Exercise actually moves the mental health needle
If you want to improve your mood, go for a walk — because it can truly work — and maybe pass on the single-session interventions (“condensed CBT + more”) featured in my last post.
Exercise for depression and anxiety just got a resounding endorsement from an unusually large new meta-meta-analysis — yes, that’s two metas, meta2. I don’t normally write about pure psychology, but this study is truly huge, big enough to swerve out of my lane for.
It’s also informative to compare those exercise results from Munro et al. to the SSI results reported by Ziadni et al., which were distinctly underwhelming — and, by the way, about the same as what people get from bog-standard cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). Small but significant benefits, the authors said. Standardized mean differences in the 0.25–0.37 range. Fine. Technically real, as reported. Not exactly a revolution. Not even if you believe them.
And then along comes Munro et al., covering 81 meta-analyses of over 1,000 component studies, with nearly 80K participants, all examining exercise for depression and anxiety. The effect sizes? SMD was 0.61 for depression and 0.47 for anxiety.
Quite a bit more than for SSI. And that is what I am always hoping to see in an effect size. Not necessarily huge, but … respectable.
For reference, 0.2 is considered “small,” 0.5 is “medium,” and 0.8 is “large.”
Different populations; not a head-to-head comparison. SMD = standardized mean difference.
This is a casual apples-to-pears comparison I’m making between these studies: Munro was about exercise for people without diseases, while SSI had the handicap of focusing on people in chronic pain, who often struggle with exercise. A direct comparison might narrow the gap. Or … not? Because exercise for anxiety can work just as well for people with pain: SMD .63! Exercise for depression with pain is a different story: it didn’t work nearly so well, just .21 (much like SSI). See Amiri.
Exercise can truly affect psychological states, regardless of whether there is also pain involved (high confidence) … but SSI barely does so in people with pain (and quite possibility not even that, because the data is so much weaker and fishier). If your mind and mood are relevant to your pain at all, you should certainly be taking exercise more seriously than SSI/CBT. And that’s without even considering the other general health benefits of exercise.
I’ve collected a bunch of other highlights from Munro et al. for the PainSci bibliography.