The Impact of Physical Activity on the Psychological Welfare during the COVID-19 Pandemic- A Review Article

Abstract

The COVID-19 epidemic and its accompanying public health limitations are having a growing negative influence on mental health, and steps must be done to reverse this trend. Although there is a well-established link between physical activity and mental health, space and facilities for physical activity are restricted during the COVID-19 epidemic because of different constraints. Based on the most recent study findings released in 2019–2021, this article investigates the association between physical activity and mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic. First, physical activities during COVID-19, particularly supervised activities, are beneficial to happiness and mental health. Second, during the COVID-19 epidemic, physical activity decreases people's anxiety, melancholy, and despair. Third, the intensity and frequency of physical activity are linked to mental health maintenance and improvement. Physical activity that is both intense and frequent is beneficial to mental health. Finally, this study suggests crucial research directions for the future. The corona crisis has handicapped all of us in more than one way and we had to force ourselves to live within the rigid norms the government had pushed upon us. The tight lockdown, the strict curfews, the curbing of any sort of dopamine-releasing factor. All of this made us feel like we were inmates in an institution, and the feeling of helplessness crept in despite the elaborate measures the government took to make us feel that this was for the ‘greater good of our communities. The lockdown made us all couch potatoes endlessly switching channels on our television, scrolling on our exuberant number of social media applications or reading the same news over and over again, keeping track of the extent of the spread of the deadly virus hoping to find something worth spending our already wasted time on. In time this has opened a portal to which we never batted an eye and made us realize how precious our freedom is to us. This article is a small glimpse of how precious our bodily movements are to us, however minuscule or ordinary they might be.