00:02Norman, we know that being active is generally considered to be good for your mental health,
00:07but there has been a review into activity, mental health, anxiety and depression.
00:12That's right. So, you know, if you talk to people or talk to your GP, they'll say you're depressed,
00:17you'll get out and exercise. Sometimes that's hard because you've got to motivate yourself.
00:20The question is, is it worth it? And an Australian group of researchers has looked at the evidence
00:26to see just how solid is it that exercise can help treat depression and anxiety?
00:32Because what they found was that previous research was a bit affected by the fact
00:37that they hadn't eliminated people from the studies who might have had heart disease
00:43or diabetes or metabolic problems. And when you've got chronic disease,
00:49depression goes along with that. And it could be that the exercise was helping the chronic disease
00:54and that was relieving the depression rather than a direct effect of depression from exercise.
01:00So they got, they looked for studies that got rid of this confusing factor and they found 63 studies
01:07with 80,000 people and they looked at the effect of exercise by itself on these people
01:13and in terms of depression and anxiety separately. And they confirmed that everybody by and large
01:19will benefit from exercise if you've got depression. What they found was, so that was baseline.
01:26Almost any exercise that you do, you get a benefit. What they found was that over and above that,
01:33if you did aerobic exercise, so that's exercise which gets your pulse up and gets you a bit breathless,
01:37that was even more effective. So for top effectiveness, you would go for aerobic exercise
01:44and particular age groups would benefit most. So women after giving birth who are depressed
01:51and younger people between the ages of 18 and 30, they benefited more.
01:56It's not that you don't benefit if you're not in those age groups,
01:59it's just that you got a bigger benefit if you were in those age groups.
02:01So that's good news, the aerobic exercise. And what they found was when they compared these,
02:07this review of the evidence and they brought it all together and they compared it to similar reviews
02:12of the effectiveness of antidepressants and the effectiveness of psychotherapy,
02:16cognitive behavioural therapy, the effect was roughly the same. So you were getting a similar benefit.
02:23It's not that you would replace antidepressants or psychotherapy, it's just that when you add it on,
02:28you're adding on, if you like, an extra treatment effect that you otherwise wouldn't have with very few side effects.
02:34With anxiety, what they found was that the slightly less intense exercise for shorter durations might help anxiety more.
02:43But if you've got depression and anxiety together, which is the common situation,
02:47you're probably better focusing on what benefits your depression and the anxiety will come along with.
02:52Okay, so are there any health benefits of doing nothing?
02:55Well, it's a really interesting question because the evidence suggests that you, it's very hard to do nothing.
03:02You're always doing something. And, but when they've studied doing nothing, what they find, and it's not doing nothing.
03:10So you get into an MRI scanner, which assesses what your brain is doing.
03:15And they might want to see what's it like when you write a poem or do something in the MRI
03:20scanner,
03:21which parts of your brain light up. So in order to actually look at what happens to your brain,
03:25when you're doing something, they've got to find out what's happening to your brain at rest when you're doing nothing.
03:30Mm-hmm.
03:30So they ask you to look at a little cross in the scanner.
03:33That's their, the resting state of the brain.
03:36Now, when they started doing this research, maybe 30 years ago, they assumed that the whole brain would quieten down.
03:42Mm-mm.
03:42The brain lit up.
03:44Is that right?
03:45Of all the internal thoughts.
03:46Exactly.
03:47Mm-mm.
03:48So your mind starts wandering.
03:50Mm-mm.
03:50And mind wand, and when your mind starts, what's happening is it's called the default mode network.
03:56And you get these networks in the brain that light up when you're doing nothing.
04:00And you get crosstalk between parts of the brain that you wouldn't otherwise get.
04:05Mm-mm.
04:05And it's thought to be quite good for retreating memories, laying down memories, and also just organizing your brain and
04:14solving problems.
04:15So it's, it's not mindfulness meditation, because that's, you're actually doing something.
04:19This is when you're just kind of doing nothing.
04:22Chilling.
04:22But don't get worried when your brain fills with stuff, because it might be quite handy.
04:26Okay.
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