America is currently undergoing a teen mental health crisis. Although things have slightly improved over the past few years, in 2025, 33% of U.S. high schoolers reported persistent hopelessness or sadness. Twenty-three percent said they experience poor mental health, and 14% had seriously considered taking their own life.
Experts say multiple factors have led to this crisis, including loneliness, social media, bullying, ever-increasing academic expectations, and the state of the world. Although there is no magic bullet that will improve every teen’s mental health, a new study by King’s College London’s Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, working with the University of Massachusetts Amherst, found that the number of steps a teen takes a day is directly correlated with their mental health.
How many steps should teens take a day to improve their mental health?
The study found that the more steps adolescents take each day, the fewer mental health symptoms they have. It also outlined how many steps teens should take each day for optimal mental health. Teens who had 5,000 steps a day or fewer had the greatest mental health burden. Those who got up to 8,000 a day had marked reductions in anxiety and mood symptoms, and those who got 12,000 or more had the best emotional resilience and the smallest number of mental health complaints.
“This study gives us some of the clearest evidence yet that even an everyday, low-cost, accessible measures 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 levelling off in the observed range, even among the most active young people in our sample,” Dr. Divyangana Rakesh, Senior Lecturer in Neuroscience and Psychology at King’s College London, said in a statement.
To learn the benefits of getting your daily steps in, participants aged 11 to 12 wore research-grade Fitbits for three weeks. A year later, researchers examined their mental health and compared it with their step counts. The study found that any increase in steps correlated with improved mental health.
“It is not an all-or-nothing situation. Adolescents don’t need to be elite athletes to benefit. 1,000 to 2,000 higher daily step increments, from any starting point, was associated with better brain structure and mental health outcomes, and that beneficial association keeps building from there,” Dr. Amanda Paluch, Associate Professor of Kinesiology, University of Massachusetts Amherst, said in a statement.
10 ways teens can incorporate more steps into their day to improve their mental health
1. Walk to school each day
2. Walk around the house, or the block while talking on the phone
3. Join a sport at school
4. Spend some time with your family taking an after-dinner walk
5. Take your dog (or your neighbor’s) on nightly walks
6. Take up photography and walk in a scenic location looking for photo opportunities
7. On weekends, spend some time at a local museum or on a walking tour
8. Challenge your friends to a daily step competition
9. Go dancing at a local teen club
10. Walk the track at your local high school—four laps are around 2,000 steps
(Tip of the hat to Illinois State for some suggestions.)
