Walking 7,000 steps a day could help reduce your risk of depression, a study has suggested.
Physical exercise has long been known to improve mental health and wellbeing but this is the first study to investigate the benefit of step counts and find a link between the two.
Analysis of 33 different studies of almost 100,000 people found that individuals who take 7,000 steps a day are almost a third (31 per cent) less likely to also be depressed.
The risk also decreased by a further nine per cent for every 10,000 steps a day, the study found.
All participants in the study wore pedometers to determine the amount of steps they took and provided information on their mental health via questionnaires.
"Our results showed significant associations between higher numbers of daily steps and fewer depressive symptoms as well as lower prevalence and risk of depression in the general adult population," the scientists from the Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha in Spain write in their study, published in the journal Jama Network Open.
They add that encouraging people to do at least 7,000 steps a day would be a good public health intervention "that has the potential to prevent depression".
Experts say the findings do not show a causation but the study shows promise for the benefit of encouraging people to meet daily steps targets.
"While it shows a clear association between higher step counts and lower depression symptoms, we can't definitively say that walking more reduces depression, as most studies only looked at one point in time," said Dr Brendon Stubbs, from King's College London (KCL), who was not involved in the study.
"However, the findings align well with existing evidence about physical activity's benefits for mental health.
"The encouraging message is that even modest increases in daily steps day can potentially reduce the risk of future depression. We really do however need long term randomised trials to test if this is causal."
The goal of walking 10,000 steps a day has been a social phenomenon since it was invented in the 1960s as a marketing scheme for pedometers ahead of the Olympics in Tokyo in 1964. However, the initiative has been linked to a range of health benefits.
A study from March found that the arbitrary target is enough to lower the risk of early death by almost 40 per cent - even if the rest of the time is spent on the sofa.
Experts led by the University of Sydney used UK Biobank data from 72,174 people who were aged about 61. An accelerometer device was worn for seven days to measure exercise levels. The findings, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, showed that anything beyond 2,200 steps a day was enough to make some difference to heart health and mortality.
Those managing 4,000 steps a day cut their risk of early death by 20 per cent.
The best results were among those achieving between 9,000 and 10,000 steps daily, who cut their risk of premature death by 39 per cent. This group also reduced their risk of heart attacks and strokes by 21 per cent, the research found.