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For most people, daily physical activity improves mood and, in particular, increases feelings of energy. This is shown by an international meta-analysis conducted in collaboration with the Central Institute of Mental Health (CIMH) in Mannheim. For the study, data from more than 8,000 people across over 60 real-world studies were analyzed. The results have now been published in the journal “Nature Human Behaviour.”
Although it is widely known that exercise has a positive effect on health, many people still do not get enough physical activity. This suggests that simply knowing about the benefits of physical activity is not enough to bring about a change in behavior. For this reason, scientific research is increasingly focusing on mood and emotions. Researchers at the Central Institute for Mental Health (CIMH) in Mannheim, Ruhr University Bochum (RUB), Paris-Lodron University of Salzburg (PLUS) and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have now collected and analyzed 67 datasets from research groups worldwide to investigate how physical activity is linked to mood and emotions.
The key finding: For most people, mood improves with daily physical activity. At the same time, people are more physically active when they are feeling better.
How Exercise Affects Your Mood in Everyday Life
“It has long been known from laboratory and cross-sectional studies that physical activity has a positive effect on affective well-being,” reports Prof. Dr. Markus Reichert (PLUS, RUB, CIMH), who coordinated the project. For several years now, this relationship has also been investigated in studies that track physical activity and well-being under natural conditions in everyday life using electronic devices such as accelerometers and smartphones. This allows researchers to investigate not only the effects of exercise but also those of low-intensity daily activities (such as walking, climbing stairs, and doing housework). Furthermore, a distinction can be made between correlations within individuals (“if I move more than usual, I feel better”) and between individuals (“if I am a person who generally moves more than others, I feel better than others who move less”). However, the results from these studies were unclear and in some cases even contradictory, says researcher Reichert (PLUS, RUB, CIMH).
Daily data shows a link between physical activity and mood
“It was important to us to synthesize the mixed results—in part so that we could assess the strength of the associations for various aspects of affective well-being, such as positive and negative emotions, energetic arousal, calmness, and, where appropriate, identify differences between individuals,” explains Johanna Rehder (RUB, PLUS, CIMH), a doctoral candidate and the first author of the publication.
“This synthesis of a large volume of real-world research data required the use of innovative and complex meta-analysis techniques,” adds Dr. Julian Packheiser (RUB). In these analyses by the core research group—which also includes Dr. Marco Giurgiu, Dr. Irina Timm (both KIT), and Dr. Gesa Berretz (RUB and Radboud University)—it was found that affective well-being generally shows a positive correlation with preceding and subsequent physical activity. Only calmness showed a negative correlation with physical activity. This means that people were less calm and relaxed before or after physical activity in their daily lives than when they were not moving.
People with low well-being benefit in particular
At the same time, the analyses revealed that the relationship between physical activity and emotional well-being varies greatly from person to person. While the majority of participants reported feeling better during physical activity, some reported feeling worse before or after physical activity. “Our findings show that people with low well-being in particular seem to benefit from physical activity. This underscores the potential of nonexercise activity for psychologically vulnerable groups,” emphasizes project coordinator Markus Reichert.
Prof. Dr. Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, Prof. Dr. Ulrich Reininghaus, and Dr. Iris Reinhard from the CIMH in Mannheim also played a key role in the study. “Especially when it comes to mental illness, it is important to understand how physical activity in everyday life affects mood,” emphasizes Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, Director and Chairman of the Board at the CIMH.
The most consistent results were found for subjective energy as a form of affective well-being: more than 95 percent of the participants analyzed felt more energetic before or after physical activity. “In the coming years, it will be crucial to identify individual and contextual factors that can explain the differences in these associations,” says Reichert. Furthermore, the data do not allow for conclusions about the causality of these relationships. Intervention studies in real-life settings are necessary for this. Only in this way the full potential of the relationships between physical activity and affective well-being can be harnessed for health-promoting interventions in healthcare.
The Largest Analysis of Physical Activity and Mood in Everyday Life
The researchers drew on data from more than 8,000 individuals across 67 datasets worldwide. However, they included only studies that had repeatedly measured physical activity and affective well-being in the participants’ daily lives. This resulted in a dataset containing a total of more than 300,000 mood assessments. This is the largest and most comprehensive analysis to date of the relationship between physical activity and mood in everyday life, in a field of research that has only existed since the 2000s.
Funding:
This work was supported, among other sources, by the Peer Mentoring Program of the Health Psychology Section of the German Psychological Society (DGPs), by the German Research Foundation (DFG) as part of the Collaborative Research Center TRR 265, and by the ERA-NET NEURON project MASE.
About CIMH
The Central Institute of Mental Health (CIMH) stands for internationally outstanding research and pioneering treatment concepts in psychiatry and psychotherapy, child and adolescent psychiatry, psychosomatics and addiction medicine. The CIMH clinics provide psychiatric care for the population of Mannheim. At the CIMH, mentally ill people of all ages can rely on the most advanced treatments based on international standards of knowledge. Educating people about mental illness, creating understanding for those affected and strengthening prevention is another important part of our work. In psychiatric research, the CIMH is one of the leading institutions in Europe. Since 2021, it has been a site of the German Centre for Mental Health. The CIMH is institutionally linked to the University of Heidelberg through jointly appointed professors from the Medical Faculty Mannheim. The CIMH is a member of the Health + Life Science Alliance Heidelberg Mannheim.
Rehder J, Timm I, Berretz G, Reinhard I, Neubauer AB, Güntürkün O, et al. An individual participant data meta-analysis of how physical activity relates to affective well-being in daily life. Nat Hum Behav. 2026 May 6. doi:10.1038/s41562-026-02218-2. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-026-02427-2
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