Exercise Is Adderall Minus the Profits

Attention is a scarce resource, and it’s one the most valuable things you can give to someone. But in today’s world, when we have distractions everywhere, attention and focus have?suffered dramatically.?ADHD diagnoses, not surprisingly, have increased by 42 percent in the last 10 years, and the answer for many is to turn to pharmaceutical drugs.

The problem is made worse when these drug companies get involved, because their motive is profit. They may have one solution to our attentional problems, but there is another–exercise. Working out is just as effective as drugs are for improving our attention, but because large companies can’t sell exercise, very few people ever get prescribed it as a solution. The Huffington Post has more:

“Very few people are exercising these days, especially kids,” he says. “Without the movement, we’re seeing much more of the diagnoses.”

What Ratey wants to do is bring back the past. Before drug treatments were developed, dealing with kids who had so-called “hyperkinetic disease” used to be as simple as letting them run around, in the manner of marathoners or overly frisky dogs, until they tuckered themselves out. Now Ratey’s trying to revive that paradigm by backing it up with science.

We could likely all do with some more focus at times, and exercise is one valuable way to get it–for those that rely on drugs, it might also be a cheaper way to get the same results.?Check out the full post for more details on the study.