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Exercise can create a propensity for drug addiction
Medical expert of the article
Last reviewed: 01.07.2025
In some cases, exercising hard doesn't cure drug addiction, but rather hinders it, argues journalist Gretchen Reynolds in a blog post on The New York Times website, citing new results from an experiment with mice at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology (Illinois, Urbana-Champaign).
The male mice were divided into two categories - some had cages with wheels in which they could run, while others had virtually no "sports equipment". For 30 days, the mice in whose cages there were wheels were able to run in them as much as they wanted.
After this, the mice were moved to a narrow enclosure with many compartments and given cocaine to try. The mice liked the substance and became practically addicted.
The next step of the experiment: some mice were allowed to run in the wheels for the first time. Mice that had wheels in their cages initially were also allowed to use them as before.
Then the scientists stopped giving the mice drugs and began to find out how quickly their drug addiction would pass.
"Among the mice that were both 'addicts' and 'runners,' two clear trends emerged. Mice that began running on the wheel only after becoming addicts quickly and seemingly effortlessly lost their drug addiction," the paper says. In contrast, mice that ran frequently before first using cocaine recovered from their cocaine addiction slowly or not at all.
"There are two novelties in our results - one good and one not so good," concluded one of the study's authors, psychologist Justin S. Rhodes. Certainly, this study shows that drug addiction is harder to break if it is acquired during intense physical overload. "Although, in fact, the study has proven how profoundly physical activity has a big impact on the learning process," Rhodes added.
An analysis of the mice's brains showed that the "runners" had almost twice as many new brain cells as the animals that remained sedentary. These new cells were concentrated in the hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for associative learning.
"Scientists suggest that animals that ran periodically before being introduced to cocaine had an abundant supply of new brain cells primed to learn. And these cells learned to crave drugs. As a result, it was much more difficult for them to forget what they had learned and to get rid of drug addiction," the article says.
On the contrary, mice that started running after becoming drug addicts, thanks to their own new brain cells, survived the withdrawal symptoms more easily.
"Basically, the results are encouraging," Rhodes concluded. Exercise boosts associative learning, he explained.
The psychologist also pointed out that previous studies have shown that playing sports appears to stimulate the pleasure centre in the brain and can serve as a substitute for drugs.
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