How Much Exercise Do you need to Improve Mental Health?

Everyone knows that exercise improves your physical health, but what is less well known is how powerful exercise can be to prevent and treat mental health issues.   Exercise can prevent depression and has been proven to be more effective than many leading anti-depressant medications in head to head studies comparing the two.    

But just how much exercise do you need to do?  A recent large study looked at 1.2 million people in the US and had participants report their activity levels for one month along with rating their mental health.    On average participants said they had 3.5 days of poor mental health during the month, but for exercisers it was only 2 days.

All types of exercise improved mental health including housework and formal exercise.  However three forms of exercise stood above the others:

Team Sports

Cycling

Aerobic and Gym Activities

The social aspects of team sports may well be why they showed up at the top of the list.   For people in the study with known mental health issues exercise also helped.      Those who did not exercise had 11 days of poor mental health each month compared with just 7 for exercisers.

Too much exercise actually seems to worsen mental health problems.   In this study people who exercised more than 23 times a month or exercised for longer than 90 minutes per session tended to have worse mental health.     The sweet spot in this study was exercising for 45 minutes three to five days per week.

High Intensity vs Lower Intensity Exercise

ALL types of exercise have the ability to improve mental health and it is quite likely that whether high or lower intensity will benefit you most has to do with different types of mental health challenges.    It is clear that high intensity exercise can be a major mental health booster for many people because it radically and quickly changes your brain chemistry.

In a study, a group of researchers from the University of Texas investigated the effects of high-intensity exercise on a protein called BDNF, short for brain-derived neurotrophic factor. BDNF is involved in brain-cell survival and repair, mood regulation, and cognitive functions such as learning and memory; low levels of BDNF have been associated with depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. In the study subjects, all healthy young adults, a session of high-intensity exercise was linked to both higher BDNF levels and improvements in cognitive functioning.

In a similar study done in 2014, a group of middle-aged volunteers ran through a battery of mental tests before and after a high-intensity exercise session — and these subjects, too, saw their cognitive function improve. Notably, there was no such improvement after a session of low-intensity active stretching.

High Intensity Exercise and Anxiety

For those with anxiety disorders be careful with high intensity exercise because during a high intensity workout the sympathetic nervous system is highly activated. The sympathetic nervous system is the “fight or flight” mechanism and includes a major increase in norepinephrine and epinephrine (excitatory neurotransmitter and hormone respectively).   

These effects mimic the the physical experience of panic.  So high intensity exercise can provoke a panic attack.   On the other hand.  Easing into higher intensity exercise can help people desensitize to the physical symptoms of anxiety and panic.  In fact, the nervous system will “learn” how to become better at returning to normal and slowing itself down to balance out the excitatory burst of neurotransmitters.

The key as always is balance, and remember ALL exercise can and does help with mental health so get moving!