It's not entirely clear to me from reading the points in this article and skimming the paper that they are able to control the direction of causality for this. That is the question as to whether or not "healthy" activity prevents depression or if depression causes us to reduce our healthy activity (and increase our unhealthy ones).
The pandemic has been a great experiment in this and has me starting to think that many of these studies might have the causal arrow wrong. I absolutely spent less time on the screen, ran more often, drank much less and slept better immediately before the pandemic.
Running as an example became much harder to do emotionally after the a few months of the stress induced by the pandemic. The lack of other runners out there seemed to confirm that other people were also feeling this impact.
I spend more time glued to the screen "doom scrolling" and you can bet my drinking is up as well.
But it's certainly not like all of these behaviors happened and then stress set in (in this case I wouldn't say "depressed" as much as "stressed", ironically I'm probably the least depressed that I've been in years).
It seems to me much more likely that compulsive behaviors in general, and in this case especially the example of screen time are produced by the depression rather than it's causes.
Certainly there is the possibility of positive feed backs: depression causes excessive drinking which unchecked can clearly lead to more depression. Same goes for screen time, sleep etc.
Yeah, in my personal experience causality is not easily discernable. I definitely believe that for me a very regular sleep schedule helps my mood. But as you say, it's not a straightforward relationship. Bad sleep triggers bad mood when triggers bad coping behaviors that can disrupt my sleep, making it worse. Same thing for what I'm eating, exercise levels, amount of time invested in rewarding activities, how clean the house is, and I'm sure other things. It's a big causal snarl.
That said, I do think focusing on good sleep is one of the most effective things I can do to manage my mood, so if people are going to have a too-simple understanding of things, "more sleep critical for preventing depression" is probably a pretty good one.
"A higher frequency of alcohol consumption was surprisingly associated with reduced frequency of depressed mood in people with depression. This may potentially be due to the self-medicating use of alcohol by those with depression to manage their mood."
So they explicitly consider your point for alcohol consumption. But they don't seem to consider it for sleep, screen time, or exercise.
To complicate things, I find alcohol negatively impacts sleep and exercise, so the hypothesed self-medication with booze could score multiple hits.
The pandemic has been a great experiment in this and has me starting to think that many of these studies might have the causal arrow wrong. I absolutely spent less time on the screen, ran more often, drank much less and slept better immediately before the pandemic.
Running as an example became much harder to do emotionally after the a few months of the stress induced by the pandemic. The lack of other runners out there seemed to confirm that other people were also feeling this impact.
I spend more time glued to the screen "doom scrolling" and you can bet my drinking is up as well.
But it's certainly not like all of these behaviors happened and then stress set in (in this case I wouldn't say "depressed" as much as "stressed", ironically I'm probably the least depressed that I've been in years).
It seems to me much more likely that compulsive behaviors in general, and in this case especially the example of screen time are produced by the depression rather than it's causes.
Certainly there is the possibility of positive feed backs: depression causes excessive drinking which unchecked can clearly lead to more depression. Same goes for screen time, sleep etc.