How Exercise Fights Anxiety and Depression

When it comes to mental health, most treatments for conditions like depression or anxiety come with caveats. Medications work for some symptoms, but can exacerbate others. Cognitive behavioral therapy is effective for many patients, but not all.

- Erik Vance

NEW YORK — When it comes to mental health, most treatments for conditions like depression or anxiety come with caveats. Medications work for some symptoms, but can exacerbate others. Cognitive behavioral therapy is effective for many patients, but not all.

But there is one strategy that seems to work for most people and almost all experts endorse, and that is regular exercise.

Decades of research have established that exercise has a positive effect on mental health. In studies of patients with mild to moderate depression, for example, a wide range of exercise regimens has been shown to be as effective as medications like selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (though the best results generally involve a combination of the two).

Moving regularly can improve sleep and reduce stress. While there is good evidence for the mental health benefits of exercising for about 45 minutes, three to five times a week, even just a few minutes of walking around the block can have positive effects.

"Is this walk going to do anything?" said associate professor Jennifer Heisz at McMaster University in Canada and the author of Move The Body, Heal The Mind. "The answer is yes. It'll do way more than you think."

WHY IS EXERCISE GOOD FOR MENTAL HEALTH?