The effects of exercise on mental health

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The effects of exercise on mental health

“A simple exercise routine can have a major impact not only on health but also mood and overall daily life.” (L Brightwell; www.laurafreberg.com)

The area of focus for this study will be the effect of exercise on mood and mental health. Although there are no doubts that by exercising you benefit physically, not as much research has been done into how exercise affects us mentally and why it does this. A lot of people take part in physical activity to let anger out and alleviate stress, but does this actually work?

The short-term effects of exercise are clear – when you exercise, endorphins are released, which improves your mood. There is also research that mainly suggests that if you are depressed or have some other mental illness, by doing exercise you are more likely to recover. However, from reading about different studies, I know that it’s unclear whether there is a change in your mental health if you are already mentally healthy and you partake in physical activity, so I will focus mainly on this.

I plan on looking at relevant research into the effects of exercise on mental health, in order to know what other studies have concluded and to know what experiments have and haven’t done. I hope to find studies where experiments or research has been done on both mentally well and unwell people, in order to see if there is a change in mood in both. I shall then conduct my own small experiment, by asking fifty participants to fill in a questionnaire about how exercise affects their mood. I will ask questions such as “How much exercise do you do on a normal day?” “How do you feel on a normal day?” and “How do you feel after you exercised?” to find out whether there is a correlation between them both. The participants will all be mentally fit. By this, I hope to find out how exercise affects an average person’s mood and how they feel after they have exercised. I will then be able to discuss and compare the studies and come to my own conclusions about whether exercising improves your mood in the long term.

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There is a lot of research that suggests that physical activity may be associated with reduced symptoms of depression. A useful study into the effects of exercise on mood is by K Moore et al. The purpose of this study was to assess the status of 156 adult volunteers with major depressive disorder six months after they completed a four month course of either aerobic exercise, sertraline (an anti-depressant) therapy, or a combination of exercise and sertraline. Their results were that after four months, patients in all three groups had improved. The participants taking antidepressants improved the fastest. ...

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