Picture Pleasure

This week, online art viewing boosts well-being, exercise aids addiction recovery, and your weekly recommendations.

The Rundown

Picture Pleasure. Exercise is known to be a mood booster but if you miss a workout and need a mental pick-me-up, a new study says online art viewing is “an untapped source of support for well-being” and a few minutes of viewing can significantly improve mood and anxiety.

For the study, an international research team had 240 participants view an interactive Monet art exhibition from Google Arts and Culture. (Google Arts and Culture features over 3,000 collections from galleries across the world).

The participants’ average viewing time was a little more than two minutes, ranging from ten seconds to about nine minutes. After viewing the exhibit, they completed a questionnaire about their state of mind, what pleasure they received from viewing the painting and how meaningful they thought the experience was.

The results found that viewing one artwork, even for one to two minutes, had a detectible positive effect on mood and anxiety levels. Those who were more receptive to viewing art benefited more, which the researchers labeled “esthetic responsiveness.”

Running Toward Recovery. A new paper reports that adding simple workouts like jogging or weight training to addiction treatment programs improved the likelihood of recovery from a variety of substance-use disorders.

Researchers at the University of Montreal reviewed previous research in order to compare treatment programs that included exercise to those that didn’t. They collected 43 studies involving over 3,000 men and women who underwent treatment for dependence to different addictive substances (except tobacco). The exercise programs typically involved easy jogging three times per week or comparable amounts of weight training, walking, yoga or cycling.

In studies that quantified participants’ drug usage from start to finish, the team found that people who exercised generally quit or reduced their usage while those who didn’t workout typically did not reduce their usage as much.

The paper did not examine how exercise influences people’s willpower but other research suggests that over time, exercise reduces depression and anxiety, which often co-occur with addiction. Exercise also helps the brain heal from the damage that substance use has on brain cells by increasing neurogenesis (the process that creates new neurons) and bolstering the health of existing neurons.

Extra Point

Watch

Sunderland ‘Til I Die. If you missed this popular Netflix series, you have time to catch up before the planned third season is released. It follows Sunderland’s 2017-2018 season as they try to bounce back from their Premier League relegation. It’s part behind-the-scenes action and part exploration of one of English football’s most passionate fan-bases.

Listen

How To Fail With Elizabeth Day. This is a health and wellness podcast that celebrates the things that haven’t gone right. Each week, host Elizabeth Day’s diverse guests discuss what they learned through failure that has helped them to succeed better.

Read

Yes, Even Slow-Twitchers Can Build Bigger Muscles. Alex Hutchinson examines new data that says how you respond to strength training isn’t determined by your muscle fibers. Whether you’re endurance (slow-twitch) or speed (fast-twitch) oriented matters little when it comes to building bulk.