Of course, not everyone can have everything and some of those aren't 100% under your control, but ultimately it becomes your responsibility to try fix them if you want your situation to improve, since nobody else will.
It's a known fact that exercise and good lifestyle are good for the mental health. But isn't the inability to maintain a good lifestyle one of the first symptoms of depression ?
Vague reports like these are how you get people who drag themselves by the feet to go to gym and sit on a machine or do a random set of jumping jacks on the sled track. Taking up a sport and making it part of your lifestyle will be much more beneficial than telling people to do "moderate level exercise" because most people don't even know what that means and will never enjoy it.
If you actually get into a sport there will be second order effects such as better diet and possibly finding others with interest in such activities as you will invest more time into it.
lets get concrete with "Exercise": what is one unit of exercise? like exactly what type of movement, at what intensity and duration should be performed how frequently to be as effective as therapy? like should i run every day at 160bmp for 20 minutes? whats the minimum effective dose?
Exercise, therapy, and antidepressants have all been shown to have similar effect sizes for depression. It seems like some people take that to mean that therapy and antidepressants are pointless but unless there's some reason to think that the effects are mutually exclusive, a more reasonable interpretation is probably that it's good to try to do all of these things if possible if you are depressed.
I've seen the exact same post on HN maybe a dozen times. The psychology of people posting this sort of advice is more interesting to me than the advice itself.
This might sound strange, but a trick that got me off my ass was doing housework. It started to spill over into the rest of my life...
If I'm sweating already and warmed up, I might as well take a walk to cool down. If I'm already walking and a good song comes on, I might as well jog. If I'm feeling sore already, I might as well lift some weights to gain some strength. To boost this all, I might as well eat more protein. If moving around is kinda making me feel nauseous sometimes, it's probably a vitamin thing so I go for more veggies. Hey veggies are slowly replacing bread and other empty carbs! Then my nerd brain kicked in and developed an obsession with cooking.
On the other end of this, I was doing more housework because I was inviting people over more often and otherwise working from home. The mess became harder to avoid. I think we all did a little of that because of the cultural shift in the first half of this decade. That also meant entertaining more which meant trying to put out better food.
All the incentives aligned to break me out of a cycle of bad habits for long enough that I genuinely can't go back. My life is objectively way better and I know exactly how it got that way, so there's nothing intimidating about it anymore. The level of effort also went down as all the new habits were streamlined into a coherent lifestyle.
At the risk of sounding condescending, I think most of this is really just a matter of growing up anyway (I entered my 30s during this time period). I just wanted to share how it happened to me.
Reistance training — moreso than cardiovascular exercise — can improve sleep quality and duration. Both have significant effects on daytime mood and cognition. A good exercise program incorporates both resistance and cardiovascular exercise.
It's important to keep cortisol low, and over-exercise can cause cortisol to spike – as does depression in general, hence the sleeping difficulties many depressed people experience. Likely that's why resistance training and HIIT are more helpful in this case as there is less built up of stress hormones.
I've been diagnosed with moderate to severe depression, and I'm a trial runner and do CrossFit. It's a balancing act to find strength and feeling capable through sport without increasing insomnia and early waking, likely because of cortisol spikes.
Sport does more for me than antidepressants, which have little effect than making me feel tired all the time. I've gone through a whole battery of them with little success and I've become quite critical of them. But I'm lucky to generally like sport and eat pretty healthily; I can imagine for others that can be an extra stressor they really don't need.
It's a review/summary of existing research, not anything new.
The fundamental problem with studying alternatives to therapy is that "being in a study" may be as effective as therapy! It's a structural placebo effect.
For a depressed person, "Exercise guided by a researcher" is different from "trying to make myself exercise".
> Authors' conclusions: Exercise may be moderately more effective than a control intervention for reducing symptoms of depression.
> Exercise appears to be no more or less effective than psychological or pharmacological treatments, though this conclusion is based on a few small trials.
> Long-term follow-up was rare.
Nothing new:
> The addition of 35 RCTs (at least 2526 participants) to this update has had very little effect on the estimate of the benefit of exercise on symptoms of depression.
This is the worst thing about having long COVID (well other than no one believing it is a thing). I had worked for years working back to being fit, had gotten up to benching 245 for 3 sets of 10. Workouts kept helped keep me balanced. Now I can barely squat 100lbs 5 times. It's so frustrating. And no one believes it's real. Like I had the fortitude to spend years building back strength and then one day I just chose to stop.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 35.3 ms ] thread- good diet with no junk food, alcohol, drugs and stimulants
- regular exercise and outdoor time
- good sleep hygiene
- regular healthy social interactions
- eliminate environmental stressors (job/financial stress, relationship stress, noise pollution, etc)
Of course, not everyone can have everything and some of those aren't 100% under your control, but ultimately it becomes your responsibility to try fix them if you want your situation to improve, since nobody else will.
I mean, yes, but we already knew this. So good that this is a finding that passes replication.
It's a known fact that exercise and good lifestyle are good for the mental health. But isn't the inability to maintain a good lifestyle one of the first symptoms of depression ?
If you actually get into a sport there will be second order effects such as better diet and possibly finding others with interest in such activities as you will invest more time into it.
If I'm sweating already and warmed up, I might as well take a walk to cool down. If I'm already walking and a good song comes on, I might as well jog. If I'm feeling sore already, I might as well lift some weights to gain some strength. To boost this all, I might as well eat more protein. If moving around is kinda making me feel nauseous sometimes, it's probably a vitamin thing so I go for more veggies. Hey veggies are slowly replacing bread and other empty carbs! Then my nerd brain kicked in and developed an obsession with cooking.
On the other end of this, I was doing more housework because I was inviting people over more often and otherwise working from home. The mess became harder to avoid. I think we all did a little of that because of the cultural shift in the first half of this decade. That also meant entertaining more which meant trying to put out better food.
All the incentives aligned to break me out of a cycle of bad habits for long enough that I genuinely can't go back. My life is objectively way better and I know exactly how it got that way, so there's nothing intimidating about it anymore. The level of effort also went down as all the new habits were streamlined into a coherent lifestyle.
At the risk of sounding condescending, I think most of this is really just a matter of growing up anyway (I entered my 30s during this time period). I just wanted to share how it happened to me.
I've been diagnosed with moderate to severe depression, and I'm a trial runner and do CrossFit. It's a balancing act to find strength and feeling capable through sport without increasing insomnia and early waking, likely because of cortisol spikes.
Sport does more for me than antidepressants, which have little effect than making me feel tired all the time. I've gone through a whole battery of them with little success and I've become quite critical of them. But I'm lucky to generally like sport and eat pretty healthily; I can imagine for others that can be an extra stressor they really don't need.
Here's the paper: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41500513/
It's a review/summary of existing research, not anything new.
The fundamental problem with studying alternatives to therapy is that "being in a study" may be as effective as therapy! It's a structural placebo effect.
For a depressed person, "Exercise guided by a researcher" is different from "trying to make myself exercise".
> Authors' conclusions: Exercise may be moderately more effective than a control intervention for reducing symptoms of depression.
> Exercise appears to be no more or less effective than psychological or pharmacological treatments, though this conclusion is based on a few small trials.
> Long-term follow-up was rare.
Nothing new:
> The addition of 35 RCTs (at least 2526 participants) to this update has had very little effect on the estimate of the benefit of exercise on symptoms of depression.
"Intention to treat" analyses, now ... very different conclusions.
Plus, the grand of majority of people would rather NOT move around and continue to eat junk food regardless. Animals evolved to be lazy.