Why even a little bit of exercise can go a long way to helping your mental health

During the pandemic, Nikola Sowry made a decision that helped her become happier and healthier.

After feeling challenged and disconnected during recurring lockdowns, the 29-year-old decided to try out a community football team in Melbourne’s inner suburbs. 

“Finding footy and this club genuinely changed my life,” she said.

Before football, Nikola struggled to find exercise that suited her.

Nikola at pre-season training with the South Melbourne Districts Football Club. (ABC News: Kate Ashton)

While she never had a diagnosed mental health condition, she credits the South Melbourne Districts team with transforming her physical and mental health.

“I’m just such a happier, healthy version of myself by being here,” she said.

What Nikola experienced is backed by research. 

The link between mental health and physical activity is strong enough that studies are showing exercise can be used on its own as a treatment for mild to moderate depression or anxiety. 

A woman in a red footy jumper handballs a yellow football.

Nikola says she always leaves footy training with a better mindset. (ABC News: Kate Ashton)

Physical activity has also been shown to prevent the onset of common mental health conditions in the first place.

With the latest figures pointing to declining mental wellbeing and an alarming rise in mental illness, particularly among younger Australians, experts say increasing the use of exercise for mental health should be part of the solution.

Exercise can change the brain, researchers say

Last year, a group of Australian researchers published a review summarising what we know about the effects of physical activity on symptoms of depression, anxiety and mental distress in adults.

The scope of the study was large, and looked at previous reviews that captured the results of more than 1,000 trials involving 128,000 participants. It was peer-reviewed and published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

“What we found was that basically any type of exercise is effective for improving our mental health,” said University of South Australia researcher Ben Singh.

A bearded man in a blue collared shirt sits on a park bench, with a serious expression.

Ben Singh says there’s strong evidence for using physical activity to improve and treat mental health conditions. (ABC News: Brant Cumming)

The review found that using physical activity to treat mild to moderate depression and anxiety was more effective than conventional treatments like therapy.

“And on average, we found that it was about 1.5 times more effective than medications,” Dr Singh said.

Exercise has also been shown to prevent the onset of mental disorders like depression. 

“There is a lot of strong evidence to show that people who are regularly active over a long period of time have a lower rate of being diagnosed with a mental health condition,” Dr Singh said.

Female footballer players high five each other on an oval at training

The social element of exercise is believed to help protect against anxiety and depression. 

Part of this is due to the sense of community and achievement physical activity can provide, the research suggests.

Exercise has also been shown to trigger structural and biological effects on the brain.

While there’s still more to learn, exercise has been proven to help reduce brain inflammation, promote the growth of neurons and trigger the release of mood-boosting chemical messengers like serotonin.

And even a small amount of physical activity can help. 

From tai chi to swimming, all exercise can bring benefits

Dr Singh and his co-authors found all kinds of physical activity could help relieve the symptoms of depression and anxiety, or distress.

That included cardio such as walking, cycling, swimming, running or playing a team sport. 

A group of walkers walk up a dirt hill during a parkrun event.

Even low-intensity exercise like walking can improve mental wellbeing. (Supplied: parkrun)

Strength and resistance training was found to have the biggest impact on symptoms of depression.

Mind-body exercises like tai chi and yoga were most effective at reducing anxiety and were shown to help with symptoms of depression too, the study found.

Dr Singh said it was important people chose the type of exercise that suited them. 

In general, the review found the more vigorous the exercise was, the bigger the improvement in mental wellbeing.

“But what was important is we found that also low-intensity exercise — so just getting outdoors for a leisurely stroll — is still extremely beneficial,” he said.

A checklist graphic for the use of exercise for mental health concerns. 

Key advice on how to use exercise for mental health concerns. (ABC News: Magie Khameneh)

The national physical activity guidelines recommend adults aged 18 to 64 should aim to be active on most days, if not every day. The advice is to aim for 2.5 to 5 hours of moderate intensity physical activity and between 1.25 and 2.5 hours of vigorous physical activity a week.

For some people, that might sound like a lot.

But Dr Singh’s research found even those doing less than 2.5 hours of physical activity per week experienced mental health benefits.

A young woman wearing a red footy jumpy braces herself to take a mark.

Nikola had never played Aussie Rules before joining a community footy team. (ABC News: Kate Ashton)

Exercise should be used more often for mental health conditions, researcher says

Jodie Sheehy, a PhD candidate with Melbourne’s Victoria University, thinks exercise should be used more often to treat mental health conditions and promote mental wellbeing. 

Her current project is investigating how to encourage general practitioners to prescribe exercise specifically for mental health concerns.

“There’s actually been a number of studies that look at GPs prescribing physical activity for mental health, and they really don’t,” she said.

A curly-haired woman wearing a blank singlet sits in a gym, surrounded by weights.

Jodie Sheehy says more Australians could benefit from using exercise to address mental health concerns. (ABC News: Darryl Torpy)

“Some recommend it, but they seldom prescribe it.”

She said using physical exercise to treat mental health concerns was not a big part of the GP training curriculum, despite the fact most people saw their doctor more than any other mental health professional.

“What I would like to see happen is for there to be something specific, so that a GP can actually prescribe the exercise — the type, the dose and the frequency,” she said.

Challenges for using exercise in mental health treatment

Caroline Johnson is a Melbourne GP who delivers mental health training to doctors wanting to become general practitioners. 

The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners said exercise was included in medical school curriculum on mental health. The college also produces resources for GPs on this topic.

Dr Johnson admitted it was a small mention in a “jam-packed” curriculum. 

“But most GPs know that exercise is good for depression. It’s more about how do you deliver that message to the person in a way that will actually help them engage with it,” she said.

An older woman wearing a red top and glasses is pictured  in her GP consulting room. She is smiling.

Caroline Johnson says a GP can help a patient consider what type of exercise might work for them. (ABC News: Darryl Torpy)

She said the more pressing issue was whether patients had the time, money or ability to actually do it.

“Depression really does affect your sense of self — you lose motivation, you lose interest in doing things and sometimes you even lose a belief that you’re worth working on,” Dr Johnson said.

She said it was easy to portray exercise as free and easy, but that was certainly not the case for people of different abilities or those who were time-poor. 

“If you’ve got low income, or you’re not in an urban environment where walking is easy to do, where there’s not parklands, those kinds of things, then that’s a much harder thing for you to change,” she said.

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RFK Jr. And Elon Musk: Two Great Dicks That Taste Like Sh*t!

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sure has come a long way from 2014, when he angered fossil fuel lobbyists by saying that climate change deniers should be jailed. Or maybe not such a long way; by 2005 he was already spreading the anti-vax gospel and falsely claiming that childhood vaccines cause autism. And now he’s running for president and everyone is reminding you what a complete freakass whackaloon he is.

We’ll do our part. Hey, remember that long-ago time in 2022 when he said, of COVID vaccine mandates, that at least in Nazi Germany “you could cross the Alps into Switzerland, you could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.”

Kennedy did his part to help out that educational endeavor Monday night by sitting down with chief Twitter troll Elon Musk, who seems to love conspiratorial bullshit nearly as much as Kennedy does. He started out by thanking Musk for ending all the terrible “censorship” on the platform — by making it a free-for all for COVID and vaccine disinformation, not to mention for Nazis, far-Right conspiracy theories, and rampant hatred of transgender people, but also by actually censoring people on behalf of authoritarian governments. Kennedy also explained that in 2021, “the government pressured Mark Zuckerberg” to ban him from Instagram, although now his account has been restored because he’s running for president. Talk about ineffective censorship!


Rolling Stone reports that for the first 40 minutes of the Twitter Spaces chat, Kennedy barely talked about his candidacy, because he and Musk were too busy telling each other how much they admired each other for being courageous and shit, which is honestly what free speech is for.

At one point, Kennedy asked where Musk got the courage to be like one of America’s Founders by being “willing to take this huge, massive, unspeakable economic hit on behalf of a principle for a country in which you weren’t even born?” Musk, who does kind of have US citizenship after all, replied, “I should say I do very much consider myself an American.” Musk also acknowledged that advertisers had deserted the platform because he was so very committed to democracy, at least for people who think he’s cool, so it’s been “frankly a struggle to break even” (he is not breaking even) and then everyone with an $8 blue checkmark felt very warm that they had done their part to save America and/or Twitter.

After they both agreed that free speech is the very best, and that they both really love free speech the most, Kennedy bemoaned the sad fact that “we’re no longer living in a democratic system,” because Big Pharma controls the government and silences brave advocates of medical disinformation, which would explain why we only hear from anti-vaxxers everywhere on social media but not yet in (most) doctors’ offices.

Among other great trolls, Musk and Kennedy were joined by Tulsi Gabbard and Michael Shellenberger, author of books about how environmentalism is bad for everyone and global warming is happening but is honestly no big deal, yeesh, calm down. UPDATE/CORRECTION: I initially had a brain fart and confused Shellenberger with a different “contrarian” dipshit, Alex Berenson, formerly of the New York Times. Wonkette regrets the error.

Kennedy and Musk agreed that America shouldn’t be supporting the Ukrainian government, since as Kennedy put it, the Ukrainian people are “almost equally” victimized by America as by Russians. Musk added that the war was kind of our fault anyway, since “We are sending the flower of Ukrainian youth and Russian youth to die in the trenches, and it’s morally reprehensible,” and when you think about it, we probably shouldn’t be ordering Russia’s youth flowers around like that, how would we like it huh?

The conversation got even more sane when Gabbard added that

the U.S. had turned Ukraine into a “slaughterhouse” and blamed the conflict on an “elitist cabal of war-mongers” who had seized control of the Democratic Party.

Those war-mongers, Kennedy warned, hadn’t just taken control of the Democratic party: They were in control of the Deep State as well.

He recalled being told by Donald Trump’s former CIA Director Mike Pompeo that the “top layer of that agency is made up almost entirely of people who do not believe in the American institutions of democracy,” which is pretty rich coming from a top guy in the Trump administration.

Kennedy also said he opposed an assault weapons ban, because the Second Amendment is pretty awesome, and anyway, the problem isn’t guns, it’s antidepressant meds, which turn people into mass shooters, explaining that

“prior to the introduction of Prozac, we had almost none of these events in our country. […] The one thing that we have, it’s different than anybody in the world, is the amount of psychiatric drugs our children are taking.” He then alleged that the National Institutes of Health won’t research the supposed link between these drugs and shootings “because they’re working with the pharmaceutical industry.”

It’s pretty convincing until you remember that antidepressants are prescribed worldwide, but in countries where there aren’t more guns than people, there aren’t a bunch of school shootings. Also, maybe someone could have pointed out that only about a quarter of mass shooters use antidepressants, while 100 percent of them use firearms, albeit not usually with a doctor’s prescription.

Along the way, Kennedy also insisted that COVID was a “bioweapon,” lied that after the passage of the Affordable Care Act the “Democrats were getting more money from pharma than Republicans” (it’s the other way around, according to STAT News, but then STAT News believes vaccines work), and promised to go to the US-Mexico border to “try to formulate policies that will seal the border permanently,” so he really sounds like the mainstream Democrat that everyone on the far Right has been looking for, the end and OPEN THREAD.

[Rolling Stone / Insider / NYT]

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Millions of people are prescribed antidepressants for chronic pain. Do they work? | CNN

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CNN
 — 

Around one-third of people globally live with chronic pain — pain experienced for more than three months — and millions of people are prescribed antidepressants to relieve the condition.

However, a new review of prior research published Tuesday has found that most antidepressants used to relieve chronic pain are being prescribed without sufficient reliable evidence of their effectiveness. What’s more, potential harms haven’t been well studied.

A two-year study by the nonprofit group Cochrane found that only one antidepressant, duloxetine, was effective for short-term pain relief based on the available evidence. Cochrane is an international collaboration of researchers that produces the Cochrane Library, which includes a database of systematic summaries addressing key questions in health care.

Sold under the brand names Irenka and Cymbalta, duloxetine is a serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor, or SNRI, and also boosts levels of the feel-good neurochemical dopamine.

“This is a global public health concern,” said lead author Tamar Pincus, a professor and chronic pain researcher at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom.

“Chronic pain is a problem for millions who are prescribed antidepressants without sufficient scientific proof they help, nor an understanding of the long-term impact on health.”

The review included 176 studies with a total of 28,664 participants and looked at 25 different antidepressants. The studies mainly investigated three types of chronic pain: fibromyalgia, nerve pain and musculoskeletal pain.

The average length of the study was 10 weeks, and the studies were randomized controlled trials — regarded as the gold standard in medical research. Seventy-two of the studies were funded by pharmaceutical companies.

The most commonly prescribed antidepressant for chronic pain globally was amitriptyline, the study said. Sold in the United States under the brand names Elavil and Vanatrip, the antidepressant was approved in 1961 by the US Food and Drug Administration to treat depression in adults. The medication has significant side effects, so it is not commonly used for depression, but is prescribed to treat migraines and chronic pain such as diabetic neuropathy.

However, the authors found most of the studies on amitriptyline’s effectiveness were small and the evidence was not reliable.

Milnacipran, which is approved by the FDA for fibromyalgia, was also effective at reducing pain, the review found, but the scientists were not as confident about this drug compared with duloxetine due to limited studies with few people.

Anyone taking antidepressants for chronic pain relief should speak to their doctor before stopping their medication due to concerns over the new report, the authors stressed.

Antidepressants are thought to help with pain because the bodily systems that regulate mood and pain overlap, explained Ryan Patel, a research fellow studying chronic pain at the Wolfson Centre for Age-Related Diseases at King’s College London.

He said the key question for researchers to answer was not whether antidepressant drugs were effective for treating pain but “for whom are antidepressants effective?”

“Even when the cause of chronic pain is the same, the biological changes that occur in the nervous system are varied and so it is no surprise that pain presents differently from person to person, and not everyone will respond to the same drugs,” said Patel, who wasn’t involved in the review.

“What this comprehensive analysis demonstrates is that when clinical trials are designed poorly under the assumption that everyone’s experience of pain is uniform, most antidepressants appear to have limited use for treating chronic pain,” Patel added in a statement.

Even for the antidepressant duloxetine, there was no research looking at long-term use of the drug, the review found.

“Though we did find that duloxetine provided short-term pain relief for patients we studied, we remain concerned about its possible long-term harm due to the gaps in current evidence,” Pincus said.

The report said future research should address any unwanted effects of using antidepressants for chronic pain, noting that the existing data on this was “poor.”

“It (duloxetine) does look really good at the moment for short term pain relief, but I want to emphasize that patients aren’t prescribed duloxetine or any antidepressant for three weeks, four weeks, six weeks, they’re prescribed it for six months. So it’s really shocking that we don’t have any evidence for long term use of even duloxetine,” Pincus said.

Dr. Cathy Stannard, the clinical lead for the UK National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guideline for chronic pain, and a pain specialist for NHS Gloucestershire’s Integrated Care Board in the UK, said that it was important to emphasize the social and psychological influences on how people experience pain and the importance of a patient’s relationship with their doctor.

“There is good evidence that for people with pain, compassionate and consistent relationships with clinicians remain the foundations of successful care,” Stannard, who wasn’t involved in the research, said in a statement.

“Research shows that what people want most is a strong, empathic relationship with their care provider. They want time to discuss what matters to them and they want easy access to support and to be partners in their care.”

Non-pharmaceutical interventions, such as support with mobility, debt management, trauma and social isolation, were also likely to help people living with pain, she added.

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