A new study looks at how exercise can help alleviate anxiety and depression

Not the op but the first quote completely describes my approach.

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.

I agree with this.

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_.

A lot of people are saying Jiu Jitsu. I'd actually extend that to most contact martial arts. I wrestled in high school and it was fucking brutal. In fact, wrestling made me appreciate my life a lot more, because it's so much easier than wrestling. They call it "the most fun you never want to have again".

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.

The thing that made me transition from a mindset of “I have a body” to “I am a body”, was actually Zen meditation. This was surprising to me. Before I tried it, I thought of meditation as a purely mental thing, I didn’t expect that the first really noticeable effect of regular meditation would be a changed relationship to my body,

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.

A lot of people feel like “they” are somewhere inside their head. They look out at the world through eyes that are windows. The world is out there, “I” am in here. In this undefined black hole of “me”, mysterious, but definitely separate from the world and what’s “out there” past one’s eyes.

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.