Television has long been part of everyday life, and conversations around excessive TV use have often focused on its effects on eyesight, sleep quality, and brain health. From warnings about eye strain to concerns about sedentary lifestyles, the risks of spending too much time in front of screens are well recognised. However, emerging research now suggests that television habits may also play a significant role in mental health, particularly the risk of depression.
A new study published in the journal European Psychiatry highlights that reducing time spent watching TV and replacing it with other daily activities, especially physical activity, may meaningfully lower the risk of developing depression. The research found that this effect was particularly strong among middle-aged adults, with some activity substitutions linked to reductions in depression risk of up to 43 per cent.
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), “an estimated 4% of the population experience depression, including 5.7% of adults (4.6% among men and 6.9% among women), and 5.9% of adults aged 70 years and older. Approximately 332 million people in the world have depression.” Given the scale of the problem, identifying simple, everyday lifestyle changes that may reduce depression risk could play a crucial role in prevention strategies.
How was the study conducted?
The findings are based on data from Lifelines, a large, long-term population-based cohort study conducted in the Netherlands. The study followed 65,454 adults who did not have depression at the start of the research. Participants were monitored over a period of four years, allowing researchers to observe how their daily habits influenced their mental health over time.
At the beginning of the study, participants provided detailed information about how they spent their time across a range of activities. These included active commuting such as walking or cycling, leisure exercise, sports participation, household tasks, physical activity at work or school, television watching, and sleep. This comprehensive tracking allowed researchers to examine how shifting time from one activity to another affected depression risk.
To identify new cases of depression, researchers used the Mini International Neuropsychiatric Interview, a structured diagnostic tool widely used in clinical and research settings to diagnose major depressive disorder. This ensured that diagnoses were based on standardised psychiatric criteria rather than self-reported symptoms alone.
The study was led by Rosa Palazuelos-González of the University of Groningen, who emphasised that the research offers new insights into how replacing sedentary behaviour with other activities can influence mental health outcomes.
“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 per cent,” said Palazuelos-González.
“For 90- and 120-minute reallocations, this decrease in likelihood goes up to 25.91 per cent.”
She noted that earlier research had primarily focused on the negative effects of prolonged sitting or inactivity. However, this study specifically examined how replacing sedentary time with alternative behaviours affects depression risk.
Midlife emerges as a critical window for depression prevention
One of the most striking findings of the study was that the protective effects of reducing TV watching were strongest among middle-aged adults.
In this group, replacing just 60 minutes per day of TV watching with other activities reduced the probability of developing depression by 18.78 per cent. Increasing this substitution to 90 minutes lowered the risk by 29 per cent, while reallocating 120 minutes of TV time resulted in a dramatic, nearly 43 per cent reduction in depression risk.
The type of activity used to replace TV watching also made a difference. Among all activity substitutions, sports provided the greatest protective effect against depression. Even replacing just 30 minutes of TV time with sports was associated with an 18 per cent reduction in depression risk.
Other types of physical activity also provided benefits. Replacing 30 minutes of TV watching with work- or school-related physical activity reduced depression risk by 10.21 per cent, while substituting it with leisure or commuting activities such as walking or cycling reduced risk by 8 per cent. Replacing TV watching with sleep resulted in an 8.45 per cent reduction in risk.
Interestingly, replacing TV watching with household activities showed weaker effects. Substituting just 30 minutes of TV watching with household chores did not produce statistically significant reductions in depression risk. This suggests that activities involving more physical engagement, movement, or structured exercise may provide greater mental health benefits.
Benefits vary significantly across different age groups
While middle-aged adults experienced the strongest protective effects, the benefits of replacing TV watching with other activities were less pronounced in younger and older age groups.
Among older adults, reallocating TV watching time proportionally to various daily activities did not lead to statistically significant reductions in depression risk overall. However, sports participation remained beneficial even in this group.
Replacing 30 minutes of TV watching with sports reduced the probability of developing depression from 1.01 per cent to 0.71 per cent. Increasing the substitution to 60 minutes lowered the risk further to 0.63 per cent, while replacing 90 minutes reduced the risk to 0.56 per cent.
These findings suggest that structured physical activity, particularly sports, may still offer protective mental health benefits in older adults, even when other forms of activity do not produce comparable effects.
In younger adults, replacing TV watching with physical activity did not significantly reduce depression risk. Researchers suggest this may be because younger individuals are already more physically active and may have surpassed the level of activity needed to gain protective mental health benefits.
Another possible explanation is that television watching may no longer be the primary sedentary activity among younger people. Instead, screen time may be dominated by smartphones, computers, and other digital devices, which were not fully captured in the study’s TV-focused analysis.
Limitations of the study
The researchers acknowledged several limitations that should be considered while interpreting the findings. One key concern is that TV-watching may no longer fully represent sedentary behaviour, particularly among younger adults, who increasingly spend more time on smartphones and other digital devices rather than television.
The study also relied on self-reported data to measure physical activity, TV watching, and sleep, which may not always be fully accurate. As the authors noted, “movement behaviours were based on self-report data, which can lead to overestimation, particularly for activities with higher intensities, due to social desirability and variability in sleep patterns.”
In addition, the questionnaire used in the study may not have captured all daily activities. The researchers explained that “the SQUASH may not capture all daily activities, as the total time does not always add up to the total of 1440 minutes/day (24 hours),” meaning some unmeasured behaviours could also influence depression risk.
The study also lacked detailed information about the specific types of sports participants engaged in, which may vary in their mental health benefits. Further, participant dropout during the follow-up period could have influenced the results. The authors noted that “the dropout rate is associated with various health indicators linked to depression (data not shown), suggesting the likelihood of attrition bias,” which may have led to an underestimation of the observed effects.
Finally, although sleep was included in the analysis, the researchers did not examine differences based on sleep duration. As they explained, “although meta-analyses found a U-shaped association between sleep and incident depression, we did not stratify by sleep duration to preserve statistical power across age groups.”
Despite these limitations, the large sample size and long follow-up period strengthen the reliability of the findings, though further research is needed to confirm the results across different populations and modern screen-use habits.
This story is done in collaboration with First Check, which is the health journalism vertical of DataLEADS.