You’ve probably heard the term “runner’s high,” but new research is showing us just how beneficial exercise can be for your mental health. We tend to preach the physical benefits of exercise on our blog, but the findings published in Psychological Medicine provide evidence that there are also strong psychological benefits associated with increased activity.
Treating Depression With Exercise
For the study, researchers asked 66 adults diagnosed with major depression to partake in an exercise routine. Participants were split into three groups:
- Eight weeks of moderate intensity aerobic exercise
- Eight weeks of light intensity stretching
- A control group
After comparing mental health scores throughout the study, researchers found that moderate intensity aerobic exercise helped to alleviate depressive symptoms by nearly 55 percent. Those in the light intensity stretching group saw their symptoms decrease by 31 percent over the same time period.
Why The Decrease?
So why was exercise how helpful at controlling symptoms of depression? Researchers say they uncovered a biomarker that might hold the answers. Individuals with worse depression symptoms tended to have greater levels of reward processing in the brain, and exercise can help trigger this reward process in the brain.
Brandon Alderman, the study’s lead author and an associate professor at Rutgers University noted that individuals with lower reward processing tend to respond better to treatments like therapy or drugs, but those with a higher reward processing center in the brain could really see mental health improvements simply by exercising more regularly.
Unfortunately, we don’t have a great understanding of how to determine a person’s reward processing center levels, so it’s tough to predict how someone may respond to treatment. Researchers are hopeful that questionnaires or similar tests can give medical experts insight into how a person processes rewarding behavior, but for now it’s still an inexact science. That being said, Alderman told Inverse.com that “exercise has been shown in countless studies to be beneficial for depression, and our data only add to the growing body of evidence.”
If you are struggling with mental health issues or depression, talk to a specialist in your area, but don’t discount the tools you may already have at your disposal to help with your symptoms. Even light walking has been associated with a decrease in depressive symptoms, so get out there, move around and work to take back some control over your mental health.