What if the secret to lasting fitness isn’t willpower or discipline, but rediscovering the natural joy your body was designed to feel during movement? In The Joy of Movement, Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonigal challenges everything we think we know about exercise by revealing how our brains are evolutionarily wired to find movement rewarding—not punishing.
Whether you’re someone who dreads the gym or you’re seeking a deeper understanding of why some activities feel naturally energizing while others feel like punishment, this guide will help you discover how to harness movement’s built-in rewards to create sustainable, joyful fitness habits.
Book Overview of The Joy of Movement
For many of us, exercise feels like a chore—something we know we should do but dread. But in The Joy of Movement (2019), psychologist Kelly McGonigal offers a different perspective: Movement is a natural source of joy we’re designed to crave. Instead of simply burning calories or building muscle, exercise fulfills our essential human needs for connection, challenge, and growth.
Drawing on neuroscience research, anthropological studies, and personal stories, McGonigal reveals how movement shapes not just our bodies, but our happiness, social connections, and sense of self. She argues that the key isn’t forcing yourself through painful workouts, but rediscovering the inherent pleasure in movement.
McGonigal is a health psychologist and Stanford lecturer who focuses on the mind-body connection, and understanding how the body’s natural capacity for joy and connection can lead to a healthier, more fulfilling life. Her previous books include The Upside of Stress and The Willpower Instinct.
In this guide, we’ll examine the evolutionary rewards that make movement naturally pleasurable, explore how these rewards create positive habits and personal transformation, and discuss the unique benefits of moving with others. Throughout the guide, we’ll provide practical applications that help you harness these benefits in your own life.
Our Bodies Are Built to Move
According to McGonigal, our bodies have evolved to move. In this section, we’ll outline the immediate chemical rewards that make exercise feel good, explore how these rewards build lasting habits, and discuss how regular movement creates psychological changes that extend far beyond physical fitness—transforming your mood, stress resilience, and overall confidence in your abilities.
The Chemical Rewards: What Happens in Your Brain During Exercise
McGonigal explains that humans evolved brain circuitry that rewards movement by releasing pleasure-inducing chemicals. Scientists believe we developed these neurological incentives as a survival mechanism—they motivated our ancestors to persist through fatigue during extended hunts that required tracking prey across vast distances.
The same brain circuits that rewarded our ancestors during sustained hunts help you power through fatigue when exercising today. Your brain can’t distinguish between chasing prey for survival and pushing through the last mile of your run—both trigger the same ancient reward pathways that helped humans persist when giving up meant starvation.
McGonigal says that after about 20 minutes of moderate exercise, your body releases endocannabinoids—the body’s natural version of cannabis-like compounds—creating a natural “runner’s high” characterized by feelings of euphoria, reduced pain perception, and a sense of calm focus, making sustained effort feel rewarding rather than punishing. Your brain also releases dopamine, a neurotransmitter associated with pleasure and motivation, which signals that the activity is worth repeating.
When you exercise, your muscles also release proteins that travel to your brain and function similarly to antidepressant medications. These muscle-derived compounds reduce brain inflammation, build stress resilience, and heighten your response to positive emotions. According to McGonigal, any physical activity delivers these mood-enhancing chemicals directly from your muscles to your brain, creating an immediate biochemical boost to your mental state.
How Chemical Rewards Build Exercise Habits
These immediate chemical rewards—the endocannabinoids, dopamine, and muscle-derived compounds—feel good in the moment and motivate you to continue exercising. When you exercise regularly, the dopamine release creates a habit loop: Your brain starts treating movement like other pleasurable activities such as eating your favorite food or listening to music, generating genuine anticipation for your next workout. Over time, these repeated chemical rewards transform sporadic activity into ingrained exercise habits.
McGonigal explains that these powerful chemical rewards can develop exercise habits so strong that they superficially resemble addiction. Studies of fitness enthusiasts reveal similar brain patterns to those with substance dependencies—dopamine surges and intense cravings. Regular exercisers often display comparable behaviors, choosing to work out even when offered payment to stop and experiencing withdrawal-like symptoms when they’re unable to exercise.
Yet unlike drug dependencies, which quickly hijack the brain’s reward pathways, exercise habits develop more gradually, allowing you to build self-discipline and make conscious decisions about your routine. More importantly, while drug addiction diminishes your capacity for pleasure, exercise habits increase it.
Long-Term Brain Changes and Life Transformation
Once these chemical rewards establish regular exercise as a habit, the biological changes in your brain and body create benefits that extend into work, relationships, and daily challenges—not just physical fitness. McGonigal says these benefits include:
Enhanced brain adaptability: Regular movement increases production of BDNF, a protein that helps create new brain connections and teaches your body to manage stress hormones more effectively. This dual effect makes your brain both more flexible when it comes to learning new things and more resilient when facing setbacks. In practical terms, this means you may find yourself bouncing back faster from work frustrations, adapting more easily to unexpected changes in your routine, or feeling less overwhelmed by daily pressures.
Increased confidence: When you complete physical challenges that once seemed impossible—like running your first mile or mastering a yoga pose—your brain treats this as evidence of your capability to overcome difficulty. This physical confidence often transfers to other areas of life, making you more willing to tackle nonphysical challenges like learning new skills or having difficult conversations.
The Science of Moving Together
While individual movement provides powerful benefits, something even more extraordinary happens when you move with other people. McGonigal explains that group movement creates unique neurological and social rewards that amplify all the individual benefits discussed so far, and increase feelings of joy and connection.
The Neurological Connection: How Bodies Sync Up
Research suggests that when people move together, their bodies naturally start to sync up. Your brain contains mirror neurons that activate both when you move and when you watch others move, creating an unconscious urge to copy what you see. Studies indicate this can lead to measurable physical alignment—heart rates may begin to match, stress hormones often drop in similar patterns, and brain activity appears to synchronize in areas linked to pleasure and social connection.
According to McGonigal, even simple coordinated actions like clapping together or walking at the same pace can strengthen these biological connections. Research suggests your brain begins treating the group as an extension of yourself, which may explain why shared achievements often feel more rewarding than solo success.
The Psychology of Collective Effervescence
This synchronization creates what French sociologist Émile Durkheim termed collective effervescence—the euphoric feeling when a group moves as one unit. You’ve likely experienced this rush: the energy in a stadium when fans jump and cheer together, or the high when a dance group nails a complicated routine in perfect unison. In these moments, people report feeling less self-conscious and more connected to those around them, creating a shared sense that the group can accomplish anything. This explains why activities like protest marches, religious dances, and team sports generate such powerful emotional experiences that participants remember for years.
According to McGonigal, collective effervescence creates lasting bonds that extend beyond the activity itself, transforming movement groups into support networks that complement members’ closest relationships. These communities often become sources of mutual support, with members helping each other navigate both everyday challenges and major life transitions.
Natural Environments: Amplifying All Benefits
The benefits of movement—both physical and social—are even stronger when you exercise in nature. Research shows that “green exercise” can ease anxiety, depression, and grief, with mood improvements kicking in within just five minutes. McGonigal explains that this happens because nature helps create distance from everyday stressors, fosters a sense of safety and support, and evokes feelings of awe, hope, and connection to something larger than yourself.
The Digital Challenge and Opportunity
As our world becomes increasingly digital, platforms like Peloton and Strava offer new ways to connect through movement, providing accountability, accessibility, and community across distance. These tools can strengthen motivation, but as McGonigal notes, they can’t fully replace the neurological synchronization that occurs when people move together in person—when heart rates, brain activity, and rhythms align to create deep social bonds. Digital platforms are valuable supplements, but they don’t replicate the unique bonding power of shared physical presence.
Find What Works for You
Exercise is most valuable when it nourishes not just your body, but also your mind and social life—helping you feel connected, capable, and fully engaged. The key isn’t the most “efficient” workout; rather it’s finding activities that bring joy, challenge, and meaning.
To discover what works for you, start with what naturally appeals to you: What did you love as a child? Dancing, swimming, climbing, biking, or playing tag are all great options. Notice what kinds of challenges energize you: Some people thrive on competition, others on meditative, repetitive activities.
Experiment with social contexts as well—join walking groups, take dance classes, try team sports, or exercise with friends. Pay attention to how each activity makes you feel during and after. Joyful movement should energize you and create anticipation for the next session, not dread. By exploring what feels meaningful and fun, you can cultivate a sustainable, positive relationship with exercise.
