Higher daily step counts linked to fewer mental health problems in early adolescence
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Every extra walk to school, casual soccer game in the park or trip to the store could be doing more for teenage mental health than first thought, according to new research tracking thousands of adolescents in the U.S.
The study, led by King's College London's Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience in collaboration with the University of Massachusetts Amherst, tracked 5,515 adolescents taking part in the U.S. Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study. The work is published in JAMA Network Open.
Participants wore Fitbit devices for three weeks at ages 11 to 12. A year later, researchers checked in on their mental health, using the Child Behavior Checklist, a widely used questionnaire completed by the young people and their parents that measures symptoms such as anxiety, low mood and behavioral problems. They compared the results with how many steps each teenager had been taking.
More steps, fewer symptoms
The more adolescents walked, the fewer mental health problems they had a year later, and the benefit didn't level off at any point the researchers could measure. Teenagers who took fewer than 5,000 steps a day had the most symptoms; those averaging around 8,000 had fewer; and those hitting 12,000 or more had the fewest of all.
Adolescents with the highest step counts also showed slightly thicker brain tissue in two areas involved in movement and in regulating emotion, and this difference helped explain part of the link to better mental health. There was no link found between step count and how well adolescents did at school.
Dr. Divyangana Rakesh, senior lecturer in neuroscience and psychology at King's College London and senior author of the study, said, "This study gives us some of the clearest evidence yet that even an everyday, low-cost, accessible measure of physical activity like daily step count is tied to how adolescent brains and mental health develop. What's striking is that we don't see this benefit leveling off in the observed range, even among the most active young people in our sample."
Qingyang Li, lead author of the study, said, "We're starting to understand parts of the brain that might be involved in the link between daily steps and young people's mental health. It's preliminary, but it gives us a clearer idea of where to look next."
The study used data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, the largest long-term study of brain development and child health in the U.S., conducted across 21 sites. Step counts were measured objectively through wearable devices rather than self-reports. This has been suggested to be a more reliable way of capturing habitual activity than the questionnaire-based assessments most previous research has relied on.
Small increases add up
Dr. Amanda Paluch, associate professor of kinesiology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said, "Adolescence is a key period for brain development and mental health, so it's encouraging to see that physical activity's benefits extend to both.
"It is not an all-or-nothing situation. Adolescents don't need to be elite athletes to benefit. Increases of 1,000 to 2,000 daily steps, from any starting point, were associated with better brain structure and mental health outcomes, and that beneficial association keeps building from there.
"The goal is finding realistic, sustainable ways to move more, through everyday opportunities like walking to school, active play and activities kids actually enjoy, so these benefits are accessible wherever an adolescent is starting from."
This is an observational study, so it can't show that walking more directly improves mental health. The link held after the researchers took account of the adolescents' earlier mental health problems, though they say it's still possible that those with fewer problems were simply more active to begin with. The brain differences involved were small, and few adolescents in the sample had extremely high step counts, so it isn't yet clear whether the pattern continues beyond what was measured here.
Publication details
Physical Activity and Adolescent Brain Structure, Mental Health, and Academic Performance, JAMA Network Open (2026). DOI: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2026.36973
Journal information: JAMA Network Open
Clinical categories
PediatricsFitness & Physical activityPsychology & Mental healthPsychiatryChildren's health Provided by King's College London Who's behind this story?
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