We are learning more about mind body connections and this is very not true (the ways the vagus nerve can totally fuck with your mental state is terrifying, and there are people with dysfunctions that are five times worse).
Any exercise where you think about your body as “you” helps with the dysphoria, and being integrated helps with a whole lot of other things.
Especially for men, who are conditioned to not give themselves permission to have feelings and sensations affect their behavior (and then surprise! Are affected anyway, with zero attempts at healthy coping skills).
Much later I discovered contemporary dance, quit my phd in machine learning and became a professional dancer, which really deepened my body awareness and transformed my relationship to being a body even more.
I remember, in the beginning of my dance career, after a three month dance intensive I applied to a (Haskell) programming job again to finance my dance education and went to a computer science conference. It was a bit of surreal experience. The people at the conference were very nice and intellectually curious people and I liked them, but the contrast to the environment in dance communities was very strong. I felt like almost everybody there thought of them-self as a brain, piloting a body like a big mecha. In the dance environments, even during lunch breaks etc., it always felt like there was a lot of subtle awareness in everybody about their own body, the other bodies in the space, the distances and empty space between bodies, a non-verbal channel full of quiet energy and information. In the computer science conference this channel was just dead.
Checks username... yeah that checks out. ;)
Something that struck me years ago was in the documentary about Philip Glass - Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts. He did a weekly physical class that is meant to tie mind and body together (I forgot the name, I watched this like 15 years ago). As he said he did it for like 5 years and felt like he got nothing out of it but did it regardless, until one day it just all synced up and he 'got it'.
A similar thing happen with me over the years, the more I got out and moving, the less I found myself involved in the realms of high intellect. Not in an 'ignorance is bliss' kind of way, but not identifying with it as much. It went from "why dance, lift, walk etc - it achieves nothing" to, that is it. It is the flow of the world. It doesn't achieve anything because it doesn't have to, it is a happening, like all life and the universe itself is but an happening. I have had a very similar experience to you with these conferences, it just feels kind of dead in a way, or more you can sense the lack of potential.
That disconnect between the bring and the body is something I have seen many times with those that partake in Buddhism and its many flavors. It was Ajahn Brahm said when he was in university and beginning his path, that one day he was talking with other students and professors and suddenly realized that he did not want to be like these people and that the same path as them, to be a brain and nothing more. He is now a Theravada Buddhist in Western Australia.
In fact in my yogic training, we learned to apply the 'i have' vs 'i am' as much as possible - directly opposite of what you are saying.
As someone growing religiously right now, I like the framework of the body being a vehicle for the soul (or at least, the mind) resonates a lot more.
That said, weight training completely transformed my relationship with my body. You can only lug a big hunk of iron into the air so many times before you start thinking about how much we really have in common with a gorilla. Yeah we grew opposable thumbs and a much more active prefrontal cortex, but 96% of our DNA is the same as theirs after all. By the pound we're mostly monkeys or something like them and it's a bit conceited to imagine otherwise.
If you're a knowledge worker who sits in a chair and thinks all day it's easy to believe you're nothing like a monkey, but strenuous exercise dispels that notion because it recruits all of your body's monkey systems and makes all of the parts of you work together. In retrospect it shouldn't be surprising at all that letting most of your anatomy wither away is unhealthy and puts you out of balance. It's like getting your car serviced but telling the shop that you only want them to look at the electronics.
Tai chi has a warmup that’s an easy shift into standing meditation.
I don't feel I can achieve this in my flat therefore instead of switching my whole career as you did, I'm trying to move to a big peace of land we're I can be / have to be more active.
I do think so that IT is growing more in a less super nerdy (I don't move) area.
Plenty of my friends got more active over the years
Anyways, as someone who identifies both as a computer scientist and as a dancer, I can definitely relate to your experience:-)
After that, the more cardio exercise you get the better...
This was me for most of my life.
Yoga has been life changing. Cultivating full body awareness and presence opened my eyes to states of being that I didn’t know I was capable of experiencing.
I can feel the subtle changes in strength each day, or a touch of soreness, or the exact spot that anxiety has settled into in my gut.
Gaining the level of focus needed brought with it a deeper and broader awareness of my emotional states, and the realization that I have some separation from them, i.e. they != me. This in turn helped me unwind some big things I’d been dealing with in therapy.
In retrospect, it makes so much sense to think of my body as an integral part of who I am and how I feel.
But that’s a mode of thinking that I was certainly never introduced to as a kid, and never experienced by default.
“The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.” — Thucydides
I'll never be one of those athletes who lets go of conscious control and runs off muscle memory, but I've really enjoyed learning enough about my body that I can use it the way it was designed. It feels good when you go from "some part of me is always hurting" to "every step I take recruits muscles from foot and ankle to upper back because I learned how to use all of them against gravity".
A lot of people feel this way, but the reality is that we already do almost everything without conscious control, we just don’t tend to notice.
Not to mention the majority of the systems in our body are also beyond conscious control, and for many, beyond awareness completely (e.g. the nervous system).
The book “Flow” is a really interesting read, and describes how one’s approach to daily life can lead to something closer to that athlete’s state.
This is closer than most people realize.
Oh but you absolutely must try it! I assume being in the zone mentally is a familiar thing to you, so you really ought to try the physical equivalent!
The prevalence of psychotherapy perpetuates this approach with promotes talking over countless problems with some pseudo-science witch doctor while having a horrible lifestyle that will cause endless ones to appear.
Just like "meditation" is many different things, and "exercise" is many different things, and "healthcare" is many things, and "thinking" is many different things, "psychotherapy" is many different things.
One of the first things by current therapist asked me was more or less how embodied I was. I suspect of all the relationships with other people in my life, the one with my psychotherapist is the one that's most likely to be help me build out a fuller relationship to my body in the way the grandparent comment is advocating.
The therapist before that focused on behavioral "lifestyle" changes when feelings came up, in a way that I guess superficially follows the "I am a body" model, but really felt like it only added distance and abstraction to my relationship to myself. I guess that approach was grounded in a scientific evidence base that those kinds of interventions are what moves metrics.
I don't think that it's unique to the mind body connection either. It's very popular for people to try and look at things in isolation, to try and "scientifically prove" that what they are doing is efficacious, to distill to first principles.
In an academic context this is absolutely the correct thing to do.
But for our lives? You are a human being - you evolved to think, to make love, to run, to get outside and touch grass, to labour for things, to... well, we are general intelligences - generalists.
There is something to be said for accepting that and not looking for the "efficiency hack" that allows you to minimise what it is to be the thing that you _are_.
Can you expand on that and / or provide some links? Very curious. Thanks.
>> Any exercise where you think about your body as “you”
what does it mean to think of my body as me? and can you provide examples of these exercises? thank you!
They feel like their bodies are just the mechanical thing that carries them around. They don’t think of the systemic impact of things that affect their body and consequently, their brain and mental states. E.g. gut health plays a major role in mental health, but this is not an intuitive concept for many people.
Some have argued this is an outcome of Judeo-Christian thinking, e.g. my soul is not of this world, this body isn’t my best body, my soul passes on when I die, etc. These ideas are deeply ingrained from an early age, during the time in which one is forming their concept of self.
I am me. The intellect, the mind, the person.
My body is what carries my intellect, not completely distinct from the way a car or bicycle or wheelchair might. I don't identify with my body as "me". I have at best a cordial relationship with my body.
We are RE-learning. Look at all the "new science" on psychedelics. Or gut bacteria. Etc.
I'm not sure what the bottleneck is...we did not evolve to sit all day, inside, at desk, gazing into screens. It really is *that* simple.
p.s. While nothing revolutionary new per se "The Comfort Crisis" by Michael Easter goes a solid job making the case for "this is where we came from, stop thinking where we are is compatible."
Fair point. I got accused of the “noble savage” myth recently in another post and I went the wrong way with it. In trying to be better stewards of the natural world we are looking at vestige civilizations that never lost it, but the fact of the matter is that if you watch history shows, one I’m thinking of was a recreation of feudal life in Tudor England, Western Europeans used to “know” many, many of these things too, but they forgot it all in the Industrial Revolution, then encountered civilizations that hadn’t forgotten, and ground them to dust, instead of remembering.
After hundreds of years of trying to solve problems with the same level of thinking that created them, there’s always a set of people who are asking questions about the trip we are on. There’s a fine line between pastoralism and compromise that we haven’t worked it out yet, and we don’t even always see it when it happens.
There’s a circumstantial chain of evidence out there that David Hume injected Eastern Philosophy into The Enlightenment. If that’s even a little true, this big philosophical Step Forward was really a step “back”, or maybe sideways.
And I think we still don’t know where the Stoics got their ideas from. Themselves, or Buddhism?
What I love about Apple Vision Pro is that it has the potential to solve this!
If we reduce ourselves to a bunch of "computers" there's not much left for the stuff that actually matters, like the actual awesomeness that is having a body, which is highly sensitive and able to experience amazing things.
This does not follow, except for stripping away the religious/spiritual part. Computers are amazing! So is hardware! And so is the dance of software and hardware that makes magic happen.
I've seen nothing so far in this whole thread that would convince me I should stop thinking about my body as the meatsack carrying my brain, as every argument I've read so far triggered my "religious/spiritual mumbo jumbo" detector quite hard.
This is not to say the body isn't an important and tightly integrated part of the experience. But the fact remains that a hand or a heart or a lung can be removed or replaced without loss of self. A brain can't.
What are some examples of this?
She's in some sort of program now that if I understand what they're actually doing, they're trying to manage the vagus response.
Old Alan Watts lectures cover this nicely, and can be listened to for free on YouTube and elsewhere.
After that, the more cardio exercise you get the better...
I joke that doing these rides feels like I'm re-boring my arteries because my heart pumps so hard. I feel great afterward. Recommend!
You end up doing both.
I think I agree with you that these experiences are pivotal, because they are moments when you just are without thinking. That constant monologue some of us carrying our heads is gone, and the universe didn’t end.
Taking that information and finding the spot halfway between the two is the real lesson, IME.
Heck, a week ago I did a 100 mile MTB race, with the goal of finishing and being happy. While bits and pieces are there, some chatting with folks and things I saw along the trail, but I honestly do not remember most of the ~9 hours I was riding. It was just a thing I was doing, disconnected from most of the rest of the world, and content doing it.
(Note, I'm talking about XC/cross-country mountain biking, and to some extent trail biking. NOT the big downhill/jump/whatever stuff that comes up most often in media when sees mountain biking. It's still quite exciting, but far safer because it's really just riding bikes on hiking-ish trails.)
Another example - it's pretty damn hard to think about doing the laundry when you have 100+ kg on your back.
I have found my biggest mistakes were all when I had gotten comfortable with a weight and ended up losing mental focus. Thanfully no injuries. It seems I have to be nearing my edge to be forced into focus. I am better at opting in to focus now thanks to lifting I feel. Similar to downhill riding, all my crashes have been on easy stuff as I lost focus.
I also hate cardio but it is much more palatable if I'm on a mountain bike and climbing up for a descent trail.
I’ve found Yoga and cycling to be the right fit, and they allow me to challenge myself without feeling too hyped up later.
That being said...
I really don't know any serious athletes who enjoy going to practices or going to the gym to workout. In my opinion it's rarely about enjoying the moment. Rather, it's about the way it makes a person feel when they're done. Or, it's about reaching a long-term goal and the joy that comes with accomplishing something currently out of reach.
And, of course, that type of joy can come from a wide variety of activities - exercise, coding, music, arts, etc.
Edit: Removed unnecessary quotes.
It probably helps that increased appetite never fazed me. I am hungry now, cool, I'm still not eating until dinner regardless of how I feel.
Luckily I had been building up the habit for years in advance but that was the most I had ever exercised and it was also the most I had ever been depressed. In my case I don’t think the exercise helped at all. Perhaps if I hadn’t of been exercising maybe I wouldn’t even be here now though… I’m not entirely sure. Finding the right medication and getting therapy has been what has really helped me. With those two I can see an almost day and night difference but with the exercise I noticed no difference at all. At least I had a great physique though!
I agree with you about therapy and medication: in my experience, they are the only things that work. Expensive though.
As a side note, I sort of feel triggered by this kind of article.
Depressed? Have you:
- exercised enough?
- drank enough water?
- slept enough?
- meditated enough?
- gotten outside enough?
It's passed as "helpful advice" by well-meaning people but always makes me feel like I'm not "enough". If I've done all those things but I'm still depressed, I must not have done those things "enough". Does that make sense? I'm so tired of trying to explain how hard I'm working, I just don't talk about it with people for fear they'll bring out "the list" of things I ought to be doing, and I'll have to explain that, yes, I get 8 hours of sleep a night. Yes, I drink a gallon of water a day. Etc.
Therapy is what finally taught me how to actually process my thoughts and feelings, and let me make real progress against depression.
And now, when I go for an outside run or walk, I can spend that time focusing purely purely on my internal thoughts/feelings. Done like this, exercise can be a great therapeutic activity - but it's not the dopamine or act of exercise itself, it's creating the time for self-therapy.
> Physical activity had medium effects on depression (median effect size=−0.43, IQR=−0.66 to –0.27), anxiety (median effect size=−0.42, IQR=−0.66 to –0.26) and psychological distress (effect size=−0.60, 95% CI −0.78 to –0.42), compared with usual care across all population. The largest benefits were seen in people with depression, HIV and kidney disease, in pregnant and postpartum women, and in healthy individuals. Higher intensity physical activity was associated with greater improvements in symptoms
I think comparing exercise to drinking is pretty silly and doesn't suggest a wide berth of knowledge on the topic. I'm glad to hear that therapy was the silver bullet for you, but if there's one thing that's _abundantly_ clear about mental health treatments, it's that there's no one-size-fits-all solution.
What about the studies with clinically depressed people who treat their symptoms as effectively as SSRIs with exercise? I'm thinking specifically of a running therapy study that was done recently, I haven't read the study linked by OP.
I find that exercise without adequate sleep grinds me down into a twilight zone state of everything seeming a bit unreal.
Last time I had a period similar to yours, the problem was too much screen time on social media and gaming, which was disrupting my sleep.
I cut those out, started feeling tired enough to sleep again, and bounced back to normality.
Now that I am in a healthier state of mind, I find that exercise helps a lot more as long as I can do it in a healthy way.
Then I hurt my back three years ago doing weight lifting. I haven't been able to practice BJJ ever since, and I've been suffering with constant anxiety for the past three years. Every day since has been a struggle, with some really bad days, and some better ones.
Like when you see a master of some art, they do not stop and hesitate to do something, they just do it and it looks so effortless and yet it is an amazing thing they have done.
This is 100% false. I trained for about 3 years and the number of people that had to drop BJJ or stop training for periods of time due to injuries was high, including myself. It's a sport where you accumulate a lot of minor injuries, especially if you roll at a semi competitive pace. This doubled for people who would come in from non-athletic backgrounds (as in white collar professionals not on TRT)
That said it was the most fun i've had with sports in my life
if you're a younger man, it's a much more competitive environment. since MMA has become popular, there are a lot of guys coming in who did high school wrestling or maybe a little combatives in the Army -- so purportedly novices but in fact already quite skilled and fit. some of these have big macho attitudes and enjoy kicking your ass if you're an actual untrained beginner.
Being a good jiu jitsu teacher doesn't necessarily mean you're good at handling this dynamic. Some gyms handle this well, and BJJ gyms often have informal ways of "encouraging" this kind of guy to cool off but I noticed people don't always bring them out on behalf of a younger guy getting slammed around. So you either have to be a very fast learner or willing to be knocked around and embarrassed a lot more than the other students.
These kinds of articles are always annoying because it invites a certain kind of person who will gush unendingly about how great exerting yourself is.
For me, exerting myself sucks, it is only something I want to do when it's attached to a game I want to play (and even that gets stale). It's only ever something I am either forcing myself to do (yuck) or doing for something besides the physical aspect of it (saving gas, playing a video game).
But instead of health advice being tailored to someone with my neurological makeup that causes this dislike of useless exertion, I'm just told that I need to "meditate" more or do yoga/X. If anything, meditation makes my body seem less like "me".
Just to add my contrarian two cents to a comment section that is otherwise mostly the former.
This complaint reminds me of someone digging into a bowl of ice cream and going “still waiting for someone to convince me to eat healthy on MY terms.”
Your comment is contrarian since you presumably agree that there are benefits of exercise. Maybe you’re trying to convince yourself that your level or exertion is enough?
Giving alternatives to marginally improve might be more useful than a tough love aproach of saying "Since you know the best thing to do, if you don't want to do it that's on you".
In that vein some things that may improve the amount of exercise you do:
Joining social sports club, the focus may be more on wining/improving skills/social aspect than exercise and so may help take focus off the unenjoyable part and a commitment to your group/team/opponent may be more motivating than a commitment to themselves for some people.
Walking/cycling desk setup. An initial outlay in cost but if it's there and you're doing it while concentrating on something else it might be a significant improvement.
Setting an alarm/timer to do a set of weights or squats every hour or so, stops your muscles atrophing if nothing else and will mean when you do purposfully exercise your not immediately discouraged by how sore you are 1 minute into it.
Any everyday routine you can more easily force into your day. Maybe a jog around the block/up and down apartment stairs before your morning shower. Or join the gym that is along your commute rather than the cheaper one that you need to purposefully drive/walk to. Maybe you listen to a chapter of audiobook while doing pallates as soon as you get home. Forming a habit has the highest initial cognitive load, quite often it's easier(not easy) to tie it to the begining of or end of another action you do everyday than it is to do something at a specific time.
Don't let best be the enemy of better.
Quite a lot to unpack here. I would argue the advice given is really good and valid for most people and so that's a good thing. I am sorry you feel under-represented and hope you find something valuable for yourself elsewhere.
Additionally I think lots of people find that they have to force themselves to start and finish a workout and only some eventually come to learn to like it. But for many it starts as a chore like preparing food or doing laundry or taking a shower. It costs time and effort and often hurts. And people can go for a while without any of those but it usually has consequences which are usually worse in the long run than the initial invest.
You seem to have a fairly static view of who "you" are. I used to be in the camp of "my body is just a vehicle for my brain" camp and did not understand why I would exercise at all since I was always skinny (but also super weak) and my mind was what I was working with. And then my grandpa told me: "A healthy mind likes to reside in a healthy body" and that took a few years to really sink in. And now I realize that pushing myself through regular workouts and making myself deliberately suffer exhaustion, fatigue and pain makes me more happy, stable and relaxed in general and I even think of myself as a fit athletic person now and made that part of my identity.
And lastly I am kind of curious about a thing: You said that you only want to do it when it's attached to a game. So if you share the notion that exercise is good and you already know that this is how it's easier for you to do it, then why not focus on exercises which are also games. There are so many of them. And for everyone else who does not need or want a game, meditating or doing yoga seems to be another great venue to start.
For me, past age 40, it was transformative finding a neurodivergent personal trainer and getting into weightlifting (yes, this is a cliche, everyone is doing it). Having an appointment and working with somebody makes me actually do it.
It's not always euphoric. I would like to make the too-obvious point that exercise is often really tiring. But the feeling of power and capability can be really valuable at times, even if it's fragile and physically contingent.
What works for me might not work for you, but my broader point is that exercise != exercise. Try to find something that you like, and that you can fit into your schedule. Even if it's only a 15 min walk each day, during which you can e.g. listen to music or a podcast, reflect, do some people watching just or do nothing.
Changing your tires and doing an oil change also sucks, not doing it will suck way more in the long run.
I exercise, not because I like it but because it's the right thing to do. Whatever misery you feel while doing it will be a fraction of the misery you'll feel when your body will give up on you if you don't do it.
It's an investment in the future, probably the single most beneficial investment you can make actually
Even for those people who feel the "meat-mecha" disconnection, the mecha benefits from maintenance.
"For Case, who’d lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. In the bars he’d frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh." -- Neuromancer, 1984 https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/293994/neuromancer-b...
Yes, if the worst decisions in life can be ie smoking cigarettes or being lazy couch potato, the best is easily to work out somehow, anyhow.
Your comment isn't particularly contrarian, and agrees mostly with the article. It says consistently throughout the article that the type of exercise doesn't matter, and that people should do exercise they enjoy, and tailor their choices towards their own personal wellbeing needs.
If DDR is what gets you going, then have at it (dancing is specifically highlighted in the article as beneficial). If yoga doesn't work for you, don't do it.
Acknowledging my broken brain, I avoid taking my car anywhere that I could reasonably walk or bike, because having a destination makes the exercise easier. And I’ve leaned in heavily to DDR, creating a semi-permanent station for it in my basement, complete with balance bar. If not for those things I would have nary an ounce of muscle on my body.
It gets my heartrate up, though I don't ride every day, so I'm not sure if I'm reaching the threshold for the recommended amount of exercise. But it's better than nothing.
I purchased both a Hybrid and MTB bike one year and haven't turned back. I use a lot of Strava - compete against myself, friends and strangers. My thirst for competition is filled, plus I'm in extremely great cardio shape.
So I've taken up hand tool only woodworking as a hobby. It keeps me active and allows me to trick myself into learning a new skill and having fun while making sure I won't die in 10 years time.
Exercise sucks, it really, really sucks. So work out some other thing that is exercise-like and try and trick yourself.
For me that's cycling and kayaking, alternating every day. I had tried running just because it's convenient and requires very little gear, but found it incredibly boring. But many of my friends absolutley love running. So asking others might help with some ideas, but ods are, you'll prefer something else.
That said, don't expect magic. There are no silver bullets. I often see people asking about ADHD and related issues being told to go out an exercise. In my experience you'll be a slightly fitter, slightly healthier, slightly happier person with the same ADHD issues as before. Absolutely go do it, but keep your expectations realistic.
Depression Four reviews42 44 57 58 presented analyses by weekly session duration (68 component RCTs, >5016 participants, online supplemental eFigure 12). The median SMD for ≤150 min/week and >150 min/week was –0.58 (IQR=–0.77 to –0.30) and –0.29 (IQR=–0.40 to –0.07), respectively.
Anxiety One review58 provided analyses by weekly session duration (17 component RCTs, online supplemental eFigure 13). The median SMDs for <150 min/week and ≥150 min/week were –1.23 and –0.99, respectively.
(For mental health.)
high intensity would be work you can do for only maybe a minute, not twenty, and as a result it won't keep your heart rate elevated very long.
so if they're basically saying 30 minutes 5 days a week, that's low intensity exercise.
[0] https://dutchreview.com/culture/history/netherlands-flat/
Even 5 minutes of HARD rowing a day and you’ll see amazing results.
It's very convenient, weather independent, joint-stress free, measurable with an app and multitasking-friendly! I just attach an iPad there, get the noise-cancelling headphones and row for an hour with my YouTube playlist that I fill regularly.
For Concept2, be sure to add additional cushions, my a.. hurts after 30 minutes without them, and after 1.5h with...
Start slow, find something that you enjoy. Escalate as and when you can.
Too many people think of exercise as like, get on the treadmill and run as hard as you can and make yourself feel like shit to the extent that you can't go again for a week. The vast majority of people, even people who train hard, don't do things like that.
When I was active duty in the navy through the 90's I specialized in psychiatry and worked at an inpatient psych ward.
One of the things we did for all patients was force them to go to the gym every day.
Yes, force.
Military psych wards were a bit different than civilian. You could give orders.
In this case, it was necessary - the last thing you'll willingly do when you're suicidally depressed is exercise.
Getting a nearly catatonically depressed patient out of bed was a huge challenge, getting them to the gym even harder.
But we did it. Every day.
In my experience, this was more effective treatment for depression than any meds or psychotherapy. It worked wonders, way faster than SSRIs.
Not so great for the psychotic disorders though. We had some "interesting" incidents at the gym.
Outdoor though you're right, totally different demographic and very few of them are software engineers.
The grueling, daily, multi-hour practices... the extreme physical conditioning required to succeed... the extremely nerve-wracking matches, especially the lead up to them... honestly, my FAANG job is a total joke compared to the difficulty of this stuff. I think wrestling prepared me quite well for life.
According to reader mode this article is about 10 minutes long so instead of reading it, go for a walk.
This is true if you're going to exercise once. On the other hand, finding an exercise that's good for you and that you can keep with might be worth investing some time, because you can use this knowledge for years. Even a 10 hour research project is only .75 minutes per workout when amortized over 2 years of 4x per week workouts.
Any form of cycling really clears my head. The sensory stimulation, the forced focus, the sense of freedom, it's wonderful.
Didn't go so well.
You reach an unfortunate point when depressed that makes it difficult to listen to actually useful advice. It's an unfortunate state of mind to say the least.
It's of very little consequence to you. You suggest they try something /obvious/. It's reasonable to assume they might have considered it.
How is that going to be perceived positively as a suggestion? Do you think it possible?
For someone with major depression, maybe it's like suffering from major arterial bleeding and we suggest an band-aid because it "can help stop bleeding"
For me it was fixing a shower by myself that started that upward cycle.
For someone else it could be a single exercise session that leads to it.
It's always worth a try to encourage someone to take that first step.
If your sleep or nutrition is trash, exercise will help you identify that.
This is exactly why I use a Quest 2 / pro to workout. When you’re killing zombies, fighting ninjas, or boxing fighters, working out is almost always novel. I’m just playing VR video games, which is why it’s easy to keep a routine even after 3 years
I hope Apple Vision can provide this benefit to people who are still skittish about even trying the current generation of VR headsets
Beat Saber
Les Mills Body combat - trainer guided workout where you can compete against player recorded avatars
FitXR - trainer guided workout where you can compete against player recorded avatars. Subscription only but has HIIT, boxing, and dance workouts
Ninja Legends - you’re fighting ninjas
Knockout League - Punch Out in VR with lots of variety
synth riders - music rhythm game that has a lot of variety on its own
Holopoint - shooting targets with bow and arrow. Lots of moving and dodging involved
Mothergunship forge - bullet hell shooter. Lots of dodging
Pistol Whip - bullet hell music rhythm game. Lots of dodging like Neo
Path of the Warrior - double dragon in VR
Until You Fall - slashing sword game
GORN - gladiator game
Creed - another boxing game
Punch Fit - minimalist boxing training game
Racket NX - racket ball inside a dome
Rezzil Player - lots of mini workouts like heading soccer balls
Stride - mirrors edge in VR
I tend to rotate these games, but I always try out new games for novelty.
There’s also a lot of games where you can walk or jog in place like Fallout or Skyrim that I didn’t count here. Not to mention a fighting game and soccer game with full body tracking that’s PCVR only
In the Bay Area, we’re blessed with multiple nature preserves that are beautiful and stunning, but it takes me 20-40 minutes one way just to drive to one so those hikes tend to be limited to weekends. With AR VR, I can instantly just workout in my living room. It’s a big time saver
It’s also really easy to make excuses not to do it eg it’s raining, it’s too dark, the air isn’t good today etc…
Our bodies use of exercise for healthy regulation of our mental state is probably an evolved dependency of that life as well.
I was a little confused about the “less is better” part of the article. I think it just meant diminishing returns with more exercise, but it says that less is actually better.
An hour or more of moderate activity per day? Dunno about that impossibility of one hour. Perhaps you're talking about some hectic Amazon-style working environmen,t or people that just had babies, or commute for 1 hours each way?
"Adults aged 18–64 years"
> Should do at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity throughout the week, or do at least 75 minutes of vigorous-intensity physical activity, or an equivalent combination of both.
> For additional health benefits, adults should increase their moderate-intensity physical activity to 300 minutes per week, or equivalent.
> Muscle-strengthening activities should be done involving major muscle groups on 2 or more days a week.
I ~workout~ train 20+ hours per week. This is definitely bad for my mental health, but the goals won't achieve themselves.
Turns out qualifying for Boston is no joke.
But Aji is attacking near a loss, turning the loss into a win (very, very rarely, resurrecting the dead pieces). The existence of a failure on the board can put pressure on neighboring areas, and they can still sometimes be turned to a redemption story. Lose ten stones here but gain 8 nearby. Still a loss but maybe enough to win the overall game.
Not mentioned here that I think should be considered is how much of the benefit was just due to _novelty_. If the effect wears off over time then at least part of it may be going out and doing something different.
It’s not only physically exhausting, it’s also mentally very difficult. And not just because it requires deep levels of knowledge to be good, but it also resets any preconceived notions of strength. It’s not uncommon for a new white belt male that weighs 200lbs to get absolutely waxed by a 100lbs brown belt female. I see it happen all the time. Of course, as you belt up, and gain more understanding of the sport, there are ways to utilize a size and strength advantages. But that’s secondary to knowledge.
Though don't discount other forms of martial arts, the amount of mental effort in kickboxing is still high, the coordination needed to be planning your foot work and balance out 2 or 3 moves in advance is non-trivial and that alone can take years to master!
(Also IMHO kickboxing is a more intense workout than rolling, my opinion consisting of a polar heart rate monitor strapped to my chest ;) )
exercise has made my anxiety and depression worse. I've done all kinds from weight training to ramping up to a full marathon
I don't believe this metareview one bit
For some reason I really dislike casual talk amongst people about this subject. When people causally give simple solutions to their depression I wonder if they were actually “clinically depressed.” Or they say X helped but forgot to mention they were also on drug Y and seeing a therapist Z many times a week. My favorite internet depression cure is travel.
Simply, it's not helpful. Fat people know they're fat because they have a caloric surplus. They've tried eating less. They're not stupid.
I think the defensiveness people exhibit is a byproduct of their cumulative reactions to a bunch of unsolicited advice. My own (unsolicited) advice would be: don't give people advice, unless they specifically ask for it. I can guarantee you that every depressed person on the planet has heard that exercise is good for your mental health. Instead, you can say something like, "I'm very sorry that you're having a hard time. I want you to know that you're important to me, and if there's ever anything I can do to help, let me know"
Problem?
Haven't read the whole study, but i assume people with fewer symptoms of X are able and motivated to exercise more because they have fewer symptoms.. And the article is just inventing the most interesting causal link for a study that doesn't travel far from correlation?
I am interested in knowing if my thinking on the benefits of socializing are out of date, on this.
https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/early/2023/03/02/bjsports-2022-...
It’s no that you won’t face depression and anxiety but now you have groked the skills in your body, you are able to answer it with action and not just give mental arguments.
After that, the more cardio exercise you get the better...
We are close in getting inhibitors that block enzymes from breaking down endocannabinoids !
