Physical activity, anxiety and anxiety disorders

The purpose of this paper is to present a selective overview of recent research concerning physical activity, anxiety and anxiety disorders. Introductory information about anxiety and anxiety disorders is presented in the first section. Background information about neurobiology has been emphasized in the first section because of the recent growth in knowledge about the neurobiology of anxiety, its potential heuristic value for learning about the extent to which physical activity influences anxiety and the fact that psychobiological constructs such as anxiety ultimately reflect functioning of the brain. The second section reviews and attempts to integrate into the extant literature selected, recently published investigations concerning the influence of physical activity on anxiety and anxiety disorders. Major conclusions include: (1) that most of the research concerning physical activity and clinical anxiety disorders has involved patients with panic disorder; accordingly, it is recommended that future studies be conducted examining the effects of exercise training on other anxiety disorders such as generalized anxiety disorder, (2) that not all panic disorder patients phobically avoid physical activity; however methodological weakness of this work lead to the recommendation that large scale studies with better methods be conducted to provide a conclusive answer as to whether individuals with panic disorder art more sedentary than normal, (3) that acute and chronic exercise is safe for panic disorder patients, (4) that exercise training is associated with a reduction of anxiety symptoms in patients with panic disorder, and (5) that when groups without a clinical anxiety disorder perform an acute exercise bout, post-exercise anxiety reductions are larger than usual if methods ave used to minimize the problem of low pre-exercise anxiety scores.