ABSTRACT
Substantial evidence shows that physical activity and fitness play a protective role in the development of stress related disorders. However, the beneficial effects of fitness for resilience to modern life stress are not fully understood. Potentially protective effects may be attributed to enhanced resilience via underlying psychosocial mechanisms such as self-efficacy expectations. This study investigated whether physical activity and fitness contribute to prospectively measured resilience and examined the mediating effect of general self-efficacy. 431 initially healthy adults participated in fitness assessments as part of a longitudinal-prospective study, designed to identify mechanisms of resilience. Self-efficacy and habitual activity were assessed in parallel to cardiorespiratory and muscular fitness, which were determined by a submaximal step-test, hand strength and standing long jump test. Resilience was indexed by stressor reactivity: mental health problems in relation to reported life events and daily hassles, monitored quarterly for nine months. Hierarchical linear regression models and bootstrapped mediation analyses were applied. We could show that muscular and self-perceived fitness were positively associated with stress resilience. Extending this finding, the muscular fitness-resilience relationship was partly mediated by self-efficacy expectations. In this context, self-efficacy expectations may act as one underlying psychological mechanism, with complementary benefits for the promotion of mental health. While physical activity and cardiorespiratory fitness did not predict resilience prospectively, we found muscular and self-perceived fitness to be significant prognostic parameters for stress resilience. Although there is still more need to identify specific fitness parameters in light of stress resilience, our study underscores the general relevance of fitness for stress-related disorders prevention.
Subject(s)
Physical Fitness , Self Efficacy , Adult , Cross-Sectional Studies , Humans , Prospective Studies , Stress, PsychologicalABSTRACT
Resilience is the maintenance and/or quick recovery of mental health during and after periods of adversity. It is conceptualized to result from a dynamic process of successful adaptation to stressors. Up to now, a large number of resilience factors have been proposed, but the mechanisms underlying resilience are not yet understood. To shed light on the complex and time-varying processes of resilience that lead to a positive long-term outcome in the face of adversity, the Longitudinal Resilience Assessment (LORA) study has been established. In this study, 1191 healthy participants are followed up at 3- and 18-month intervals over a course of 4.5 years at two study centers in Germany. Baseline and 18-month visits entail multimodal phenotyping, including the assessment of mental health status, sociodemographic and lifestyle variables, resilience factors, life history, neuropsychological assessments (of proposed resilience mechanisms), and biomaterials (blood for genetic and epigenetic, stool for microbiome, and hair for cortisol analysis). At 3-monthly online assessments, subjects are monitored for subsequent exposure to stressors as well as mental health measures, which allows for a quantitative assessment of stressor-dependent changes in mental health as the main outcome. Descriptive analyses of mental health, number of stressors including major life events, daily hassles, perceived stress, and the ability to recover from stress are here presented for the baseline sample. The LORA study is unique in its design and will pave the way for a better understanding of resilience mechanisms in humans and for further development of interventions to successfully prevent stress-related disorder.