The Neuroscience Of Exercise | Wendy Suzuki
10% Happier with Dan Harris
10% Media, LLC
4.6 • 12.2K Ratings
🗓️ 6 January 2025
⏱️ 75 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What exercise does to your brain—and how to actually do it regularly.
Wendy Suzuki is a Professor of Neural Science and Psychology at New York University, where she is also the first Asian-American Dean of the College of Arts and Science. She is the author of two books, Good Anxiety and Healthy Brain, Happy Life.
This episode is part of our monthlong Do Life Better series.
We talk about:
- How exercise not only enhances cognitive function but also protects against age-related cognitive decline and neurodegenerative diseases.
- The difference between cardio and strength training
- Whether it matters if you track your steps
- How to sustain your motivation to exercise
- And practical tips on how to start, restart or increase an exercise habit
- We also talk about the brain benefits of sleep, meditation, and healthy eating (with a detour into ways to counteract the potentially unhealthy obsession with being healthy)
- And finally, we talk about the counterintuitive benefits of anxiety
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free right now. |
| 0:04.7 | Join Wondery Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts. |
| 0:14.2 | It's the 10% Happier podcast. |
| 0:16.8 | I'm Dan Harris. |
| 0:20.3 | Music I'm Dan Harris. |
| 0:30.7 | Hello, everybody. How we doing? |
| 0:35.0 | One of the most popular resolutions, it actually may be the most popular resolution, |
| 0:36.9 | is to exercise more. |
| 0:38.7 | Whether or not you already exercise, |
| 0:44.9 | this episode is designed to be deeply motivational in two ways. First, by laying out in fascinating detail how exercise benefits your brain, as you'll hear my guest today describe it, movement |
| 0:51.0 | creates, and these are her words, a bubble bath of neurochemicals that lead you to a |
| 0:55.7 | healthy, fluffy brain. The second thing we're aiming to do in this episode is to give you some |
| 1:00.3 | specific granular advice for actually getting off the couch. My guest is the brilliant and effervescent |
| 1:07.1 | Wendy Suzuki, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at New York University, |
| 1:12.4 | where she's also the first Asian-American dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. |
| 1:16.6 | Wendy is the author of two books, healthy brain, happy life, and good anxiety. |
| 1:22.3 | We talk about how exercise not only enhances cognitive function, but also protects against |
| 1:27.4 | age-related cognitive |
| 1:28.6 | decline and neurodegenerative diseases, the difference between cardio and strength training, |
| 1:33.8 | whether it matters if you track your steps, how to sustain your motivation to exercise, |
| 1:39.0 | and practical tips for starting, restarting, or boosting your exercise habit. |
| 1:45.4 | We also talk about the brain benefits of sleep, meditation, and healthy eating with a detour into ways to counteract the |
... |
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