THE AUTHORS REPLY

Extract

We thank Kawada (1) for his interest in our recent work (2) and the Journal for giving us the opportunity to respond to these points. Kawada makes a number of specific comments about our results.

First of all, we agree that long commute times may reduce the amount of time a person has for other daily activities (e.g., personal care, sleep, exercise). Emphasis on reduced time for personal care can be seen in the work cited by Kawada (3, 4) and is a highly possible explanation of the relationship between commuting and mental health. Kawada (1) also suggests that longer commuting time means that people have less time for home activities and shorter sleep duration. Again, we do not dispute these as potential explanations for what we have found in our paper (and we also make reference to them in our discussion of our results (2)).

Kawada (1) states that biopsychosocial mechanisms may underpin the relationship between commuting and mental health. We have no problem accepting this explanation. Our study, however, was not designed to directly test biological mechanisms of the relationship between commuting and mental health.