• Posted February 13, 2026

Swap TV For Activity To Ward Off Depression, Study Suggests

Want an easy way to head off the blues?

Stash the TV remote.

Dutch researchers who followed more than 65,000 adults for four years found that replacing 60 minutes of TV with something more active cut depression risk by 11% — and nearly 19% in middle-aged adults.

And more is even better.

"For 90- and 120-minute reallocations, this decrease in likelihood goes up to 25.91%," said lead researcher Rosa Palazuelos-González, who led the University of Groningen team that conducted the four-year-long study.

The findings build on previous studies probing links between depression and a couch-potato lifestyle.

Palazuelos-González said the new findings stand out because her team analyzed what happens when people replace TV time with specific alternatives, like exercise, cleaning the house and sleep.

"We found that reducing TV-watching time by 60 minutes and reallocating it to other activities decreased the likelihood of developing major depression by 11%," she said in a Cambridge University Press news release.

While nearly every alternative to TV lowered depression risk, no meaningful benefit beyond a tidier home was found in swapping 30 minutes of TV for household chores.

But spending that half-hour in sports reaped an 18% benefit overall, and replacing that same amount of time with physical activity at work or school reduced risk by 10%, the study found.

Even commuting and sleep paid off, by 8% and 9%, respectively.

"Across all time frames studied, sports delivered the greatest reduction in the probability of developing major depression," researchers said in a news release.

For the study, participants reported how much time they spent on such as activities as commuting, leisure exercise, sports, housework, TV watching and sleep. 

Significantly, shifting time from TV to more active pursuits did not have a significant benefit on depression risk in younger adults, the study found. \

Researchers suspect that’s probably because they tend to be more active in the first place as a group. They may already exceed the activity level that provides protection against depression.

In addition, simply reallocating TV time to other activities did not significantly alter depression rates in older adults. Doing sports activity was the only alternative to TV that made a difference for them.

"Replacing 30 minutes of TV with sports reduced the probability of depression from 1.01% to 0.71%," researchers said in a news release. "With 60 minutes, the risk dropped to 0.63%, and with 90 minutes, to 0.56%."

The findings were published in the journal European Psychiatry.

More information

There’s more about the links between TV habits — especially binge-watching — and mental health problems at Northwestern Medicine.

SOURCE: Cambridge University Press, news release, Feb. 12, 2026