Physical activity and mental health: the connection between step count and depression, anxiety and quality of sleep

ABSTRACT

While there are studies connecting everyday physical activity (PA) to mental health, they mostly use self-report measures for PA which are biased in multiple ways. Nevertheless, a realistic assessment of everyday PA is important for the development and implementation of low-threshold public health interventions. Therefore, we want to analyze the relationship between objectively measured daily steps and mental health. We included 1451 subjects from a subsample of the population-based LIFE-Adult-Study (2011–2014) with an average age of 55.0 years, 52.1% were female. We analyzed the effects of PA (step count measured via SenseWear Pro 3) on depression (CES-D), anxiety (GAD-7), and quality of sleep (PSQI). The regression analysis showed a significant negative association between low to moderate PA [Incidence rate ratio: 0.87 (0.77; 0.98)] as well as high to very high PA [0.84 (0.74; 0.95)] and depression and no significant associations between PA and anxiety [l-m: 0.98 (0.81; 1.18)/h-vh: 1.00 (0.82; 1.21)] or quality of sleep [l-m: 0.94 (0.84, 1.06)/h-vh: 0.92 (0.82, 1.03)], controlling for sociodemographic variables and personality. Low-threshold interventions that increase daily step count could be a useful approach for the prevention of depression. The use of objective PA measurement for research is highly encouraged.

KEYWORDS:

• Physical activity
• mental health
• depression
• anxiety
• sleep
• objective measures

Acknowledgements and Funding

We thank the research teams and the participants of the LIFE-Adult-Study. LIFE is funded by means of the European Union, by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and by funds of the Free State of Saxony within the framework of the excellence initiative (project numbers 713-241202, 14505/2470, 14575/2470).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Ethics statement

The LIFE-Adult-Study complies with the ethical standards of the relevant national and institutional committees on human experimentation and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2008. The study was approved by the ethics committee of Leipzig University.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.