Can 10,000 Steps Improve Your Depression?
Can you walk away your depressive symptoms? It seems like walking really helps according to the research. A systematic review and meta-analysis published in JAMA Network Open in 2024 looked at data from 33 observational studies involving 96,173 adults. They found that people taking 7000 steps a day or higher were associated with lower risk of depression. If they went 10,000 steps or more per day, they had significantly fewer depressive symptoms compared to those taking fewer than 5,000 steps per day. This is huge!
Your Mental Health and Perimenopause
Feeling moody? Irritable? Depressed? Less interested? More anxious? Less connected? Less confident or lower self worth? And has all of this been happening or worsening since you’ve entered into perimenopause or menopause (even surgical menopause)? In November 2023, Cambridge University Press published an articled titled, “Severe mental illness and the perimenopause.” I’m so grateful that more write-ups like this are happening to educate women! In perimenopause, hormones such as estradiol, progesterone, and testosterone start changing for the worse leaving us with changes in our brain hormones like DHEA, serotonin, oxytocin, GABA, and dopamine. While you might not have heard of some of these hormones before, they play a huge role in your mood!