Sport Helps with Depression

Almost everyone knows the feeling. After an endurance run, a few laps of swimming or a bike ride, you feel relaxed, refreshed and happy. The good feeling of having done something for yourself and your body quickly makes strains forgotten. Endurance sports can also have a positive effect on depression. What sports can do for depression, you can learn here.

Feeling happy through sports

Not only after, but also already during training, athletes often experience a feeling of happiness. After all, lots of endorphins are released during sports, which quickly blow away cloudy thoughts. In many clinics, sports and exercise are therefore already a fixed part of the therapy plan for depression.

What types of sports are suitable for depression?

Especially regular running, swimming or cycling can often help patients. Team sports also strengthen through the sense of community and the sense of achievement. In addition, doing sports in a group or with a training partner increases the likelihood of sticking with it.

However, competitive sports are more likely to be discouraged because they quickly convey a sense of failure, which is much worse for depressed people than for healthy ones.

Positive effects of sports

As with all people, exercise promotes endurance, agility, coordination, concentration, body awareness and, especially in group settings, self-confidence and social skills in mentally ill people.

In addition, exercise helps,

  • Reduce anger and aggression
  • Distract from negative perceptions and sensations
  • Reveal to patients that they can cope with situations

An important factor is also the firm structure that regular training brings to the daily lives of patients, which is often characterized by listlessness and withdrawal into their own homes.

Sport as a help for mild depression

In the listlessness of depressed people lies at the same time but also the problem. Severely depressed people can hardly get up in the morning to get out of bed and brush their teeth. It takes more courage to lace up their sports shoes and go out into the open air and meet people.

For severely depressed patients or those who have never done any sports, exercise therapy is therefore less advisable. They would probably only torture themselves unnecessarily and end up having further experiences of failure when they once again could not bring themselves to exercise.

For people with mild to moderate depression, however, regular exercise offers a great opportunity and can even prevent them from slipping into severe depression. The feeling of being active against the illness is certainly more inspiring than taking medication or long sessions with a psychotherapist. Also, the positive feedback, both from the body itself and from the environment, which will come through regular training, helps in the way out of depression.

Set realistic goals

In any case, before a patient begins exercising, he or she should consult with his or her physician and have a health and stress check done. A gentle start to training with realistic goals is then essential – nothing would be worse now than feeling like a failure if you run out of breath during a planned ten-kilometer run.

However, if you don’t take on too much at the beginning, but already count putting on your training clothes as a success, you’re certainly on the right track.

Conclusion: this is how sport helps with depression

Clearly proven the concrete effect of sport on depression is not. However, numerous studies have since documented the impressive results. In some cases, sport was even more successful than therapy with medication, although one therapy does not exclude the other.

In any case, sport brings routine and structure to the patient’s daily routine; it provides support, security and the good feeling of having achieved something. It helps to forget negative thoughts and to lose fears. If goals are set realistically, small feelings of success quickly arise, which not only boost the mood, but also self-confidence.