Dr. Jeffrey Gladden discusses research on exercise and depression across over a thousand studies. Exercise shows an effect size of 0.6 to 0.8 on depression, compared to 0.35 for antidepressants. The catch: you need intense exercise, which is hardest for people with severe depression.
There's tremendous data on exercise and mental health. The meta-analyses have more than 1,000 studies in them sometimes. So I mean, this has been studied a lot. Yeah. We can be pretty certain about what we're saying here. And so for exercise for depression, for example, has a greater effect size. We measure that often in these studies by a Cohen's d statistic. It's usually in the 0.6 to 0.8 range for exercise for depression. Whereas exercise—
what does that mean, 0.6 to 0.8 for the audience? What does that mean?
So that's considered a moderate effect size. Okay. Small effect size is, you know, 0.2 to 0.5. And actually that's where modern antidepressants come in for depression in that 0.35 range. So exercise is significantly more effective than antidepressants. The challenge is it has to be intense exercise and it's very hard to get someone who's very depressed to do intense exercise.
Right.
