Have you been feeling tense lately? Don’t whine about it. Take a hike.

It’s not rude. It’s science.

The Archives of Internal Medicine published a study by a team of University researchers in February, noting the relationship between exercise and anxiety. The study found regular exercise could reduce feelings of worry and nervousness by as much as 20 percent.

A University study has shown exercising can help relieve stress and anxiety.

“It’s always my stress reliever,” said Caroline Lide, a child and family development major from Atlanta who runs six times a week. “It’s just a time to collect my thoughts.”

Though the link between exercise and depression has been closely examined in the past decade, the connection between exercise and mental states, such as anxiety, has received much less attention, said Pat O’Connor, a professor of kinesiology and study co-author. Symptoms of depression tend to be more intrusive to daily life, but anxiety is a more commonly occurring problem among the American populace.

It was this disparity that inspired Matthew Herring to investigate further.

Herring, a doctoral student of kinesiology from Fitzgerald, headed up the recent study as lead author.

“Anxiety is a significant public health burden, and exercise training is a healthful behavior that could potentially serve as an inexpensive, accessible therapy to reduce anxiety symptoms,” Herring wrote in an e-mail interview.

The study relied on the process of meta-analysis, which involved the careful selection and examination of 40 separate studies spanning more than a decade. The process also helped to streamline the findings, which ran the gamut from 1995 to 2008 and featured sometimes vastly different methods of measurement for such an intangible concept as anxiety.

“Someone has a scale from one to 10, and someone else has a scale of one to 100,” O’Connor said.

The study found exercise programs between three and 12 weeks tended to be most effective at reducing anxiety. The exercises were found to be more effective when they lasted for more than 30 minutes.

However, the study found many people begin to lose interest after the 12 week mark, with many stopping altogether.

“We have a culture that’s so inactive and sedentary,” said Stacy Connell, assistant director of fitness and wellness at the Ramsey Student Center. “We don’t have to walk to the grocery store. We drive.”

It’s not just the grocery store. Students spend a large part of their day seated, whether in the classroom or dining commons. The buses also continue to be popular, contributing to a general lack of activity, Connell said.

Combined with the time crunch of college, many students feel as if they don’t have the time or energy to spend the daily recommendation of at least 30 minutes of exercise.

“You’ve just got to push through it,” said Marc Jackson, a senior from Douglasville who works out five times a week.

However, Jackson may be an exception. In a world of delivery pizza and laptops, doing nothing is often the easiest choice of all.

“It’s a fundamental problem in our field,” O’Connor said.  “How do you get people to be more active?”