Mental Health Award: Using physical activity and circadian-based interventions to reduce anxiety and depression in young people

Mental health challenges hold back millions of young people. One-third of individuals experience the onset of a mental health disorder before age 14 and almost half before 18. With this Mental Health Award, we will fund interventions for young people in the UK and Africa that have the potential to scale, while deepening our mechanistic understanding of how and why they work. While research on the intervention must take place in the UK and/or Africa, applicants can be from anywhere in the world except mainland China.

This funding call focuses on interventions that improve youth mental health by targeting circadian rhythms (such as, but not limited to, sleep timing, sleep quality and daily light exposure) and/or physical activity (such as, but not limited to, aerobic exercise, dance classes, walking programmes and app-based exercise programmes). This is because these interventions are accessible, cost effective and straightforward to deliver, yet their mechanisms remain underexplored in this group. Interventions may primarily address either circadian functioning or physical activity or may combine both approaches.

We expect research projects to:

• Propose a circadian-based and/or physical activity intervention for young people between 10 and 18 years at risk of or experiencing anxiety and/or depression in the UK and/or Africa.
• Provide existing evidence for the proposed intervention and a clear rationale explaining why this evidence is expected to translate effectively to the chosen population and age range.
• Include measurement of both circadian rhythms and physical activity across the 24-hour cycle. While the intervention can focus on circadian rhythms and/or physical activity, both circadian rhythms and physical activity must be measured.
• Outline a well-powered randomised controlled trial or an equivalently rigorous causal design to investigate hypothesised mechanisms of efficacy (these can be biological, psychological, environmental and/or social) and explain how the main components of the intervention are expected to produce therapeutic effects.
• Meaningfully integrate lived experience expertise relevant to the research topic in the research team.  
• Include collaborations between diverse and multidisciplinary teams covering expertise in trials, mental health science and the science of circadian systems and/or physical activity relevant to the proposed work.
• Demonstrate early thinking about how the intervention could be implemented, scaled, and adapted for real world use.

We are not able to answer any questions about this call until it opens in the week commencing 13 April 2026.

You must submit your application by 15:00 BST on the deadline day. We cannot accept late applications.

• Application launch: week commencing 13 April 2026
• Information webinar: 28 April 2026, 11:00 BST
• Scope check deadline: 29 June 2026, 17:00 BST
• Application deadline: 14 July 2026, 15:00 BST
• Shortlisting: September 2026
• Interviews: November 2026
• Funding decision: November 2026