Covid Stress Seems Exercise Resistant

Exercise has been celebrated for years as the great stress reliever. Feeling stressed out? Go for a run or a workout and you'll feel better. That's the formula and it was working just fine until the Coronavirus pandemic.

A new study out of Washington State University reported by EurekAlert indicates that anxiety and stress caused by COVID-19 may be too much for exercise to overcome.

Washington State University researchers found that people who reported increasing their physical activity after the start of COVID-19 stay-at-home orders, reported higher levels of stress and anxiety than those whose activity levels stayed the same.

"In the study, published recently in the journal PLOS ONE, researchers analyzed data from over 900 pairs of identical and same-sex fraternal twins from the Washington State Twin Registry. Those who reported a decrease in physical activity within two-weeks after the start of stay-at-home orders had a perceived higher level of stress and anxiety, which was expected. But surprisingly, many of the respondents who increased their physical activity felt the same way."

Study authors say that in the short term, there doesn't seem to be a lot of impact from either decreasing or increasing physical activity in terms of handling stress and anxiety that comes on as the result of the pandemic. More study is need to see if those results change after two or three more months under COVID restrictions.

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Short Term Study Shows Covid Stress Seems Exercise Resistant