Mowing the lawn and raking leaves improve your mental health, but only by a bit, according to a massive study published in the British medical journal The Lancet. Lawn mowing, raking and other common household chores increase mental health by about 12 percent, according to the study titled “Association Between Physical Exercise and Mental Health in 1.2 million Individuals in the USA Between 2011 and 2015: a Cross-Sectional Study.” But for big leaps in mental health, the study suggests, stash the lawn mower and use your weekends on team sports. That’s because activities such as baseball, basketball, volleyball and badminton beat lawn mowing hands down, boosting people’s mental health about twice as much. “It’s clear that exercise has a number of health benefits and it’s pretty clear exercise has benefits for mental health,” one of the study’s co-authors, Dr. Adam Chekroud of Yale University’s Department of Psychiatry, told Lancet editor Niall Boyce. How the study was doneThe study was a massive one, incorporating self-reported data of 1.2 million Americans. The raw data came from a trio of surveys conducted in 2011, 2013 and 2015. The surveys were conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and included separate questions about mental health and exercise. Survey respondents told researchers whether they had ever been diagnosed for depression and whether they had suffered depression, stress or emotional problems in the past 30 days. They also volunteered information about their exercise habits — what they did to get their hearts pumping, and how often. The researchers from Yale and Oxford universities then compared the mental health of those who exercise against those who don’t. Mental health, exercise linkedThey found a large correspondence between good mental health and exercise. “The results were pretty interesting,” Chekroud said. “The most heartwarming result was even walking was associated with a reduction in mental health burden.” Different exercises offer different mental health boosts, the research found. Survey respondents named their favorite form of exercise. In all, they listed 75 different activities, highly strenuous to barely off the couch. The researchers consolidated the exercises into groups and measured the blues-fighting power of each. At the top tier were popular sports, mostly team activities, but also including two-person sports such as tennis and handball. The popular sports participants saw their mental health boosted by 22.3 percent. Cycling was a close second, at 21.6 percent. The bottom tier was the household activities category, which included lawn mowing, raking, gardening, carpentry, painting, child care, snow blowing vacuuming and dusting. The household activities boosted mental health by 11.8 percent. More exercise does not mean better mental healthAmong the study’s other findings:
Lawn mowing was already known to increase physical health. A study by Harvard University Medical School looked at the number of calories burned in common activities, including lawn mowing. A 155-pound person pushing a motorless reel mower burns 223 calories an hour. That’s slightly more than an hour of disco dancing (205 calories), slightly less than race walking (242). Now we can add mental health to lawn mowing’s benefits. The post Lawn mowing improves mental health, a bit appeared first on Lawnstarter. from https://www.lawnstarter.com/blog/home-garden/lawn-mowing-improves-mental-health/
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