Michael Easter—author of The Comfort Crisis and Scarcity Brain—published an article on his Two Percent blog yesterday exploring whether exercise is actually effective for improving depression. He had seen that two psychiatrists (one of whom works in emergency care) recently spent a day arguing about it online, and after reading some of the research himself and interviewing a third expert, his honest answer was that it’s messier than either of the first two made it sound.
Three things came out of it.
Exercise does appear to work roughly as well as therapy or medication. That’s a smaller claim than it sounds, though, because none of the three works for everybody. So what the research supports is that exercise can help—but not that it will.
Exercise also isn’t alone in that. Dancing, singing, gardening, time with animals, meditation, gratitude journaling, doing something kind for somebody—all of them come out ahead of doing nothing, which in these studies usually means sitting on a waitlist for treatment.
And then the catch, which came from the psychiatrist who works in emergency care. In the most severe cases of depression, starting and keeping an exercise habit is one of the hardest things you could ask of somebody, because the symptoms themselves are what make it hard. Severity predicts dropping out of exercise studies, so exercise probably isn’t the first thing to reach for in extreme cases.
Easter’s read on all of it was that the common ingredient to improve symptoms isn’t exercise. It’s “doing something.”
I’d already planned to write about movement and mood today. Mine is a different question than his, though—not whether exercise can stand in for treatment, but how little of it turns out to be necessary for the rest of us.
As it happens, he answers my question in his second-to-last paragraph, almost in passing: one hour a week, at any intensity, was associated with a meaningfully lower risk of depression. Then he signs off.
That sentence is where I want to spend the rest of this tip.
I’d guess that most people reading this aren’t being treated for depression. (If you are, keep doing what you’re doing—take what’s below as a possible addition, not a replacement.) Instead, you’re probably mostly fine, with the occasional “down” period after a stressful life event.
So does moving your body help with that?
An hour a week, and intensity doesn’t matter
Turns out that it likely does.
Researchers in Norway followed 33,908 adults for about eleven years—and what makes their research useful is who they left out. Before the study began they screened away anyone already carrying meaningful depression or anxiety symptoms, along with anyone dealing with significant physical illness. Everyone remaining was, by design, doing fine.
Which means that every depression case that turned up over the following decade was a new one.
And what they found was that one hour a week of physical activity—at any intensity—was associated with meaningfully lower odds of developing depression. They also estimated that roughly 12% of the cases they saw could have been avoided if everyone had managed that hour. (They found no relationship with anxiety, so take this as a finding about mood and nothing broader.)
Interestingly, more time didn’t reduce the odds much further. The benefit flattened out around an hour and stayed flat. So whatever the effect is, it doesn’t scale with effort or time—you get most of it near the bottom of the dose range, or you don’t get it at all.
If you find it hard to believe that an hour a week at any intensity could truly have a meaningful impact, it’s also worth looking at the other end of the spectrum. A 2025 review pooled 26 trials of exercise for people with a diagnosis of depression—the harder situation Easter was writing about, not the one I’m describing. Only three of the roughly thirty studies had participants actually meeting the official WHO activity guidelines for both cardio (2.5–5 hours/week) and strength (2+ days/week). But a large magnitude of (beneficial) effect showed up anyway. The review also compared cardio against resistance training directly and found no meaningful difference between them for improving depression.
Everything counts. Some of it counts twice.
That brings us back to Easter’s list of the other things with real evidence behind them: Dancing. Gardening. Getting outside. Singing. Meditation. Time with animals. Gratitude journaling. Doing something kind for somebody.
Though he framed them all as “doing something,” which is certainly true, I’d argue that movement is also disproportionately represented.
Dancing is movement. Gardening is movement. “Getting outside” often (although not always) means doing something active, as does “time with animals” (e.g. walking them, throwing balls). Singing requires more abdominal activation than you probably realize. (Pay special attention as you belt out your favorite Kesha song on your drive home tonight.) And when was the last time that you “did something kind for someone” by sitting on your butt?
My point is that more than half of the list is movement wearing different clothes.
Which I suspect is the actual finding here. A variety of unrelated hobbies don’t each happen to lift your mood. Moving your body lifts your mood, and it doesn’t much care what you call it or whether you’d have thought to describe it as exercise in the first place.
Obviously, purely mental actions (e.g. meditation, gratitude journaling) can also improve mood—and I recommend doing them too.
But as Easter pointed out in his post and I’ll emphasize and underline: movement-based activities are the only part of the list that improves your physical health as well as your mood.
So the thing to remember is that, while everything on the list “counts” as far as mood is concerned, some of it counts twice.
Putting it into practice
The takeaway from Easter’s post was this:
When you’re feeling low, do something. See if it helps. If it doesn’t, try something else.
The suggestion that I’d add is to start with the thing that counts twice (so long as you’re able†). If it’s going to help, you should find out in less than an hour per week—whether that’s done over six 10-minute after-dinner walks, three 20-minute jogs, a single hour-long weight training session, or anything in between.