But you have to be able to break the depression cycle to begin with in order to do things like exercise. It's the chicken before the egg problem.
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
#82To what extent? Being too tired and exhausted to have negative thoughts doesn't necessarily mean that exercise itself is a fundamental solution.
I think you are learning different skills as you explore different forms of exercise. As you develop those habits of exercise and connection to people, you are able to answer the call of depression with walking one day, running the second day, doing Yoga the third day, cycling the 4th day, communicating with people and so on.
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.
Re: A new study looks at how exercise can help alleviate anxiety and depression
#83I’ve had major clinical depression for the last 15 years or so. The first 4 months of this year was the lowest I’ve ever been. During that time though I was going to the gym 6 days a week doing weight lifting and then I would cycle 50km a day on top of that. All of it was on autopilot however, my depression just wouldn’t allow me to focus on anything but it.
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!
Re: A new study looks at how exercise can help alleviate anxiety and depression
#84I've read sudoku bing good exercise to avoid early deterioration as you age--use it or lose it. I find Go (board game) to be more interesting and develops a lot of cross-transferable skills outside of only games or memory. Playing StarCraft 2 is also a fun(?) way of maintaining speed.
Aji is my favorite concept from Go. In Go is it common for a failure to persist on the board. There are better moves, and some fights have to be won twice if you capture, so it’s better to leave them until the end.
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.
Re: A new study looks at how exercise can help alleviate anxiety and depression
#85A 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…
You might be interested in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breath:_The_New_Science_of_a...
Re: A new study looks at how exercise can help alleviate anxiety and depression
#86Nobody mentioning rock climbing? Come on, I bet half of Hacker News partakes in it
Sounds like a hugely echo bubbly view of the popularity of rock climbing and the HN demographic
Indoor climbers are all software engineers in some cities. In Seattle and San Francisco in particular, nearly everyone I meet there is also a software engineer. The gyms are so expensive that they are the only ones who can afford it with FAANG subsidies.
Outdoor though you're right, totally different demographic and very few of them are software engineers.
Re: A new study looks at how exercise can help alleviate anxiety and depression
#87I 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…
> 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
What are some examples of this?
Re: A new study looks at how exercise can help alleviate anxiety and depression
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
It promotes higher intensity exercising. If you’re breathing hard, that’s a good sign. (For mental health.)
that's not how i understand the term "high intensity." jogging makes me pant, but i wouldn't call it high intensity, because i can do it for twenty minutes. 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.
Low intensity shouldn't involve panting at all, because low intensity exercises are designed for people with specific health issues where anything above slight exercise is dangerous to them. [consider: significant osteoperosis, serious heart disease, etc] Stretching is low intensity exercise.
Also, an exercise you can only keep up for 20 minutes at a time is pretty high intensity.
Re: A new study looks at how exercise can help alleviate anxiety and depression
#89I 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…
> We are learning more about mind body connections and this is very not true... 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 ca…
> We are RE-learning.
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?
Re: A new study looks at how exercise can help alleviate anxiety and depression
#90Dunno, I was in Taekwondo as a kid and it made my anxiety worse, because I was always watched by my parents or had to do the moves in certain way. Could not do exercise on my own, and school was already lonesome.