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. 68.8% of participants in the combination group, 60.4% in the exercise group and 65.5% in the medication group were no longer classified as clinically depressed. In conclusion, among individuals with MDD, exercise therapy had a significant therapeutic benefit, especially if exercise is continued over time. Having said this, according to the research it’s not as effective as anti-depressants. (Source: www.betterhealth.com)
Dr. John Bartholomew also conducted an experiment about the effects of exercise on patients with major depressive disorder. He found that the patients had immediate benefits from the exercise, and that even one single exercise session can help improve mood. (Source: Dan Henkel, Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise.) Another recent major study showed that adults ages 20 to 45 with mild to moderate depression who participated in 30-minute aerobic exercise sessions three to five times a week reduced their symptoms by almost 50 percent.
The effects of exercise on people who are mentally fit are less clear. Some research has shown that exercise does affect mood, such as Cramer, Nieman and Lee in 1991. Berger and Owen also found this. They found that after 14 weeks of regularly swimming, swimmers said that they felt less tension, dejection and confusion. Stephens and Craig found that people who took part in more recreational activities per day had a more positive mood than those who took part in less (source: ‘The well-being of Canadians’). The magazine Men’s Health suggests that if you’re having a stressful day at work, going to the gym is a perfect way of making yourself feel better, which supports the theory that exercise improves mood. (Source: ) The magazine Women’s Life also claims that exercise is good for alleviating stress, especially yoga, where it says it “melts away the stress” (Source: ). Camacho et al found that people who are physically active and exercise regularly are less likely to be diagnosed with depression. They found that in the first 9 years the relative risk (RR) of developing depression was significantly greater for both men and women who were not very active in 1965 (RR 1.8 for men, 1.7 for women) compared to those who were highly active. (Camacho and Colleagues, USA 1991)
However, other research has suggested otherwise. Brown et al found that there were very little effects of exercise on mood. Hughes, Casal and Leon found that exercise didn’t improve anger, anxiety, fatigue or total mood disturbance at all. (Source: www.uregina.ca/arts/psychology)
The literature here suggests that exercise reduces the symptoms of depression and anxiety in people with mental health problems. However, although there is more evidence to suggest that exercising improves the mood of mentally fit people, the results are still mainly unclear - but there is no evidence to suggest that exercise worsens your mood.
In my study (see appendices), I designed a questionnaire about the effects of exercise on mood. My participants were fifty people - male and female, and of all ages. Some of my participants did no exercise at all, whereas others did exercise more than five times a week. The questions were all designed to find information about the participant, how much exercise they did and what type it was, and how exercise made them feel.
From my results, my study suggests that the more exercise you do, the less likely you are to be depressed, with the exception of people who exercised 2-3 times a week. The more you exercise, the more energetic you are likely to be. The participants in my study who exercised once or never were the unhappiest. This supports the theory that exercise affects your mood. However, I have also found that (with the exception of people who exercised once a week) that people felt less satisfied the more they exercised. If you exercised a lot, it didn’t seem to lower your stress levels, or make you feel less tired.
My study shows that the male participants exercised more than females, and on the whole they were also happier, more energetic and less stressed. This supports the theory that exercise improves mood. My study suggests that while people cannot exercise for a long period of time (e.g. due to injury), the large majority of them will find that their mood will worsen.
I have found many links between other researchers results and my results. From my study, I found that people were the unhappiest when they exercised once or not at all per week, and the more exercise they did, the less likely they were to be depressed. This supports the findings of researchers such as Cramer, Nieman and Lee, and Berger and Owen, who found that after regular exercise, participants felt less tension, dejection and confusion. This also agrees with Stephens and Craig who found that people who take part in sport have more positive attitudes. This supports my hypothesis that exercise improves mood.
However, I have also found that the more exercise you do, the less satisfied you feel. This contradicts all of the studies that I studied in my literature review because none of them found any evidence that exercising worsened your mood. In my study, I also found that the amount of exercise you took part in didn’t affect your stress levels or how tired you were. This supports studies by Brown et al and Hughes, Casal and Leon who found that exercise had no effect on mood at all. Overall, my results were quite mixed, as some emotions seemed to improve during exercise, such as depression and happiness, whereas others seemed to get worse, such as satisfaction. This seems to back up Brown et al who found that they got mixed results as well and couldn’t really come to any definite conclusions. In my study, all of the participants who exercised said that they felt good after exercising when asked, “what effect does exercise have on you personally?” 100% of people agreed that exercise did have a good effect on them after they had completed it. This agrees with my hypothesis that exercise improves mood.
In conclusion, I think that although it’s not the same for everyone, exercise does have an effect on mood because the majority of people felt happier and less depressed after they had exercised, and were glad to have done it. This may be due to a number of things, such as weight-loss, endorphins and self-perceptions.
Although I tried to make my study as reliable and valid as possible, there are some things I could not control, which may have made my study more limited. Firstly, some of the participants may not have told the truth in the questionnaire, either because they didn’t want people to know how they felt, or they have different self-perceptions to everyone else. I tried to make the questionnaire as confidential as possible, by asking participants to put their completed questionnaire into an envelope with the other completed ones. Also, I had a small sample size of only 50 people, and how they feel may not represent the rest of the population - although I tried to get my sample group as varied as possible, e.g. different genders, ages and incomes. My experiment sample was based more in the countryside, where there is a slower pace of life. This is unlike the city, which is fast-paced and possibly more stressful; therefore I could have got completely different results there. Another point is that some of the literature that I wrote about was quite old, and the same results then may not apply now. Because my study choice was original and there is very little research on the effects of exercise on the mentally fit, I have nothing to compare my study to.
If I had to redo my research project, I would try and get the same amount of people for each amount of exercising per week for my questionnaire, as I think this would make my results more accurate. If I had more time, I could also look at a bigger sample group because this would make my results more reliable. For further research, I could look into why exercise affects mood in the long-term.
Bibliography
R. S. Weinberg and D. Gould (1995) Foundations of Sport and Exercise Psychology - Human Kinetics
F Galligan et al (2000) Advanced PE for Edexcel - Heinneman
(National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion)
Biddle S J H., Mutrie N 1991 Psychology of Physical Activity and Exercise, London Springer-Verlag
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