Running to escape everyday stresses may eventually cause exercise dependence instead of mental wellbeing: Study

A study published in Frontiers in Psychology investigated whether the concept of escapism can help us understand the relationship between running, wellbeing, and exercise dependence.

Escapism can restore perspective, or it can act as a distraction from problems that need to be tackled. Escapism which is adaptive, seeking out positive experiences, is referred to as self-expansion. Meanwhile maladaptive escapism, avoiding negative experiences, is called self-suppression. Effectively, running as exploration or as evasion.

Escapist activities used for self-expansion have more positive effects but also more long-term benefits. Self-suppression, by contrast, tends to suppress positive feelings as well as negative ones and lead to avoidance.

The team recruited 227 recreational runners, half men and half women, with widely varying running practices. The scientists found that there was very little overlap between runners who favored self-expansion and runners who preferred self-suppression modes of escapism. Self-expansion was positively related with wellbeing, while self-suppression was negatively related to wellbeing. Self-suppression and self-expansion were both linked to exercise dependence, but self-suppression was much more strongly linked to it. Although exercise dependence corrodes the potential wellbeing gains from exercise, it seems that perceiving lower wellbeing may be both a cause and an outcome of exercise dependency: the dependency might be driven by lower wellbeing as well as promoting it.

Similarly, experiencing positive self-expansion might be a psychological motive that promotes exercise dependence.

Reference:

Dr Frode Stenseng, Running to Get "Lost"? Two Types of Escapism in Recreational Running and Their Relations to Exercise Dependence and Subjective Well-Being, Frontiers in Psychology, doi10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1035196