Stretching just 10 minutes a day might help ease depression and menopause symptoms in middle-aged women, a small study suggests.

“Light-intensity exercises such as stretching have not been previously evaluated for its impact on menopausal and depressive symptoms,” lead researcher Yuko Kai said.

Forty Japanese women, aged 40 to 61 years, participated in the study at the Physical Fitness Research Institute, Meiji Yasuda Life Foundation of Health and Welfare in Tokyo.

Twenty of the women were randomly assigned to stretch 10 minutes a day before bedtime for three weeks. The other 20 were instructed to remain sedentary before bed.

The research team evaluated the women’s menopausal symptoms using 10 questions about vasomotor symptoms (such as hot flashes and chills), psychological symptoms (including mood and sleep disturbances) and body aches.

They used a separate set of questions to evaluate symptoms of depression.

At the start, the groups were generally similar. More than half the participants were postmenopausal and nearly two-thirds had depression. Most of the women were not physically active. On average, the stretching group stretched about five days per week.

Overall, the women in the stretching group had improved scores on both sets of questions after the three-week study period, compared to the group that did not stretch before bed.

The frequency of hot flashes was not different in the two groups, however.

For more conclusive results, Pinkerton said, “this study needs to be replicated with larger, more diverse postmenopausal women with an active control group.”