Physical Activity: A Treatment for Depression?
The trap works like this. You want to exercise, but the motivation never arrives. Some days even getting to the gym feels like too much. You know it helps, you've seen the studies, and none of that is enough to pry you off the couch. Maybe part of why you're still there, remote in hand, is precisely that you haven't been moving in the first place. Researchers at University College London found that depression and physical activity feed each other in both directions. People who added more activity to their week reported fewer depressive symptoms, while people carrying more depressive symptoms moved less, and that pattern showed up most strongly at younger ages. Call it a Catch-22: more exercise would lower the odds of depression, yet depression saps the energy it takes to exercise.
The research appeared in JAMA Psychiatry and came out of the Public Health Research Consortium. It tracked 11,135 people born in 1958, following them to age 50, with depressive symptoms and activity levels recorded at set points through adulthood. Each extra activity session per week lowered the odds of depression by about 6%. In England, 19% of men and 26% of women fall into the 'inactive' category, and the findings suggest that getting them moving could lift mental health alongside physical health.
Dr. Snehal Pinto Pereira of the UCL Institute of Child Health, who led the study, put it plainly. Assuming the link is causal, leisure-time activity shields against depression. An adult in their twenties through forties who went from sedentary to active three times a week would cut their depression risk by roughly 16%. And the benefit wasn't confined to people already at high risk. The more active someone was, the fewer depressive symptoms they reported. Pinto Pereira drew a comparison: plenty of people who aren't clinically depressed still live with some depressive symptoms, the same way a person can be a bit overweight without meeting the clinical threshold for obesity.
Participants were followed on this question from age 23 to age 50. They completed a Malaise Inventory, a questionnaire gauging depressive symptoms, at ages 23, 33, 42, and 50, and they reported how often they were physically active. Those who scored higher on depressive symptoms at 23 tended to move less, which points toward pushing young people harder to get outside and exercise. As Pinto Pereira noted, that matters for policy, because it means depressive symptoms may themselves be a barrier to activity in young adulthood. Stepping up the frequency of activity, meanwhile, cut depressive symptoms consistently across every age in the study.
Earlier work on exercise as a depression treatment landed in mixed territory, but a longitudinal study this large makes a stronger case that movement matters for mental health. It lends weight to programs such as the NFL's Play 60, run with the American Heart Association to push back against childhood obesity through in-school, after-school, and team-based activity. Whatever the stated goal, the effect is the same: kids leave the house and spend time with other kids.
Senior author Chris Power, Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health at the UCL Institute of Child Health, said that universal activity three times a week should bring depression risk down, on top of the physical payoffs other research has mapped, including lower risk of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes. There was already some evidence that activity could treat depression, he added, but this study reaches past the depressed group to suggest activity curbs depressive symptoms across the general population.
Professor Mark Petticrew of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, who directs the Public Health Research Consortium, framed the wider picture. Most people already grasp what physical activity does for general health, and the evidence that it also helps mental well-being keeps accumulating. The research, he said, points to how much it matters that people work and live in places that let them stay active and mentally well.
The takeaway: physical activity may head off depression before it starts, and it may help treat it once it's there.
A personal note to close. Many of us promise ourselves every January that we'll exercise more, and the motives behind that promise run in as many directions as the people making it. 'Exercise more' has to rank among the most common resolutions going. Most of the world, and America in particular, could stand to move more, myself included, and not because of obesity statistics or vanity.
I'm a goal-setter by temperament. I name a goal and grind toward it. Like a lot of Americans, I kept setting that 'exercise more' resolution, and year after year I came up short. Failure has always scared me, so each time I fell short I didn't just fail at the goal, I took on failure as a trait. That was all inside my head, which might be the cruelest place to carry it. Eventually I quit making resolutions at all.
People genuinely need to move more to clear out what weighs on the body, the mind, and the spirit. Over the last 50 years, depression diagnoses have climbed sharply, and the reasons are too many to count on fingers and toes. Still, look at how American life has shifted over that stretch and a few causes surface. One that comes to mind: everyone, young and old, used to spend more time outdoors, and the season barely mattered.
As a kid I found it as much fun to play bundled up in the snow as to run barefoot across hot summer pavement. I'd head out right after breakfast, duck back in at lunch, duck back in again at supper, and only come inside at nightfall under threat. A few hours of sleep, maybe a bath, then up to do it all again. The adults in my family worked the garden so we'd have fresh vegetables, and they canned and preserved so there'd be food through winter. They tended the lawn, sat on the porch, shoveled snow, made snow cream, and planned for spring.
Now most parents won't let a child out of sight for more than a few minutes, let alone most of a day. Often that's reasonable given real safety worries and how quick people are to sue. In place of outdoor play there's video games, social media, or television as the resident babysitter, only in high definition these days. Parents log longer hours and seem to have less room to parent. The old 9-to-5, Monday-through-Friday rhythm that left space for, maybe even assumed, that scarce thing called quality family time looks mostly gone.
Given a century of social and cultural change, it's no wonder depression reads like an epidemic. I've actually made myself a little sad writing this, thinking about how good my own childhood was next to the flatter one my kids are living.
Reference: Bergen University College London. (2014, October 15). Leisure time physical activity linked to lower depression risk. ScienceDaily. Retrieved December 9, 2014.