Brain Gains?: How CrossFit Became a Foundation for My Mental Health
Brain Gains?: How CrossFit Became a Foundation for My Mental Health
When my friends, family, colleagues, or fellow CrossFit-ers describe me, I’ve heard a litany of answers, but there’s one word that tends to come up more frequently…I’m “intense”. This might even be a top-3 answer my own wife would give about me, so I suppose that makes it an immensely credible answer. But it’s true - I definitely have an intensity about me, and while I’ve learned how to harness that intense energy into lots of productivity and focus, I also have to recognize that same intensity contributes to a general state of borderline anxiety which can definitely bring me to my proverbial knees. My mind races, sleep suffers, and the people closest to me get the short end of a very sharp stick.
I started CrossFit in 2013 primarily to “get fit”, but at 23 years old it was mostly just to “look fit” (or at least try to!). Yet what I’ve realized over the last 13 years is that the primary purpose for CrossFit in my life is to manage and clarify my mental health. CrossFit (and cycling) are the most important “circuit breakers” for my brain, not because they make the anxiety disappear (anyone who has hoped for that knows that’s a BS claim), but because fitness outlets give my intensive obsessive habits a productive target and trigger a cascade of actual biological changes that control the way my nervous system handles load.
When I’m halfway through one of Coach Joe’s 30-minute “mental test Monday” workouts, my body demands presence and the only way to get through the workout is for all the mental mechanics to focus on the task at hand. I’m sure many of you have felt this type of embodied focus and it’s a real phenomenon that is increasingly linked to measurable shifts in threat processing and anxiety management in real clinical research. But this mental outlet only really works when I’m applying, you guessed it - INTENSITY - to the workout, and that’s why I’m such a strong believer in CrossFit which is literally predicated on intensity. You could scour PubMed (for us nerds), or for the modern aficionado I’m sure AI will get you some pretty good resources, and you’ll find thousands of peer-reviewed articles looking deeper at the biology of how fitness and exertion play a role in mental processes. I could literally pull citations for hours but just to name a few:
- Plag et al. 2020 compared high-intensity interval training to lower-intensity work and showed ~2X the reduction in somatic anxiety symptoms and comorbid depression, which stayed true at extended follow-up time periods. (Journal of Anxiety Disorders)
- Szuhany et al. 2015 meta-analysis summarized a likely mechanism behind this, as high-intensity efforts produce much sharper spikes in brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) that directly support neurogenesis and synaptic plasticity in brain regions tied to stress regulation. (Journal of Psychiatric Research)
- Stefanica et al. 2025 looked at CrossFit specifically in high-stress law students, where a four-week program documented large drops in depression, anxiety, and stress scores alongside the physical gains. (Nature Humanities and Social Sciences Communications)
Ok now here is the “but”...overdoing the whole fitness thing takes things in the opposite direction. I cannot treat training volume like another KPI to maximize. I’ve learned that the hard way. Multiple times I’ve crossed the line into “overtraining”, in fact I recently spent almost a full year rehabbing knee injuries that resulted directly from overtraining. And through all the mistakes I’ve made I’ve experienced all the classic symptoms: disrupted sleep, shorter fuse with my wife and daughters, frustrating injuries, and a noticeable difference in how I felt after a workout - I didn’t feel relief, I felt MORE STRESSED. The literature on overtraining syndrome in athletes consistently documents these exact psychological shifts.
For me, the difference now is not lower ambition; it is higher awareness. I still train hard most days, but I track the mental and recovery returns as closely as the watts or the lift numbers. Easier days are scheduled, not negotiated (usually). Cycling provides a different stimulus of steady-state cardio that complements my CrossFit training. I’ve literally got cabinets full of recovery tools at home that I have tried over the years, and I’m always looking at my Whoop data to monitor my systemic recovery and strain day in and day out. The older I get, the more I face the consequences of putting recovery on the back burner.
In the thirteen years since I started CrossFit, my life looks very different and there are substantially more external stressors and obligations in my life. But with all that said, I’m fitter and healthier than I’ve ever been, yet most profoundly, I’m in the best mental shape I’ve ever been in. Training is no longer an escape from anxiety. It is deliberate practice at regulating a nervous system that was always going to run near the “red line”.
I share this perspective because I know many of you carry similar stress and mental load—and the gym serves as an outlet for you too. I want us all to help each other recognize the thin line between ‘enough’ and ‘too much. That line shifts daily with sleep, nutrition, life stress, and age. What has worked for me is treating fitness as both a physical practice and a standing experiment in nervous-system management—measuring not only what it does to my “Fran” time or my front squat, but how my mind operates in the hours around the time at the gym. Let’s encourage each other to train with the explicit goal of building a more resilient all-around operating system. The barbell and the bike have been my most reliable tools for maintaining my OS. After 13 years, they still are.
Find your constant at Coefficient.
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