We all know exercising can have a lot of positive benefits for your health. Now there’s one more to add to the list: preventing depression. A new paper published in the American Journal of Psychiatry found that as little as one hour of exercise each week could help prevent depression.
The study looked at 22,000 healthy Norwegian adults that didn’t have symptoms of anxiety over the course if 11 years.
Adults that said they didn’t exercise at the beginning of the study were 44% more likely to become depressed than those that exercised at least 1 to 2 hours per week. Interestingly, the protective benefits weren’t any greater for people who exercised more than a couple hours (i.e. getting just one hour a week seemed to do the trick).
While the study couldn’t provide a true cause-and-effect relationship between exercise and depression, its authors says that the results suggest that such a link exists.