Category: Mental Health

Largest study of its kind reveals the best exercise for improving mental health — and how long to do it for.

Team sports have the strongest link to improved mental health, followed by cycling and aerobic and gym exercise.

The largest benefits to mental health were seen in those doing around 45 minutes exercise between three to five times a week, research finds.

However, all types of exercise were linked to better mental health, including doing household chores, lawn-mowing and fishing.

Overall, people who exercised had 18 fewer days of poor mental health per year compared with people doing no exercise.

People who had been depressed in the past felt the greatest benefit from exercise.

The results come from 1.2 million people in the US who reported their activity levels for a month.

They were asked to estimate how many days they thought their mental health was ‘not good’ based on depression, stress or emotional problems.

Most people benefitted from exercise, however, doing too much exercise was linked to worse mental health.

Those who did over 90 minutes a day saw only small improvements in mental health.

Those who did more than 3 hours exercise per day reported worse mental health than those who did none at all.

Dr. Adam Chekroud, who led the study, said:

“Previously, people have believed that the more exercise you do, the better your mental health, but our study suggests that this is not the case.

Doing exercise more than 23 times a month, or exercising for longer than 90 minute sessions is associated with worse mental health.

Our finding that team sports are associated with the lowest mental health burden may indicate that social activities promote resilience and reduce depression by reducing social withdrawal and isolation, giving social sports an edge over other kinds.”

The study also showed that exercise had much bigger benefits to mental health than factors like earning more money or being better educated.

Dr Chekroud continued:

“Exercise is associated with a lower mental health burden across people no matter their age, race, gender, household income and education level.

Excitingly, the specifics of the regime, like the type, duration, and frequency, played an important role in this association.

We are now using this to try and personalise exercise recommendations, and match people with a specific exercise regime that helps improve their mental health.”

The study was published in the journal The Lancet Psychiatry (Chekroud et al., 2018).

The type of writing that can help you control stress.

Writing about past failures reduces the ‘stress hormone’ cortisol, research finds.

It is the first study to find that thinking critically and writing about past failures can reduce stress and improve people’s performance on a new task.

People are often advised to ‘stay positive’ and not think too much about their failures — but this research suggests the advice is misplaced.

Ms Brynne DiMenichi, the study’s lead author, said:

“We didn’t find that writing itself had a direct relationship on the body’s stress responses.

Instead, our results suggest that, in a future stressful situation, having previously written about a past failure causes the body’s stress response to look more similar to someone who isn’t exposed to stress at all.”

For the study, some people wrote about past failures and others about a topic not related to themselves.

It was only those that wrote about past failures that saw the benefits when they were given another difficult task to complete.

People who wrote about past failures made more careful choices and performed better.

Ms DiMenichi said:

“Together, these findings indicate that writing and thinking critically about a past failure can prepare an individual both physiologically and cognitively for new challenges.”

The study’s results could help people use their failures to promote future successes, Ms DiMenichi said:

“It provides anyone who wants to utilize this technique in an educational, sports, or even therapeutic setting with clear-cut evidence of expressive writing’s effectiveness.

However, it is difficult to compare laboratory measures of cognitive performance to performance on say, the Olympic track.

Future research can examine the effect of writing manipulation on actual athletic performance.”

The study was published in the journal Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience (DiMenichi et al., 2018).

Job strain at age 45 predicted mental health problems five years later.

Toxic jobs that have high demands along with low levels of control increase the risk of mental illness, research finds.

The study’s authors estimate that reducing job strain could prevent 14% of new mental health cases from occurring.

Job strain includes two factors:

• High demand: can come from a high work pace, conflicting demands, difficult co-workers, high intensity etc..
• Low levels of control: having little control over how the work is done. An inability to make decisions relevant to the work.

The study analysed 6,870 people in the UK at ages 45 and 50.

They found that job strain at age 45 predicted mental health problems five years later.

Dr Samuel Harvey, the study’s lead author, said:

“The results indicate that if we were able to eliminate job strain situations in the workplace, up to 14 percent of cases of common mental illness could be avoided.

Workplaces can adopt a range of measures to reduce job strain, and finding ways to increase workers’ perceived control of their work is often a good practical first step.

This can be achieved through initiatives that involve workers in as many decisions as possible.”

People need discretion in how they do their jobs along with control over the pace of work and how to deal with conflicting demands — or it can make them ill.

Dr Harvey said:

“These findings serve as a wake-up call for the role workplace initiatives should play in our efforts to curb the rising costs of mental disorders.

It’s important to remember that for most people, being in work is a good thing for their mental health.

But this research provides strong evidence that organisations can improve employee wellbeing by modifying their workplaces to make them more mentally healthy.”

The study was published in the journal The Lancet Psychiatry (Harvey et al., 2018).

Around 3% of people are thought to hear voices when there is no one talking.

People who drink a lot of caffeine — over 7 instant cups of coffee a day — have triple the risk of hallucinating, research finds.

Hallucinations can include hearing voices when no one is talking and seeing things that are not there.

Those who had high caffeine intake were three times more likely to report these experiences, along with sensing the presence of dead people.

The reason could be that caffeine boosts the production of the ‘stress hormone’ cortisol.

Too much cortisol may cause people to hallucinate.

Dr Simon Jones, the study’s first author, said:

“This is a first step towards looking at the wider factors associated with hallucinations.

Previous research has highlighted a number of important factors, such as childhood trauma, which may lead to clinically relevant hallucinations.”

The study asked 200 people about any hallucinatory experiences and their caffeine intake from products like energy drinks, chocolate bars, tea and coffee.

Dr Charles Fernyhough, who co-authored the study, said:

“Our study shows an association between caffeine intake and hallucination-proneness in students.

However, one interpretation may be that those students who were more prone to hallucinations used caffeine to help cope with their experiences.”

Dr Jones said:

“Hallucinations are not necessarily a sign of mental illness.

Most people will have had brief experiences of hearing voices when there is no one there, and around three per cent of people regularly hear such voices.

Many of these people cope well with this and live normal lives.

There are, however, a number of organisations, such as the Hearing Voices Network, who can offer support and advice to those distressed by these experiences.”

The study was published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences (Jones & Fernyhough, 2008).