Lately I’ve been worrying that we really are storing up a problem for the future unless we find a way of helping children to take more regular exercise. Just this week the British Heart Foundation reported that only one in eight young people is getting the recommended 60 minutes of physical activity a day. This is based on a survey they did in July and August, involving over 1,000 8-15 year olds. This is a new problem – anyone who has tried to keep a toddler still for more than 30 seconds knows that a young child is a study in perpetual motion! Children have been naturally active throughout the millennia, so what is the current lifestyle in the developed world doing to change this and how we can move things back to the way they have always been?
I’m particularly concerned about this from the perspective of the latest research on physical exercise and psychological well-being. The connection between the two has now been shown to be so strong that some people are calling exercise “the magic bullet” for treating stress and improving how we feel about ourselves and our world.
Exercise is one of the most sure-fire ways of lifting your mood – for a number of reasons. Some of these relate to feeling better about ourselves and making new social contacts. Then there is the automatic release of feel-good chemicals in the brain triggered by physical exercise and the effect that has on psychological well-being. When a threatening situation increases the amount of adrenalin in our body, physical exercise helps us to use this up so that it doesn’t turn into stress. What’s more, people who take regular exercise report lower depression scores than those who don’t .
So it’s vitally important that we think about the long-term implications of lack of exercise for the mental well-being of future generations. Mental well-being is high on the agenda these days: Foresight (which I’ve featured here before), BIS’s engagement report, Dame Carol Black and the Boorman review have raise the public’s awareness in general. Of these, Foresight was the one that really focused on childhood and the needs of children in this respect and we must not lose sight of its recommendations: http://www.foresight.gov.uk/OurWork/ActiveProjects/Mental%20Capital/Welcome.asp
And to finish, here are a couple of fun ideas – and the kind of thing I think we need to see more of. One of my colleagues was in Singapore recently. The government there is trying hard to encourage everyone to take more exercise, but there isn’t a lot of outdoor space in Singapore. So they’ve built amazing curving wooden walkways across the city from one park to another, and families are using the walkways to exercise and socialise at the same time. Also while in Singapore my colleague spotted thousands of people gathering outside her hotel in preparation for a marathon. She wondered what route they would be taking, but all was revealed when she was told it was a vertical marathon – they ran up the stairs of her hotel, all 73 stories of South East Asia’s tallest hotel! We need to think outside the box and make exercise for the young the norm again.
I cycle to and from work for that very reason. It gives the day a really good kick start. It’s also perhaps not surprising that I often have a lot of inspirational ideas whilst in the gym. It’s amazing how few great ideas emerge in the office environment.