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

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

#301

Post by antonfire »

pawelmurias wrote: post #224
hinkley wrote: post #2

I don’t know if this has changed for younger generations, but a lot of people, particularly those in intellectual pursuits, suffer to one degree or another from thinking of themselves as a brain being carried around as a meat sack. 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 dysfun…

> I don’t know if this has changed for younger generations, but a lot of people, particularly those in intellectual pursuits, suffer to one degree or another from thinking of themselves as a brain being carried around as a meat sack. 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…

Throwing blame on "the prevalence of psychotherapy" into this conversation, writing it all off to "pseudo-science" and emphasizing "lifestyle" (as in "if you exercised more you'd be better off", I guess) reads like a just-so story from a brain in a meat sack that's missing the substance of the conversation.

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.

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

#302

Post by greycol »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #214
satokema wrote: post #199

I walk to the store when it's reasonable. I wasn't top tier at it, but the most exercise I could tolerate was playing DDR, because there was a game to it that isn't just physical activity. 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 attac…

Meh, exercise is up to you to do it. Once convinced that there are benefits, I don’t know what other message you need beyond finding something that works for you. 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 tr…

I mean that's one of the reasons keto is so popular. For a lot of people they manage to lose weight while being able to enjoy what they eat while they'd have trouble sticking to better diets. There's obviously draw backs and if they eat only bacon a keto diet isn't going to help them but if they do keto "right" it's an improvement for them.

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.

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

#303

Post by ChatGTP »

antonvs wrote: post #291
ChatGTP wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you the spirituality police? You seem worried people have found a deeper connection to their bodies and then, for some reason label it as “spiritual” or “mumbo jumbo” and go on trying to diminish their experience, why ? Personally, the more I see of this anti-spiritual enforcement, the more I see intellectualism and science becoming the dogmatic religion of the Catholic Church when it was illegal to have unorthod…

I'm not enforcing or policing anything, or worried about anything, how did you get that from my comment? Please read it again. > "It’s also ok to debate the point sure, just be respectful?" Could you please explain where, in my previous comment, I wasn't being respectful? I was simply observing that the way people often talk about these ideas, including in this thread, resembles spirituality and religion. Which is tr…

> every argument I've read so far triggered my "religious/spiritual mumbo jumbo" detector quite hard.

Agreed. Sounds like a number of people have found a spiritual way to look at this, which seems a bit like a kind of quasi-religion, similar to the mystical aspects of Zen or yoga.

You wrote that?

What I don’t think is healthy to new ideas is bashing anything seemed spiritual with rationality and science.

They can coexist just fine so long as either side isn’t too dogmatic.

Personally, I think it's too common that people conflate spirituality and religion with shady institutions, which exist just as much in science and engineering as anywhere else.

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

#304

Post by antonfire »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #234
ChatGTP wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I think all the "meatbags" and "hardware running on software" analogies are actually really primitive and silly, even though I know some find them funny. 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.

> 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 se…

> 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.

Here's a related observation that tipped me a bit away from thinking about my body as the meatsack carrying my brain: cutting off a hand doesn't cut off the experience or sensation of having a hand. (E.g. people with missing limbs have phantom pain.)

Lots of emotions are at least partly "embodied". People feel love in the chest. Fear in the stomach.

Not sure about anybody else, but I feel frustration in my elbows. I strongly suspect that if my arms were removed, I would still feel frustration in my elbows. I don't think removing my physical arms would remove all the ways "having arms" is baked into my experience. Even if an external physicalist account accurately places those phenomena "in the brain" and not "in the arms", that's not really all that relevant to an internal account of someone actually having the experience.

As I see it, a human's brain-from-the-inside (mind? soul?) is "body-shaped" in a lot of ways. When I hear warnings against "reducing ourselves to a bunch of 'computers", I read them as prompts to recognize this. As warnings against recognizing and engaging with *only* the parts of one's experience that can fit into an "abstract reasoner" model.

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

#305

Post by sn9 »

fasterik wrote: post #142
hisnameisjimmy wrote: post #3

A key unlock for me was doing exercise where at some point I was trying so hard and breathing so aggressively that I couldn't really think anymore, I could only focus on the task at hand. For me, that's been biking up steep hills. I like biking because I get to see a bunch of cool stuff and if I go up hills I get a dope view. I joke that doing these rides feels like I'm re-boring my arteries because my heart pumps so…

I have to agree with the other comment about intense cardio. I got into long-distance running last year and it was a big mental shift for me to go from fast to slow running. Before that, I had always approached exercise as if harder is better. I was surprised to learn that even elite runners are doing 80% of their training at a pace that's really slow relative to their race pace. Of course training plans will vary de…

That still implies 20% of their training is moderate-high intensity.

You end up doing both.

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

#306

Post by [deleted] »

kpennell wrote: post #298
hinkley wrote: post #2

I don’t know if this has changed for younger generations, but a lot of people, particularly those in intellectual pursuits, suffer to one degree or another from thinking of themselves as a brain being carried around as a meat sack. 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 dysfun…

Kevin Kelly has a great essay on this called 'thinkism' : https://kk.org/thetechnium/the-thinkism-fallacy/

[deleted]

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

#307

Post by antonfire »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #300
haswell wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some would argue that we are deeply and intrinsically interconnected to the world around us in ways we seldom consider, and the idea that a vehicle could become part of “us” is not so farfetched. If you keep going down the rabbit hole of looking for “you”, the only consistent answer that comes up is that there is no single or stable center, and that the boundaries of “you” are not so easy to find. Going deeper still…

> If you keep going down the rabbit hole of looking for “you”, the only consistent answer that comes up is that there is no single or stable center, and that the boundaries of “you” are not so easy to find. I'm in agreement with that; in a way, it's a superset of the point I was making. What is or isn't "you" feels variable, fluid. An experienced driver might find that, when driving, their sense of self extends to en…

> But if, instead of extending it, you try to contract it, then without crossing into metaphysics, you'll stop at the brain.

Dunno about the other poster, but I can promise you I will not.

I think it's kind of a pointless exercise to try to draw a physical boundary of what's "me" and what isn't, but carrying that exercise a bit further: How much of the spinal cord can I exclude in my "sense of me" before I "cross into metaphysics"? If I drop my eyes from my sense of "me", seems like I could also drop the neurons in the brain that are responsible solely for visual processing of input from them. Or is that a step too far and "into metaphysics"?

Heck, I think the classic nerd brain-in-a-meatsuit position doesn't really stop at the brain here either. E.g. I think it places an accurate simulation of one's brain running on different hardware on about the same level as the meat brain, and "you" wouldn't know the difference. That's just not a thing we can do (yet?). Does that position cross into metaphysics?

In practice, I "contract my sense of self" when it comes to my thoughts too, which (presumably) all happen in the brain. I often find it useful to ask "where did that thought come from?" and give an external account ("ah, I picked it up from X") and let that have some bearing on the next thought. I also have "intrusive thoughts"; the act of labeling a thought an "intrusive thought" is (arguably, partially) an act of contracting one's sense of self to exclude that thought.

I'm pretty sure this conversation had "crossed into metaphysics" by the time discussion about expansion/contraction of one's "sense of you" was happening; not when the contraction reached the brain.

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

#308

Post by firecall »

hinkley wrote: post #2

I don’t know if this has changed for younger generations, but a lot of people, particularly those in intellectual pursuits, suffer to one degree or another from thinking of themselves as a brain being carried around as a meat sack. 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 dysfun…

Indeed, as I’ve learned this is a western perspective!

Old Alan Watts lectures cover this nicely, and can be listened to for free on YouTube and elsewhere.

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

#309

Post by firecall »

lloeki wrote: post #237
safety1st wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a non-spiritual, non-religious perspective, as an atheist I don't believe that souls exist, I don't subscribe to any religious teachings and I don't do any kind of meditative or spiritual stuff. 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 gori…

> I don't subscribe to any religious teachings and I don't do any kind of meditative or spiritual stuff. It sounds like you're conflating meditation-the-exercise with spiritual and religious approaches. Fundamentally they are unrelated. Taking it to the extreme one can consider the mind to be a process produced by the brain+, no soul involved. Taken that way, meditation is no different than weight lifting. The same w…

Yes, and it’s interesting that Prayer in Christian Churches is essentially a form of group meditation!

These practices date back thousands of years, and likely came out of the understanding of the importance of meditation for a healthy society.

The importance of meditation, yoga-like practice and so on has been muddled in our neo Christian western cultures.

Christianity separates mind, body and soul.

So perhaps now US style Christian prayer has become more about worship and less about self awareness.

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

#310

Post by Swizec »

mupuff1234 wrote: post #151
Swizec wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was a little confused about the “less is better” part of the article. 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.

So why do it?

Type 2 fun. I enjoy overcoming challenges.
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