Movement is Medicine: Depression

Before taking antidepressants, consider exercise.

Humans were built to move. We are designed to be in motion. Yet we have created a world in which we do not need to move at all. And so we are making ourselves sick. Having freed up time, we use that time to scroll, to sit, to spectate—while the very mechanisms that support our emotional and cognitive wellbeing are quietly starved.

Eric Pickersgill photoshopped away the smartphones and digital devices from his portraits of everyday life.

A body that barely moves. Days spent behind glass, eyes fixed on a glowing screen. A world designed for stillness, yet wired for motion. It's a mismatch—between how we've built our lives and what it means to be a living, breathing human being. And in this mismatch, something essential is breaking down.

And yet, instead of addressing that mismatch, we treat depression as if it were a magical illness—something that appears out of nowhere, untethered from the rhythms and routines of everyday life. It's easier to sell us pills than to challenge the systems that keep us still. It's easier to medicalise the symptom than to question the lifestyle that causes it. We’ve built a healthcare model that responds to depression with medication before ever asking: how are you living? Are you moving? Are you connected to the things that make you feel human?

We talk about depression like it’s a personal failing. Or a purely chemical imbalance. Something to be medicated, fixed, managed. But what if it’s also a message? A protest from the body, saying: this isn’t working.

What if part of what we call depression is what happens when a body built to move no longer moves at all?

What the Science says

A 2023 meta-analysis in Nature Mental Health evaluated over 1,000 randomized controlled trials and found that physical activity is highly effective at reducing symptoms of depression—with large effect sizes, especially for people with mild to moderate depression. The study concluded that movement should be considered a primary intervention, not just an add-on.

The BMJ echoed this, reporting that aerobic and resistance training had positive impacts on depressive symptoms, rivaling medication and therapy. These effects are not minor—they are measurable, lasting, and grounded in rigorous evidence.

The NHS, Harvard Medical School, and Mayo Clinic all advocate exercise as a frontline tool for managing depression. This isn’t speculative. It’s one of the most well-supported findings in mental health science.

The Brain & Movement

Exercise stimulates the production of serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine—neurotransmitters implicated in mood regulation and targeted by many antidepressants. But unlike medication, movement also increases brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which supports neurogenesis and synaptic plasticity—your brain’s ability to rewire itself.

In plain terms: movement doesn’t just make you feel better—it helps your brain function better. It supports executive function, working memory, emotional regulation, and stress response systems.

Philosophically, this aligns with embodied cognition—the idea that our mind is not separate from the body, but inseparable from it. The body is not just a vessel for the mind. It is the mind, in motion.

The Real Risk: Sedentary Life Depresses Us

Modern life has systematically removed movement from our daily routines. The body, which evolved to walk, lift, carry, stretch, run—now mostly sits. And sits. And sits.

A sedentary lifestyle is not just a physical risk—it’s a psychological one. Inactivity correlates with increased risk of depression, anxiety, cognitive decline, and even suicide. The longer we stay still, the more our neural networks atrophy. The brain needs stimulation to stay alive—and motion is a primary source of that stimulation.

Heidegger once said that we are not beings who have a world—we are beings for whom a world appears. That world shrinks when we do not move through it. And that shrinking, existentially, can feel like despair.

It's more than fitness

This isn’t about becoming a gym person. It’s not about weight loss or hitting personal records.

It’s about reconnecting with the evolutionary truth that you were built to move. And that movement is a mode of knowing, of feeling, of reclaiming the agency depression so often erodes.

Philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued that perception is not a mental act imposed on a body—it’s a bodily engagement with the world. Movement is perception. When you begin to move again, the world itself often becomes more visible, more available.

Gardening. Walking. Dancing in your kitchen. These are not trivial acts. They are deeply human ones.

What If the Answer Isn’t Just in Your Head?

If you're feeling low, flat, or disconnected—maybe the first question isn’t “what’s wrong with me?” Maybe it’s “what have I stopped moving through?” Your brain is not disconnected from your body, it is a part of your body and influences your body

Your brain isn’t failing. It’s responding to an environment that no longer asks for the kinds of engagement it evolved to expect. The cure may not be found solely in cognitive reflection or pharmacological balancing—but in simple, consistent acts of embodiment.

This isn’t a miracle cure. Depression is complex. But movement is one of the few interventions that speaks to every layer of it: biological, psychological, existential.

When you move, your world begins to move too.

And maybe that’s where healing begins—not in fixing yourself, but in remembering what you were built for. You don’t have to run a marathon. Just move. In any way you can. With whatever energy you have. Not to change your body. But to come home to it.