Human beings evolved to move. Our bodies, including our brains, were . “We’ve engineered that out of our lives now,” says , a psychology professor at Northeastern University who has spent decades studying the link between exercise and cognition. The toll our relatively new sedentary lifestyle takes on our bodies is clear: For the first time in U.S. history, than their parents.

While the myriad ways exercise can shape our bodies are well known, researchers have long suspected the same might be true of the brain. have gone into examining the effect of exercise on attention, memory, and visual sensitivity, according to , a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Davis. “There is a very consistent finding that the brain works better after exercise,” Maddock says. But why that is has been harder to figure out.

“Few studies have really looked at what’s actually going on in the brain while we’re moving,” says , a postdoc at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Only recently has technology given scientists the tools to zero in on the mechanisms at play. Aerobic exercise appears to lead to changes in both the structure of the brain and the way it operates, which together bolster learning in kids, give adults an edge on cognitive tasks, and protect against the cognitive declines that often come with age.

Here, we outline exactly what we know happens in your head when your heart rate rises.

Brain Waves Get a Boost

Your brain becomes much more active during exercise, “perhaps more active than at any other time,” says Maddock. One way neurons communicate is with electrical pulses, and sometimes entire networks of neurons fire in unison, like a group of soccer fans chanting together at a game. These synchronized pulses are known colloquially as brain waves. Different kinds of brain waves, characterized by the number of times they oscillate in a single second, are linked to one’s mental state and mood. Lower-frequency waves occur when we’re running on autopilot: brushing our teeth, driving, or sleeping, for example. Higher-frequency waves, known as beta waves, occur when we’re awake and mentally engaged and are associated with attention, memory, and information processing.

Using tools like an electroencephalogram (EEG), which pick up on these electrical pulses, researchers have found that aerobic exercise causes a shift in the amplitude and frequency of brain waves. More beta waves, in other words, means that exercisers may be in a more alert state. “The brain is in a different gear when the human being is in motion,” Maddock says.

You Become More Sensitive to the World Around You

During exercise, the brain becomes much more receptive to incoming information, leading to measurable changes in vision. Tom Bullock and , a professor of psychology and brain sciences at UC Santa Barbara, work in one of the few labs that have managed to measure the effects of aerobic activity on the visual cortex during exercise. Bullock says it’s taken him four years to figure out how to consistently and reliably record an EEG while a subject is in motion.

The visual cortex is designed to zero in on important features in the environment—the kind of features that might indicate, for example, the presence of a predator or prey—and filter out less important background noise. This year, Bullock and so the brain was able to better identify specific features during exercise.

Scientists have also administered cognitive tests right after exercise—for example, measuring the flicker fusion threshold (the rate at which a flashing light begins to look like it’s steadily glowing) and found the same thing: After exercise, one’s senses are heightened and thus can detect the flashing at a higher frequency than before exercise.

Taken together, these findings indicate that “people see more clearly and immediately after exercise,” Maddock says. “They can make finer visual distinctions; their perceptions are sharper.”

Your Brain Shores Up Neurotransmitter Stores

The benefits of exercise to your brain may begin as soon as your heart rate begins to rise. Imagine, if you will, climbing onto your bike for a morning ride and pedaling at a tough but sustainable clip. Your breath becomes faster and heavier as your lungs struggle to meet the oxygen demands of the body in motion. Your heart rate climbs as it pumps oxygenated blood around the body and into the brain. And in much the same way that your muscles demand more energy during exercise, the brain begins gobbling up glucose or other carbohydrates when the body is in motion.

“In the past, nobody had any idea what the brain was doing with all this fuel,” says Maddock. That is, until last year, when he and his colleagues published  in the Journal of Neuroscience. They discovered that the brain uses some of that fuel to build more neurotransmitters, the chemicals that relay messages around the nervous system. Maddock and his colleagues used MRI to measure levels of neurotransmitters in study subjects after a bout of exercise on a stationary bike and found that levels of glutamate and GABA—two of the most common neurotransmitters in the brain—had increased. The brain may be “filling up its stores of essential ingredients,” Maddock says. “Perhaps in order to deal with a sustained period of hunting, for example, or running or fleeing or war.” Exercise, in other words, may restock the brain with essential neurotransmitters that it needs to operate optimally.

This process might be why exercise has been . Maddock’s team found that during activity, glutamate levels rise in the same region of the brain where stocks of the neurotransmitter have previously been found to be low in depressed patients.

Your Brain Becomes Younger

A few things happen in the exerciser’s brain that make the organ appear younger. First, studies in both and suggest that exercise sparks the production of growth factors that nourish new neurons and help existing cells survive. Budding neural cells also need more nutrients as they grow, and that promote blood vessel growth, which could deliver those nutrients. At least has found that active individuals tend to have more and healthier blood vessels, or, in the words of the authors, a “younger-appearing brain.”

These structural changes in the brain generally take at least a few weeks to develop but lead to long-lasting improvements in regions of the brain associated with cognitive tasks, like working memory. “A lot of intervention studies that are out there show that aerobic exercise increases neurogenesis in the hippocampus, for example” says Giesbrecht. “The hippocampus is really critical for memory.”

Beyond that, research shows that aging exercisers have increased gray-matter volume in regions associated with general intelligence and executive function, which encompasses everything from attention to planning to problem-solving skills. Studies also show that fit adults have healthier white-matter tracts—the superhighways that connect various regions of gray matter—in the basal ganglia, a critical region for balance and coordination.

New Connections Between Neurons Emerge

Over time, exercise changes both the number of neurons in your brain and how they communicate. from the University of Arizona, for example, found that cross-country runners had increased connectivity between parts of the brain involved in memory, attention, decision-making, multitasking, and processing sensory information—the very same regions that tend to be hit hardest as we age—compared to healthy but sedentary controls. The networks that fire together as you run—coordinating your route, keeping tabs on traffic, trying not to trip on rocks, and maintaining your pace—strengthen as you use them, so that even at rest, runners tend to have greater connectivity between brain regions. It’s the kind of connectivity that musicians and cab drivers and other skills-based experts develop. At the same time, the runners had decreased connectivity with a region of the brain typically associated with mind wandering, which indicates runners may have increased focus or concentration skills.

So, Is Exercise Magic?

Hillman cautions that for now, exercisers should be realistic about what aerobic activities can do for the brain. “You shouldn’t expect to increase your IQ or anything of that nature,” he says. “We’re talking about small to moderate effects, which are potentially great for improving cognition and brain health.”

But Bullock and Giesbrecht envision a future in which doctors prescribe exercise instead of drugs. “Exercise is a potential prophylactic against some aspects of age-related cognitive decline,” Giesbrecht says. “When you think of the fact that we have an aging demographic and the high prevalence of depression, there might be simpler treatments out there, like exercise.”

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The military has a mental health problem. The rate of suicide among service members in the United States has been since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, fueled by an inherently high-stress work environment and a persistent organizational culture that . Roughly three-quarters of service members who take their own lives never seek mental health services, Craig Bryan, associate director of the at the University of Utah. But it isn’t just soldiers going off to war who account for this climb in suicide rates. The majority of service members who attempt or complete suicide have never deployed, the Department of Defense.

Rather, experts believe that a dangerous feedback loop of daily stressors—including financial, legal, or relationship troubles that even those of us with less-harrowing jobs face—erode resiliency, leaving soldiers more susceptible to potentially traumatic events. This problem isn’t limited to the United States. Researchers and military leadership around the globe have been scrambling to develop programs to maintain or rebuild that resiliency and lower the risk for service members. The techniques developed for and by service members can trickle down to civilians—as happens with many military technologies (caffeine-laced , anyone?)—and help us all deal with whatever stress life brings our way.

Virtual Meditation Retreat

At Fort Sam Houston in Texas, Valerie Rice, a researcher at the Army Research Laboratory’s Human Research and Engineering Directorate, is combining an age-old stress buster—guided mindfulness meditation—with a virtual world to help soldiers cope with stress wherever they are.

Research on mindfulness meditation in civilians , but given the fact that , Rice wondered if soldiers would see the same benefits from an online program. “You still have soldiers and veterans who won’t come to an in-person training, even if it’s not in a health care setting,” Rice says. She thought a virtual setting might give participants a protective shield of anonymity.

In Rice’s ongoing, as-yet-unpublished study, participants create avatars and enter a virtual world where they meet up with other participants and a trainer in a virtual gazebo to learn mindfulness-based stress-reduction techniques inspired by . Preliminary results suggest that this training eases stress, anxiety, and pain and appears to increase participants’ attention span, “which is really important to active-duty soldiers,” Rice says. And the subjects’ trust levels in the virtual trainer and group members were nearly as high as in-person trust levels, according to Rice.

This is all in line with research of other virtual worlds, like Second Life, showing that people are more likely to do things in the real world that they watch their avatars do online—. One of the participants in Rice’s study even tried out a new hair color on her avatar before adopting it in real life. One reason virtual training may work so well is that when we imagine ourselves doing something, it activates the same neural networks that fire when doing the same thing in reality. In other words, visualization, whether virtual or just in your head, can have tangible benefits.

Rice, who spent 25 years on active duty, recognizes that introspection will not come easily to everyone, and she is still battling the sentiment among many soldiers that meditation is a “soft” option. “You know, samurai warriors are supposed to be some of the best warriors that ever lived,” she says. “They all meditated.” Many of the reasons that make the training ideal for service members—the option for anonymity, the ability to access guided meditation groups from anywhere with a computer—would appeal to civilians as well.

Rescue Center for Traumatized Animals and Vets

At the Lockwood Animal Rescue Center, a 20-acre facility in Frazier Park, California, a motley pack of dogs trails the center’s keepers, Lorin Lindner, a clinical psychologist, and her husband, Matthew Simmons. Wolves and wolf dogs keep a watchful eye on the couple from behind the chain-link fences that make up the facility’s 22 enclosures, which house dozens of rescued dogs, foxes, coyotes, wolves, primurine horses, even a parrot. At Lockwood, veterans participate in a work therapy program in which the traumatized animals and traumatized veterans can heal together.

The origin of the Warriors and Wolves program can be traced back to the late 1990s, when Lindner was the clinical director of the New Directions for Homeless Veterans program in Los Angeles. On weekends, she would take vanloads of the veterans she was treating to Ojai, where she was building a sanctuary for rescued parrots. Lindner felt the vets weren’t that engaged in traditional therapy sessions during the week. “These veterans are sitting there with their arms crossed,” she says. “So I bring them up to the sanctuary, and I see them interacting with the birds in a remarkably different manner.”

At Lockwood, the veterans are full-time employees, responsible for feeding the rescued wolves and wolf dogs, cleaning out their enclosures, and socializing the animals, all while forming deep bonds with the typically reclusive creatures. Decades of that interaction with pets and animals can one’s blood pressure, increase levels of oxytocin (a neurotransmitter that, among many other things, plays a large role in our mood), and may even help us .

“When [the animals] choose you, it’s a pretty special relationship,” Lindner says. “A lot of these veterans haven’t felt special in a while.” That relationship and responsibility, in addition to the employment, help traumatized veterans stay sober, obtain housing, reunite with family, and feel a part of a community—all crucial pillars of recovery.

Future Chill Pill

Researchers at the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) on the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio are tasked with studying human performance to answer a not-so-simple question: how do you make the nation’s most physically and mentally elite service members even better? Their solution might come in the form of a new drug. Dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) is a steroid hormone and a biomarker of chronic stress, according to Regina Shia, a research psychologist at the AFRL. One small of young military trainees found that after experiencing a stressful scenario during survival school—like a mock prisoner-of-war camp—the service members who handled stress better had a higher ratio of DHEA to cortisol, another stress-related hormone. The finding suggests that supplementing DHEA, the natural levels of which begin to drop in the human body after our mid-twenties, might help buffer soldiers from the worst effects of stress.

As a nutritional supplement, DHEA isn’t FDA-regulated and thus is available over the counter at places like Walmart and GNC. “The idea behind it is to reduce chronically high cortisol levels,” Shia says. “That’s how it’s supposed to work. Of course, any over-the-counter drug is going to express itself the way that it’s manufactured.” In other words, unregulated supplements contain all sorts of ingredients other than the active compounds, all of which could influence how it works inside the body. When Shia begins her study, she’ll be getting DHEA in its natural form directly from a compound pharmacy or manufacturer. So before you go tweaking your hormone levels with over-the-counter supplements, remember that you’ll be getting more than just DHEA.

Trading Combat Boots for Ballet Slippers

Soldiers in the South Korean Army’s 25th Division guard the border with North Korea along the Demilitarized Zone. To deal with the stress of living full-time on the front lines, the group of about 15 soldiers and dance away the tension. The dance classes are taught by a member of the Korean National Ballet, who visits the base once a week and lines up the service members at the bar to learn the basics of ballet.

“Ballet requires a great amount of physical strength and is very good for strengthening muscle, increasing flexibility, and correcting posture,” Lieutenant Colonel Heo Tae-sun Reuters in 2016. Dance also reduces stress hormone levels in individuals—as do most forms of exercise. But as a social activity, the benefits of dance extend beyond those associated with simple movement. In South Korea, for example, officials reported that the practice also strengthened the bonds between soldiers, making the unit more cohesive. Research has that dancing in synchrony with others can increase pain tolerance, as it appears to activate the endogenous opioid system, which releases feel-good chemicals like endorphins and encourages social bonding. Both the social aspects of dance and the mental effort required to learn and remember choreography can have a neuroprotective effect, serotonin levels, and improve mood.

Creative Cure for Stress

Twice a year, in Canberra, Australia, members of the Australian Defense Force (ADF) participate in a monthlong, live-in art therapy program. The ADF launched the Arts for Recovery, Resilience, Teamwork, and Skills (ARRTS) program in 2015 for service members suffering from PTSD, depression, and anxiety. Experts in one of four tracks—music, drama, creative writing, and visual arts—offer training tailored to each participant’s skill level. So far, participants report higher self-esteem, confidence, and resiliency. “I keep a visual diary and lose myself in my art rather than my mind racing and me going downhill,” Corporal Daniel Cooper, a 2015 participant in the visual arts track the News Corp Australia Network.

Art therapy has to confer psychological and cognitive benefits by providing budding artists with a sense of purpose and a chance to learn to new skills. Research is beginning to show that taking time to be creative can also have a physiological effect on the body and on stress hormones in particular. A 2016 from researchers at Drexel University found that after just 45 minutes of making art—for study participants, this meant getting creative with paper, markers, and clay, among other materials—reduced cortisol levels. Beginners and more-experienced artists alike enjoyed a drop in the stress hormones, which suggests that you don’t need a monthlong training course in the arts to reap the benefits of creative activities.

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