The need for regulating mood with activities during lockdown
04 May, 2020
A new study finds that persons with depression are less likely to use activities to greatly help regulate their moods. This is something that is even more complicated to do during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The analysis, which now appears in JAMA, examined an array of activities that people may use as a type of mood regulation to push away depression. Its aim was to discover if persons with depression are less inclined to plan their activities for mood regulation.
Insufficient homeostasis - which is “the failure to stabilize mood via mood-modifying activities,” as the analysis puts it - may very well be exacerbated by the limited activity choices available during lockdown.
Senior study author Guy Goodwin, from the University of Oxford in britain, says:
“Whenever we are down, we have a tendency to choose to do things that cheer us up, and when we are up, we might take on activities which will tend to bring us down. However, in our current situation with COVID-19, lockdowns, and social isolation, our choice of activity is quite limited.”
Depression
Globally, a lot more than 264 million persons have depression.
According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), major depression is among the most typical mental health conditions in america.
The NIH estimate that 17.3 million people, or 7.1% of the country’s adult population, experienced at least one major depressive episode.
Low mood regulation
To ascertain the degree to which a lack of mood regulation is a factor in depression, Goodwin and colleagues analyzed the histories of 58,328 participants, comparing those with low mood (depression) and high mood. The team included people from low, middle, and high income regions in the cohort.
Specifically, the researchers tracked the extent to which persons responded to their moods through their selection of activities during the day.
They found a significant link between rarely or never practicing this sort of mood regulation and depression. Specifically, in computer simulations, the researchers found that insufficient mood regulation predicted more frequent and longer lasting episodes of depression.
Individuals who proactively selected the sequence of activities where they engaged were less inclined to experience a minimal mood.
Goodwin notes, “Our research shows this normal mood regulation is impaired in persons with depression, providing a fresh, direct target for further research and development of new treatments to greatly help persons with depression.”
The study authors suggest that providing well-targeted activity recommendations to people with depression may help them regulate their moods and stop depressive episodes.
Since medication only works for approximately 50% of men and women with depression, this could represent an essential new direction for treatment.
As lead study author Maxime Taquet says, “By training persons to improve their own mood homeostasis, how someone naturally regulates their mood via their choices of activities, we could be able to prevent or better treat depression.”
“This is likely to be important at times of lockdown and social isolation, when persons are more susceptible to depression so when choices of activities appear restricted.”
Activity choices
In analyzing the participants’ histories, the researchers also found that the types of activities the participants who did regulate their moods selected varied based on their income level.
In high income countries, people were more likely to select exercise for mood regulation. In lower income populations, individuals were more likely to select religious activities.
There may also be other options. Taquet concludes:
“Our research findings open the entranceway to new opportunities for developing and optimizing treatments for depression, which may potentially be well adapted to treatments in the type of smartphone apps, distributed around a big population, which sometimes lack access to existing treatments.”
Source: www.medicalnewstoday.com
TAG(s):