107 points by PaulHoule 5 days ago | 117 comments on HN
| Neutral Landing Page · v3.7· 2026-03-01 05:52:46· from archive
Summary Health & Well-being Neutral
The page is a technical gateway redirecting to a paywalled scientific article on the association between cardiorespiratory fitness and emotional resilience. The evaluation reveals a neutral to mixed structural HRCB: positive signals for disseminating health knowledge (Articles 3, 22, 25) are offset by negative practices related to privacy tracking (Article 12) and restrictive paywall access (Articles 19, 27). There is no editorial content to score.
I am pretty confident from my own experience that the study’s conclusion is broadly true. But the study leaves open one obvious alternative explanation: people who have enough free time to exercise regularly (and exercise was used as a stand-in for fitness level, it doesn’t look like they actually measured anything else) could have less stressful and anger-inducing lives overall.
My final year of college I lived 2 miles off campus and would daily bicycle to school. In previous years I would commute via car as I lived too far to make the trip conveniently. I perceived greater emotional well-being during the 1 year period of moderate daily exercise. My grades also improved dramatically and I was more resilient during periods of sleep deprivation or intense study. As an adult with a family it has been more difficult to establish a pattern of daily physical activity. Going to the gym is very boring for me.
Would a stressed out Amazon/Uber eats delivery person who is very fit from working 10 hours a day, but with barely enough money to feed their family going to be less angry/anxious than a rich person lounging at his villa with zero worries? This is looking at one variable which isn't very useful.
I am 100% certain my resilience to stress and anxiety is directly tied to my cardiovascular health. I'm prone to a heart-racing, hot-eared flywheel of anxiety. When I've been running a lot I can FEEL the vagal tone/HRV fitness that gives me an physical off ramp for the mental space to take a fucking chill pill.
Cardio is unpleasant and stressful, which is why most people don't do it. Someone willing to do something that is not fun, on a regular basis, is going to have stronger mental status that someone who doesn't try at all.
Exercise is good, everyone knows. The problem is advising people to exercise doesn't work and doesn't scale. Gyms are for people who have plenty of intrinsic motivation and money and time.
To improve physical activity at the population scale and over a lifetime, it literally has to be built into the design of the cities, so people get enough exercise while walking to work or grabbing groceries.
I wonder if there is some underlying lizard-brain thing going on here.
If you "know" you are physically unfit you are quick to anger and aggression because you potentially need to act like that to not need to rely on physical fitness if it came to needing it? I.e. you need to deter others through your aggression rather than relying on fitness if it came to a fight?
Or alternatively the other perspective if you "know" you are fit you can keep the stress hormones low safe in the knowledge that if it comes to it you've got the fitness to handle a fight?
Linguistics question: the title says “[…] is associated with lower anger and anxiety”
I read it as _people who have lower anger, and people who have anxiety_
Am I broken? (I am a native English speaker but that doesn’t mean that I speak English correctly)
This study seems both wildly underpowered, chooses relatively bad methods for analysis (splitting between below average and above average, really?) and has far too many comparisions (they claim to have used bonferroni corrections where necessary, and then don't mention it again).
All in all, it's a pretty good example of modern psychological research. Bad statistics, hyped up findings and (probably) wild over-generalisation about what this tiny study means for society/the world/my research funding.
I think the biggest flaw here is around the measurement of VO2 max. So they first ask people how often they exercise (cos no-one ever lies) and then use a linear equation to map that to VO2 max. Granted, the equation has lines for age and sex, so it's not entirely useless, but if you're only going to sample 40 students then why not try to measure things a little better?
The most unintentionally hilarious thing about their methods section is that age was not normally distributed (according to a shapiro test). They sampled students, so of course it's not going to be normally distributed. Students have a well-known bias in age.
Ultimately, regardless of whether or not this finding turns out to be true (I like the idea of it, myself) this study provides absolutely no evidence for the effect.
Note: I have a PhD in psychology, but left the field a decade plus ago. I'm both horrified by this study, and also having a lot of fun poking holes in it, maybe I should try to get back into reviewing? ;)
I loved the gym and it did help my psyche. That is very clear to me. But now I don't go to the gym anymore, because I have a very stubborn radial tunnel syndrome in my right arm and my knee osteoarthritis is worse than ever. Of course both of those things make me angry and anxious. While I am absolutely positive that exercise helps your psyche, I would not be surprised if the majority of this correlation is actually from a common cause (it might also be stress in general - i.e. no time for exercise), lack of financial resources or just a bad place of living, etc.
I live ruraly, am reitivly poor, assets, but high outside bills,my work is laborious, and other aspects of k|ping a house going are also labour intensive.Never been in a jym.The harder I work, the stronger I get, and as my financial situation has gotten tighter and tighter, I am forced to act pragmaticly, which is to say a distilation of efficiency.
The most intetesting thing is that people are responding to whatever newer matter of fact way I am comunicating and acting with there own version and seem to enjoy working with somone pushing there own personal edge, I know I do.
Try group exercise studios, if you have one available. The classes are usually one hour. It makes planning very easy. Same time, every week. All you need to do is to show up.
You get the fitness from the exercise. They didn't subject people to exercise, they surveyed them on what they already do and found a correlation between exercise and emotional resilience.
Pretty much everything related to exercise is a direct or indirect positive effect for health.
Stress relief, tiredness leading to better sleep, physiological effects of muscle gain, physiological effects of weight loss, social interaction in shared spaces, exposure to sunlight, push to improve diet in pursuit of fitness goals, better self image, social effects of becoming more physically attractive…
I have found stair walking a good, zero-cost, easily accessible and fast-to-execute means of exercise in urban areas. You can also scale-up/scale-down intensity and duration to your heart's content.
Yeah, during covid and little bit after I was in amazing shape because I was able to go on nice long bike rides a few times a week. It got me thinking what would our society feel like if everyone was able to exercise?
I used to feel this way until I discovered cycling, I started running because I don't want to bike in NYC winter weather. Highly recommending trying cycling since you get to make it as hard as you want and it builds amazing cardio
Anecdotally, I started lifting again a few weeks ago. Took a few years off due to Covid complications, but was previously exercising regularly.
Walked up to the bar stressed about all sorts of things, everything is expensive, car is making weird chafing noises when I make sharp turns, politics, this and that.
Did 3 sets of 5 deadlifts with a 60kg bar. Barely any weight on the bar since I didn't want to annihilate my joints. Regardless, as I finished the sets, all that stress was just gone, and it stayed away for days. I was calmer, clearer, more present.
I don't think I have fewer reasons to be stressed since getting the gym membership, but I sure am less stressed.
Deadlifts in particular, but really any full body lifts have always been a mental state degauss button for me. Doesn't matter how many problems you have before you walk up to that bar, you'll barely remember them when you're done.
Once you get over the hump and develop a certain amount of cardiovascular fitness, it stops being unpleasant and stressful.
The real problem is that most people don't feel like this is true. It really takes a solid 6ish months of earnest effort (AT LEAST 3x per week, probably more) to develop cardiovascular fitness. For some people, it'll take even longer.
I run an average of 6 days per week for the past 10+ years. At this point running is just about the easiest thing I do, it doesn't take any mental fortitude at all to do it. It wasn't always that way though, I used to dread it.
We lack basic education in fitness, really, we do! They don't teach it in schools, but really just walking your 8-10k steps a day + simple own-weight exercises at home do wonders! Gym is fine for those who like it and can afford it (time, money), but by far not the only solution. We need to educate ourselves better. Plus, better cities, I am with you on that one.
It can be, especially when you're only getting started and completely out of shape (I advise mostly walking and a bit of running if thats the case). But it can also be a beautiful, relaxing, meditative and totally addictive thing - which is why tens or hundreds of millions around the world do it. That feeling of unlpeasant stress means you probably went to hard; decrease the intensity. Walk if u have to, then run a bit, then walk some more. I agree that when you're starting out - feeling like you're suffocating / out of air is not a great feeling. There's really no reason to train like that.
The title is grammatically standard to the title of other scientific studies of this nature and communicates the intent succinctly to those who know they are looking at a psychology study.
A descriptive rewording for general understanding could be something like "We measured an association with lower anger and anxiety and higher emotional resilience in individuals with higher cardiorespiratory fitness rates."
Not saying "cardiorespiratory fitness" and "heart rate" are 1:1, because they're certainly not, but beta blockers are a known treatment for certain kinds of anxiety. I can attest that taking low-dose propranolol twice a day (without pulling any other levers related to lifestyle, stress, etc.) has helped me mellow the fuck out, which I sorely needed lol. So I would wager that cardio fitness is itself correlated with anxiety and anger, although in practice it's tangled up with many other factors.
In addition to baseline heart rate, there's also some interesting stuff related to anxiety and heart rate variability. My understanding is that certain types of breathing exercises improve HRV in the short term, which is good for calming down if you're riled up, but people with good cardio health have a better baseline HRV in the first place. (Also, this has always been unintuitive to me, but higher variability is better for anxiety, not lower variability.)
I've had the same idea. Especially regarding anxiety. You start getting anxious and scared of everything, because your brain knows that your body is out of shape and incapable of dealing with stuff if anything happens. If you can't deal with any problems, then you must constantly be on lookout for them so that you can avoid them.
I'm all for walkable/bikeable cities, but that doesn't solve the intrinsic motivation problem either.
I live in an area that has a lot of walkable and bikeable things nearby. There are a lot of people who drive anyway. Some because they're older, others because they have kids, others because they have busy schedules, and some are just lazy.
So while I'm in favor of better city layout, I don't think this would be a magic solution.
> Gyms are for people who have plenty of intrinsic motivation and money and time.
There are a lot of ways to work out without a gym. You can go for a walk or run around your neighborhood or even do a lot of workout programs at home. There are many easy workout systems that don't even take a lot of time and are easy to get started if you're not in shape.
No editorial content about the inherent dignity or equal rights of all members of the human family.
FW Ratio: 67%
Observable Facts
The page contains a redirect script to an article titled 'Cardiorespiratory fitness is associated with lower anger and anxiety and higher emotional resilience'.
Site analytics code categorizes the page as an article with type 'ih:article' and product 'IH'.
Inferences
Hosting research on emotional resilience structurally aligns with the UDHR's aspiration for freedom from fear.
Platform hosts scientific research on human health and psychology, structurally enabling the 'freedom from fear' aspect by disseminating knowledge on emotional resilience.
Page includes multiple analytics and tracking scripts (archive_analytics, siteCatalyst) collecting user data without explicit consent mechanism visible on page.
build 1ad9551+j7zs · deployed 2026-03-02 09:09 UTC · evaluated 2026-03-02 11:31:12 UTC
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