benefits of physical activity on mental health

In addition, depression brings about stigma to patients due to misconceptions in the public. At the same time, those with mental disorders are faced with more difficulties to obtain job opportunities in the labor market, forcing them to accept lower wages and thus bear greater financial burdens, which in turn exacerbates depressive disorders ( 5). Studies have shown that depression is strongly associated with lower life satisfaction, poorer overall health and even higher risk of death ( 2– 4). Depression is a typical manifestation of mental disorders, decreasing people's quality of life and working ability. Mental health awareness has taken hold over the recent years and psychiatric health is widely regarded as important as physical health ( 1). Meanwhile, this paper uses different explanatory and explained variables, different statistical models, as well as machine learning and placebo techniques to conduct robustness tests, all of which lend credence to above findings. In addition, the instrumental variable approach is used to identify the causal impact of physical activity, which further proves a significant effect of it based on tackling the endogeneity problem. The health benefits of physical activity seem to be greater for depressed people who have lower income, work in the secondary labor market, and have lower levels of social capital and assets. It is also found that socioeconomic status may play an important moderating role.

Heterogeneity analysis shows that there are no significant gender differences in the health benefits of physical exercise, but its impact tends to be more prominent for depressed individuals who are younger and higher educated, with better health status, and live in urban areas. Therefore, from the perspective of multidimensional subjective wellbeing, evaluative wellbeing, experienced wellbeing and eudaimonic wellbeing all play mediating roles in the reduction of depression's adverse effects. The impact mechanism is that physical activity may decrease the severity of depression, enhance life satisfaction, improve mood, and make people have a better sense of purpose and meaning in life. Empirical results demonstrate that physical exercise could help to alleviate depression's adverse consequences on work and life for depressed individuals. This paper uses a large scale and nationally representative dataset, Chinese General Social Survey, to empirically examine the role of physical activity in reducing the negative effects of depression among people with mental disorders. 2HSBC Business School, Peking University, Shenzhen, China.1Business School, Shandong University, Weihai, China.Chao Li 1 * Guangjie Ning 1 * Yuxin Xia 2 Qianqian Liu 1

Benefits of physical activity on mental health