Buffalo Depression Project

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How Movement Can Help with Depression

Written by Chris Muldoon, founder of Strideful

When you’re living with depression, even the smallest tasks can feel overwhelming. Just getting out of bed can feel like a win some days. So, the idea of exercise might sound impossible.

If that’s where you are, you’re not alone.

You might not hear enough that you don’t need a hardcore workout to start feeling better. It might help to rethink what “exercise” means altogether. Even gentle movement—a walk around the block or a few stretches between meetings—can lift mood, energy, and clarity.

Let’s explore how movement can help manage depression symptoms, how to get started, and why every step truly counts.

Why Movement Helps with Depression

We often consider exercise a means to lose weight or get in shape. But its benefits go far beyond the physical. When it comes to depression, movement can have powerful effects on both your brain and your emotional health.

On a biological level

Physical activity triggers the release of endorphins, serotonin, dopamine, endocannabinoids, and more. These neurochemicals play a key role in regulating mood and reducing anxiety. It also helps lower cortisol, the body’s primary stress hormone, and supports better sleep and brain function.

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Why a Website About Depression for Western New York?

Over the past twenty years of living with major depression, I’ve met many people in our Western New York community seeking help for depression. The questions are often the same: “Where do I go for help? What local resources are there? I have an adult child, co-worker, or elderly parent struggling with depression. How can I help and support them?”

As a lawyer and mental health advocate, people have asked me these questions for years because they know about my work fighting stigma. When stigma goes down, treatment goes up.

Our community has terrific mental health resources, but most folks don’t know how to find them or learn about what they do. I thought it was time, perhaps long overdue, to create a website that provides not only resources, both local and national, but more: podcasts, videos, and a place where I blog about living and working with depression. I chose the name – The Buffalo Depression Project – because it is a work in progress, an ongoing “project” that I hope will change and grow as the conversations about mental health in our community evolve, especially about depression, but generally, about any form of mental illness.

I know about the struggles people with depression face – at work, at home, and living in the world with mental illness. The two pillars of depression – a sense of helplessness and hopelessness – can darken the days of sufferers and those who care about them.

But things can get better. People can learn to manage their depression or help a loved one to do so. I have experienced this and known hundreds of people who have done so across the U.S. and in our community.

We all need help sometimes. So many of us can’t fix depression on our own.

This website is meant to answer that call.

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Unpacking Depression with Dr. Margaret Wehrenberg

Dr. Margaret Wehrenberg is a clinical psychologist in Naperville, Illinois. She is the author of six books on the treatment of anxiety and depression published by W.W. Norton, including, “The Ten Best-Ever Depression Management Techniques: Understanding How Your Brain Makes You Depressed and What You Can Do to Change It” and “Anxiety + Depression: Effective Treatment of the Big Two Co-Occurring Disorders.” An international trainer of mental health professionals, Dr. Wehrenberg coaches people with anxiety via the internet and phone. She’s a frequent contributor to the award-winning magazine Psychotherapy Networker and blogs on depression for Psychology Today.

Dan:

What is the difference between sadness and depression , and why do people confuse the two so often?

Dr. Wehrenberg:

Because depression comprises sadness, sadness is a response to a specific situation in which we usually have some loss—the loss of self-esteem, a loss of a loved one, the loss of a desired goal. Depression is more about the energy – whether it’s mental energy or physical energy – to make an effective response. So, sadness is an appropriate and transient emotion, but depression sticks around and affects all of our daily behaviors and interactions.

Dan:

What causes depression? Sadness, as you say, is an appropriate response to loss. What is depression a reaction to? What are the causes of depression?

Dr. Wehrenberg:

Throughout my career, I’ve developed the idea that there are four potential causes of depression. This comes from working with people for forty years and reading a lot of research.

The first part is genetics. You are born with a brain that is going to tend toward depression because of the function of neurotransmitters in your brain. It’s a genetic predisposition towards depression. With poor self-care and poor nutrition, you may end up stimulating or starting that feeling of low energy and interest in the world around you. Then, if you pull back from the world around you, you begin to have fewer experiences that keep you interested in the world.

Another possible and probable cause is with people experiencing situational stress that goes on and on. That could be the stress of not being able to earn enough money, and you’ve got two jobs, and kids, and a life filled with stress. It could be the stress that comes on while caring for someone in your family circle who’s got a disability or a chronic illness that increases with severity over time. So, you’re stuck in stress, and you deplete yourself. And you can become depressed.

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