Take the plunge to lift the mood

From yoghurt to yoga, there are healthy ways to alleviate anxiety and depression.

Taking the plunge outdoors in cold water has been shown as an effective way to reduce depression.

We battle with the weight of expectation and pressure to meet high standards at work, school and in our social lives. It’s taking its toll.

About three million Australians live with depression or anxiety, according to Beyond Blue. And what has been described as “a serious and worsening crisis” by the Association of Child Psychotherapists has meant a sharp rise in young people suffering anxiety and depression.

However, two new and large studies show changes in diet can bring dramatic improvements in depression and mental wellbeing, and other research has found evidence for how exercise can improve mood. Here are some of the simplest ways to adapt your lifestyle to improve your wellbeing.

Pick up your walking pace

Your walking gait is influenced by your fitness, your range of motion and, more surprisingly, your mental health. Walk slowly and with shorter steps, and it could be a risk factor for depression. This is particularly true as you get older, as Robert Briggs, a researcher on the Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing at Trinity College Dublin, reports this month in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. Briggs says his study “raises the possibility that exercise programs aimed at improving walking speed and balance may help in prevention of depression in later life”.

Lift weights twice a week

Determined mature man exercising with barbell in a health club.

Hitting the runner’s high or going for a long walk isn’t the only way to boost your mood through exercise. Studies suggest that resistance training can be as effective, provided you do it regularly.

Last year a team of researchers from the University of Limerick reported how lifting weights can reduce the onset and duration of depression. In a meta-analysis of 33 studies, published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, Brett Gordon and his team found it didn’t seem to matter how often people went to the gym to lift weights or how heavy the weights were — twice weekly was as effective as five times a week — but that, like other forms of exercise, it probably changed levels of neurochemicals in the brain that influence mood.

Eat one more portion of fruit or veg a day

If you don’t manage to get your seven a day every day, then eating just one extra portion of fruit and vegetables could have an equivalent effect on mental wellbeing as about eight extra days of walking a month.

That was the conclusion of researchers from the University of Leeds who, with scientists from the University of York, analysed data about the diet and mood of more than 40,000 people for a paper published online this month in the journal Social Science & Medicine.

“People who do eat more fruit and vegetables report a higher level of mental wellbeing and life satisfaction than those who eat less,” says Neel Ocean of the University of Leeds, a co-author of the study.

Swim outdoors

Michael Tipton from the University of Portsmouth’s department of sport and exercise science says swimming outdoors in cold water might be an effective treatment for depression.

It comes down to biological mechanisms that control how our bodies react physically and hormonally to cold water. Initially, blood pressure, heart rate and levels of stress hormones increase when we jump in a lake or river — which won’t help your mood. But start slowly with three-minute swims, and these adverse responses diminish as you acclimatise to it.

If you do several short swims, your cold-shock response will change. According to a study published last year in BMJ Case Reports by Tipton and his team, for one 24-year-old woman a program of weekly open cold-water swimming led to “an immediate improvement in mood after each swim and a sustained and gradual reduction in symptoms of depression and consequently a reduction in, and then cessation of, medication”. A year later she was no longer taking antidepressants.

Practise Kundalini yoga

The model Cara Delevingne is among those who claim yoga has helped fight against depression.

There’s evidence one particular type, Kundalini — a yoga form that involves breathing exercises and meditation as well as traditional poses — can help ward off feelings of melancholy. When psychiatrists at the University of California recruited 29 middle-aged and older adults, all of whom suffered anxiety and low mood, and asked them either to embark on a commercial brain-training program or to learn Kundalini for a 2016 study, they found the ancient art form greatly improved their mood.

The volunteers did a Kundalini class for an hour a week and were taught a meditation, Kirtan Kriya, that involves chanting a mantra, which they did for 15 minutes daily. The other group did a weekly 60-minute brain-training session and practised brain-training exercises for 15 minutes a day.

After 12 weeks, results in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease showed the yoga group experienced big improvements in their moods and scored lower on an assessment of potential depression.

Eat yoghurt every day

Increasingly, scientists are interested in what they call the gut-brain axis, the link between our microbiome — the ecosystem of bacteria and yeasts inside our gut — and our mental health.

Eating a diet that promotes a healthy gut flora, they suspect, can have a big impact on mood and cognitive function. And a simple way to enhance gut bacteria could be to eat plain live yoghurt, which contains lactobacillus, a probiotic bacteria that has been linked to improved mood.

A team from the department of neuroscience and brain imaging at the University of Virginia School of Medicine found that when laboratory mice were subjected to stress, levels of lactobacillus in their guts diminished. And, in turn, that coincided with a rise in depressive symptoms. Conversely, feeding the mice strains of the probiotic with their daily food helped to restore their mood.

“A single strain of lactobacillus is able to influence mood,” says the lead author, Alban Gaultier, although he adds that people with depression should not cease taking their medication even if ­yoghurt does help.

Meditate before you run

Shot of a handsome young man practicing yoga in the living room at home

Fusing the benefits of meditation with your regular workout can prepare the brain in a way that maximises the benefits for your mood much more than if you were to do either activity on its own. It certainly works for runners and cyclists who take time to meditate before hitting the pavement or trails, as a team from Rutgers University discovered. They asked 52 men and women, 22 of whom had been diagnosed with depression, to learn a basic meditation technique known as “focused attention”, in which they sat quietly and counted their deep breaths, trying not to let their minds wander.

Twice a week for eight weeks the volunteers did this for 20 minutes before completing 10 minutes of walking meditation (focusing on their strides and gait) and then performing a 30-minute jog or cycle on indoor equipment.

By the end of the trial, published in Translational Psychiatry, the subjects with diagnosed depression reported a 40 per cent reduction in symptoms and said they were much less inclined to linger on mood-draining thoughts. Interestingly, even those who had no depression at the start of the study reported a mood boost by the end of the program.

Cut out chips and ditch the junk food

Processed food — the chips, the ready meals, the biscuits — has to go if you want your mood to improve long term.

In a study of almost 46,000 people published this month in Psychosomatic Medicine, Joseph Firth, an honorary research fellow at the University of Manchester and a research fellow at Western Sydney University, showed that the more nutrient-packed your diet, the better. No single diet was better than another at boosting mood, but Firth says: “Cutting out refined, sugary and fast foods appears to be sufficient for avoiding the potentially negative psychological effects of a ‘junk food’ diet.”

Eat salmon, mackerel and mussels

Getting enough of the omega 3 fatty acids eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) can help to protect against depression and low mood.

But it seems that eating seafood — oily fish in particular — rather than popping a supplement holds the most benefit. Last year Dutch researchers published findings (in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology) that found blood levels of DHA and EPA, known to improve levels of brain chemicals associated with positive mood, to be “lower in people with a current depressive disorder”.

And the high levels of oily fish consumed in the Mediterranean diet are part of the reason it has a mood-boosting effect.

Researchers from University College London analysed data from 41 food studies and found “compelling evidence” that the foods we eat can lower the risk of depression, and their findings, published in Molecular Psychiatry last year, showed that the Mediterranean-style diet containing fish, fruit, vegetables, beans and wholegrains was the best approach.

Get six to eight hours of sleep every night

Too little — or too much — sleep can place you at a higher risk of developing depression, with several studies showing that at least six hours a night, but preferably seven to eight hours, is optimal for good mental health.

Changing your sleep patterns and getting to bed earlier might also help in the long term. A 2018 paper in The Journal of Psychiatric Research, based on a study involving 32,740 middle-aged women, found those who labelled themselves “morning people” were 12 per cent less likely to develop depression, and self-professed “night owls” were 6 per cent more likely to develop it.

Download a mind app

Too much time spent using technology is often blamed for triggering low mood, and yet, used wisely in the form of downloading digital therapy apps, it can help to alleviate it.

Two years ago an Australian study showed a range of mindfulness apps — including Mood Hacker, Prism and Headspace — helped to improve symptoms of depression, and last week researchers from the City University of New York revealed that a brain-training app helped to alleviate symptoms of depression.

In their study involving 46 young adults with mild to moderate depressive symptoms — loss of interest, concentration and energy, and difficulty sleeping — those who used the Peak brain-training app on their phones five days a week for eight weeks showed significant improvements in self and clinician-rated depressive symptoms.

Joel Sneed, a clinical psychologist and the lead researcher on the study, admits that before it started he was “quite sceptical” that an app could be beneficial. “However, our research indicated that computerised cognitive training is associated with improved mood, cognition and everyday functioning,” he says.

The Times