Mental Health

Exercising Could Reduce Desire for Money: Study

By Drishya Nair | Update Date: Oct 17, 2012 08:09 AM EDT

No matter what or how much we have in life, we are always working towards and craving more. Let it be money, or comfort or fame, we never have enough. However, a new study claims that people who are never satisfied with anything could find contentment, once they hit the gym.

According to the study by researchers from the University of Berlin, the "natural high" that comes through aerobic exercise could reduce the need for other rewards, Mail Online reports.

Apparently, the anticipation of reward is linked with a short spike of the chemical dopamine in the brain, exercising raises the level of dopamine, lasting for a couple of hours.

For the study, the researchers recruited two groups of volunteers. While the first group were sedentary, the other group was trained or endurance athletes.

The volunteers were asked to do either 30 minutes of rigorous exercise on a treadmill, or a "placebo exercise" such as stretching for the same length of time.

After an hour of exercising, the volunteers played a monetary incentive delay game where they had to press buttons quickly to try and gain or avoid losing a Euro at the time, the report said.

The researchers found that there was no difference in the reactions of the brain of people from both groups, when it came to losing a Euro. However, the desire to win money had evidently gone down in even those who were new to exercise.

Recently, two previous studies found that exercising dramatically changes our attitudes towards food.

In the first study, researchers recoded the neural activity of 35 women while they looked at pictures of food, on mornings when they worked out and on days when they did not.

They found that after a working out, the women's attentional response to the images of food had decreased.

"This study provides evidence that exercise not only affects energy output, but it also may affect how people respond to food cues," Lead author Professor James LeCheminant, from Brigham Young University, was quoted as saying by Mail Online.

Another study found that a person's desire for food decreases after 45 minutes of moderate to vigorous work out.

The current research was published in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise.

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