My mental health is better when I bike, yours could be too

I notice a significant difference in my mental health when I bike to work compared to driving or taking transit. I’m more relaxed and more focused. Getting up for a workout when I work from home helps but it is not the same. When I bike, I get exercise, but it is different because I don’t have to focus on it. The exercise just happens as I bike through the city. It’s even better when I get to bike along or through the river valley. It’s not unusual for me to stop to watch wildlife or check out a view. I also have to focus on what I’m doing. I can’t think about my work day; I’m focused on the ride. As a result, it creates a solid mental separation on either end of my workday.

Berrie and colleagues (2024) studied commuters, car and cycling, in Edinburgh and Glasgow. There were pretty low rates of bike community with both cities coming in at less than 5% of people. However, there was a significant difference in the rates of prescriptions for mental health-related drugs (antidepressants and/or anxiolytics. 14% of non-bike commuters had a prescription for mental health, whereas only 9% of cyclists had prescriptions.

This supports findings by others, such as those discussed by Liu and colleagues (2022), that include a positive relationship between mental health and active commuting, especially biking, and reduced stress with biking and walking compared with driving.

At the same time, I have questions. In the Scotland study, they looked at people living within a kilometre of a bike route. This implies that there are likely some elements of increased safety on these paths, although we know that not all bike infrastructure is created equal. But I am curious how infrastructure plays into these different routes. As a bike commuter, do you still have decreased stress if you view the route you take as potentially dangerous or have a lot of interactions with vehicles? I know my short commute option is more stressful because of the lack of protected bike lanes for parts and the design of the bike lanes in other parts. There is a good few kilometres, but the rest isn’t ideal. But, when I take my longer option, with significantly higher protection, my stress level is way lower, except when I’m running late but that’s my own doing.

Regardless, this is important research because mental health has huge financial and personal costs. If we looked at this from a systems perspective, there would probably be significant opportunities to reduce overall costs by increasing spending on building and maintaining cycling infrastructure.