A foreign study shows that exercise is important in helping children cope with stressful situations. When exposed to stressful and stimulating environments, researchers found that stress hormone (cortisol) levels were higher in sedentary children, while active children showed little or no increase in stress hormone levels. The study revealed that exercise is important for children’s mental health and can help buffer them from everyday stress. This representative study monitored exercise and hormone levels in a birth cohort of 8-year-old children, with a total of 252 participants, divided into active, intermediate and inactive groups for comparison. These children were asked to complete arithmetic and storytelling tasks to detect stress responses. The results found that children in the active group had the lowest cortisol levels in response to stressful situations, and that children in the active group exercised more intensely and for a longer period of time than the other groups.