Everyday physical activity is linked to a major boost in energy and mood

People tended to feel more energetic and positive when they were more physically active than usual, and they were also more likely to become active after reporting better well-being, according to a large analysis published in Nature Human Behaviour.

Physical activity includes more than organized exercise. It can involve walking, household movement, commuting and other everyday activities. Affective well-being refers to a person’s momentary emotional state, including whether they feel happy or unhappy, energized or tired, calm or tense, and generally good or bad.

Earlier research has often linked exercise with improved mood, but studies conducted in laboratories or through occasional questionnaires may not accurately reflect people’s ordinary lives. Researchers have increasingly used wearable movement monitors and smartphone surveys to record what people are doing and how they feel throughout the day. However, these studies have used different methods and have produced mixed results.

The current researchers aimed to combine this evidence and determine whether physical activity and well-being were related in both directions. They also wanted to distinguish changes within individuals from differences between individuals. This distinction matters because a person who is generally active may also be happier for other reasons, such as better health, social support or living conditions.

Led by Johanna Rehder of the University of Salzburg in Austria, the team analyzed 67 datasets from 14 countries. The study included 8,223 participants, with an average age of 36.33 years. Sex or gender information was available for 8,190 participants: 54.93% were female and 0.06% were nonbinary.

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Participants wore accelerometers, small devices that objectively record movement, for periods ranging from one to 100 days. They also received smartphone prompts asking them to report their current well-being. Across the datasets, participants provided 321,345 well-being ratings linked to nearly 1 million hours of movement measurements.

The researchers examined five aspects of well-being: positive feelings, negative feelings, overall pleasantness, energy and calmness. They assessed both whether physical activity came before later changes in well-being and whether well-being came before later physical activity.

Within individuals, physical activity was consistently associated with greater energy, more positive feelings and better overall pleasantness. The strongest relationship involved energetic arousal—the feeling of being awake, alert and energized. In practical terms, moving from sitting to walking was associated with a 0.62-point increase in energetic arousal on a 1-to-4 scale. The same comparison was associated with a 0.24-point increase in positive feelings and a 0.16-point increase in pleasantness. Physical activity did not, however, show a consistent relationship with negative feelings such as sadness or anxiety.

Physical activity was also linked with feeling less calm. This does not necessarily mean that movement made people distressed. It may reflect the fact that being active is associated with feeling more alert and stimulated rather than relaxed.

The relationship also operated in the opposite direction. When people reported feeling better and more energetic than their own average, they tended to be more physically active afterward, whereas feeling calmer was associated with less subsequent activity. Negative feelings, however, did not show a consistent relationship with later activity. At the level of differences between people, physical activity was most consistently associated with positive feelings and pleasantness.

The strength of the associations varied substantially among individuals. Age, body mass index, sex or gender and whether measurements were taken on a weekday or weekend explained some of this variation. For instance, younger adults and those with a lower body mass index showed stronger positive emotional responses linked to physical activity. Additionally, the energy boost from being active was more pronounced on weekends than on weekdays, and women felt more energized after activity than men.

The authors concluded that “the results document the critical relevance of [physical activity]–[affective well-being] relations in everyday life.”

Important limitations remain. For example, the datasets were observational, so they cannot establish that physical activity directly improves well-being or that positive feelings cause later activity. The studies also differed in the devices they used, how often participants reported their feelings and how well-being was defined.

The study, “An Individual Participant Data Meta-analysis of How Physical Activity Relates to Affective Well-being in Daily Life,” was authored by Johanna Rehder, Irina Timm, Gesa Berretz, Iris Reinhard, Andreas B. Neubauer, Onur Güntürkün, Keisuke Takano, Walter Bierbauer, Miriam Cabrita, Matthew Bourke, Joshua Smyth, Jinhyuk Kim, Johannes Michalak, Joshua Curtiss, Björn Pannicke, Jacob B. Gallagher, Ana M. Abrantes, Toru Nakamura, Yoshiharu Yamamoto, Paul Cook, Lena M. Wieland, Birte von Haaren-Mack, Bryan McCormick, Justin Hachenberger, Tomas Vetrovsky, Benjamin Henwood, Louise Poppe, Gorden Sudeck, Laura Hollands, Andrea B. Goldschmidt, Lynn Martire, Martina Kanning, Jaclyn P. Maher, Yu-Mei Li, Ulrich Reininghaus, Corina Berli, Caroline Seiferth, Derek J. Hevel, Kate Leger, Amanda E. Staiano, Almut Zeeck, Stefano Calza, Yue Liao, Geralyn R. Ruissen, the CoCA Consortium, Andreas R. Schwerdtfeger, Matthias Haucke, Loree T. Pham, Siwei Liu, Mark C. Thomas, Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, Genevieve F. Dunton, Steriani Elavsky, Ulrich W. Ebner-Priemer, Marco Giurgiu, Julian Packheiser and Markus Reichert.