says people like this are constantly engaging in challenging activities. Some are in competitive sports, and what footage do you think that she used to make the point? Mountain biking. High five, pals! And as Wendy says, there is no cure for Alzheimer’s yet. There’s no effective drugs yet. But there is this, so grab your bike, grab a buddy, and keep going. That’s your prescription.
What the experts agree on
All the neuroscientists I featured in this video agree on this: good quality sleep is non-negotiable. A decade ago, I was an insomniac, but I fixed my sleep, and I talked about how I did it in this video right here.
See you soon!
