Exercise for Low Mood: Which Kinds Help and How Quickly

Advice to “get some exercise” has a poor reputation among people with low mood, and it’s easy to see why. It can sound like a brush-off, and on a bad day a shower feels like a lot. Over the past few years, though, the research behind the advice has become hard to wave away. Large reviews now argue that exercise belongs alongside therapy and medication as a standard option for depression, and that it helps with anxiety too.

That doesn’t make it a substitute for treatment when depression is severe, and we’ll come back to that further down. Nor does it mean training like an athlete. Some of the forms that helped are about as gentle as exercise gets.

What the Large Reviews Found

In 2023 a team at the University of South Australia pulled together 97 systematic reviews, covering 1,039 trials and 128,119 participants. Across the adults studied, physical activity reduced symptoms of depression, anxiety and psychological distress. Higher-intensity activity had larger effects, and programmes of 12 weeks or less did better than longer ones, so the benefit didn’t take years to appear. The authors noted that the effects compared favourably with those reported for psychotherapy and medication in similar reviews.

Singh, B. et al. (2023). “Effectiveness of physical activity interventions for improving depression, anxiety and distress: an overview of systematic reviews.” British Journal of Sports Medicine, 57(18), 1203-1209.

A review of reviews is only as good as the studies underneath it, and exercise trials have a built-in weakness: you can’t hide from people that they’ve been put in the running group. Still, the direction holds up when you look at other kinds of evidence. A 2018 meta-analysis of 49 cohort studies followed about 267,000 people who weren’t depressed at the start. Those who were more active had about 17% lower odds of developing depression later. That’s observational, and part of the link could run the other way, since people who are becoming depressed may already be moving less. It fits with what the trials show, though.

Schuch, F.B. et al. (2018). “Physical Activity and Incident Depression: A Meta-Analysis of Prospective Cohort Studies.” American Journal of Psychiatry, 175(7), 631-648.

Which Kind, and How Hard

A 2024 analysis in the BMJ compared types of exercise against each other, using 218 randomised trials with about 14,000 participants who had depression. Walking or jogging, yoga, strength training and mixed aerobic exercise all reduced symptoms, and so did dance. More vigorous exercise tended to work better, but even walking helped.

Noetel, M. et al. (2024). “Effect of exercise for depression: systematic review and network meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials.” BMJ, 384, e075847.

In practice, you can choose by what you’ll actually do. If you hate running, nothing in this evidence asks you to run. Yoga, squats and push-ups in the kitchen, a brisk walk to work: each is a version of something that helped in the trials. If you can manage a bit more effort than a stroll, it’s probably worth it. As a rough guide, moderate effort means you can talk but not sing, and vigorous means you can only get a few words out before you need a breath. If neither is possible yet, a stroll is a fair place to begin.

Where Exercise Stops Being Enough

Severe depression needs medical treatment, and exercise can’t stand in for it. If low mood has hung around for more than a couple of weeks, or it’s getting in the way of work, sleep or looking after yourself, see a doctor. Exercise can sit alongside therapy or medication, but if you already take an antidepressant, don’t drop it in favour of exercise without talking to whoever prescribed it. If you’re having thoughts of harming yourself, contact a doctor or emergency services today.

Starting on a Low Day

Low mood makes the first step the hardest part, and waiting until you feel like it can mean waiting a long time. Pick the smallest version you’d still manage on a bad day: a 10-minute walk around the block, or to the shop and back. If you feel like carrying on, carry on. If not, you’ve still been out, and you can do the same tomorrow.

It helps to tie the walk to something that already happens every day, like the end of lunch or the bus stop on the way home, so it isn’t a fresh decision each time. Once it feels routine, add some effort with a hill, a faster stretch or a short jog, since the trials favoured harder work when people could manage it.

A record helps here, because a month of moods is hard to remember accurately. In Lamplit, log the workout when you finish (the type, how long, and whether it was light, moderate or intense), then do the journal’s mood check-in that evening. It’s three taps: how you feel overall, a more specific feeling, and the part of life it’s about. Both are free. After a few weeks you can compare the mood trends in your journal with your workout history and see whether your active days and your better days tend to line up. With Lamplit Max, Genie can make that connection for you.

Log today’s walk in Lamplit, then do a mood check-in tonight.