Walking in urban environments can be its own sort of joy. Cities (well, good ones anyway) are full of life and energy and humanity, have unexpected nooks and crannies, and a rich sense of dynamism and excitement. Even late at night (as long as you're safe), a quiet city can be a source of serenity and melancholic beauty. Writers like Baudelaire and Benjamin described at great lengths the pleasures of flânerie.

Nature is wonderful too, of course! I love a good hike through the forests and mountains...but I also love a good stroll downtown.

Exercise is a side effect free treatment that works for some people so it’s worth a shot because it sometimes works.

I have a page long list of failed psychiatric regimens that included drugs alone and drugs combined with talk therapy. None of them effective.

I won't say that I'm cured of depression now or will ever be. But a strict and persistent exercise routine lessened it to the point where I can function day to day. This was never achieved with presrciption drugs or therapy (of which I have developed a dim opinion).

The article doesn't claim exercise is a universally effective treatment, so whose statements are you questioning?

I’ve been diagnosed clinically several times in life with depression and the pills never did anything for me. Sometimes exercise worked, sometimes it was of little or no use.

With retrospect, all of my episodes of depression were a function of environment. As a child, growing up in a broken home situation and bad school environment, of course there is going to be depression. Life sucks. Further, no pill or weight lifting schedule is going to fix that either. Only breaking out of that situation will.

As an adult, I’ve absolutely had and broken out of a long episode of depression with exercise. Bad breakup, startup failure, then introduce chronic drinking and subsequent weight gain. Guess what, cutting back on drinking, bicycling to work 30 minutes each way, doing martial arts in the evenings, it was a great fix. It enhanced self image, added a new community of positive people, and broke a cycle of depression.

But in general, humans just work better when we're regularly putting our bodies under reasonable physical load.

Exercise is a crucial part of dealing with it, but it is not a panacea.

> In plain terms, everybody is being fucked with constantly in tiny little ways by most apps and services, and I believe that billions of people being fucked with at once in all of these ways has profound psychological and social consequences that we’re not meaningfully discussing.

And I think one of those psycho-social consequences we're not discussing is everyone is just... fucking annoyed now, constantly, about shit that it doesn't feel right to really complain about. Like, you plus or minus live on your phone, and I'm very much including myself in that statement. Every time you get logged out of an app you use every day to, for example, board your morning train, or park your car, or have to reset a password to pay your power bill, just like, all of that? Every time your day is interrupted with stupid bullshit from Modern Life takes a tiny bit of that energy, and I dunno about everyone reading this, I have a quite well managed and streamlined life, and I still have just... dozens of these. Every single day. I can't fathom being one of the folks who ISN'T as well versed in tech as I am, existing for them must be utter HELL.

And that's the essentials, that's not even going into how most tech products now are constantly begging for your attention, for your engagement, trying to pluck the strings of your psyche into making you angry, or horny, or whatever. Engage with platforms, buy these products, watch 9 TV shows so you're not out of the loop, you've been added to an SMS spam group, and everyone is replying to it saying they're not interested, on and on and on.

Sorry this turned into more of a rant than I really envisioned but yeah. I can easily comprehend a day where I try and go to my gym, and the fucking app doesn't work right and I can't get in, and I just quit because I've already solved 20 fucking captchas today and I simply lack the energy to do another, to help train some goddamned AI, for a company I don't know, you know?

No way could I do a gym and these days most things in a gym would be just begging for joint pain. But the wilderness is a great gym (assuming you know what you're doing safety-wise, I see too many idiots out there.)

Some of my best friends are personal trainers and they say the same thing. When you tell people just moving essentially gives you what they refer to as "free exercise". The kind that doesn't make people feel like they have to get up off the couch, change their clothes, go to the gym, get on the treadmill, lift their weights, etc.

Just walking around the block. Just walking up a few flights of stairs. Just doing something that doesn't feel like you have to have a huge investment is sometimes the best way to start - then transition into more structured stuff like wight lifting or running or anything else. And you still get the benefits for almost nothing. Walk a few flights of stairs and your legs start to burn, your lungs open up, you increase your blood flow, and you release endorphins. And it didn't cost anything if you can just include it in your day-to-day activities.

Not sure how many times I make extra trips to my basement just to get in a few more stairs. lol

Seems like this has been my story:

Severe prolonged stress floored me. Turns out that the autonomous control of bronchoconstriction and dilation had gone out of wack, into dysregulation. My lungs were basically clamped shut. (Muscular tension and sundry dysregulation from severe prolonged stress makes sense, right? Applies to the lungs too!)

Exercise worked when I could get myself to do it... because exercise forces lungs to open.

And the nervous system and brain, well it requires lots of oxygen. In order to learn. And unlearn.

—

edit: Also interesting: Ketamine therapy worked. And... ketamine is a bronchodilator!

Same thing for ADHD.

Medication helps having willpower/focus to develop better habits and realize you are not a useless dumb human. It's just that your brain is a little finicky to get going sometimes.

In fact the few diagnosed ADHD people I know are wicked smart. It's just that their brain overclocks to unproductive levels without medication.

Gosh it must be nice to have at least an ordinary amount of executive function skills. Is it really this easy for neurotypical people to build routines? That's really all it takes?

I don't see how this removes willpower at all. It just determines what time you have to use it.

Right after New Year’s Day, he said pretty much what you said. Discipline beats Herculean effort that’s sporadic.

> Routine can be used for bad things but also for good things.

So your willpower causes such routines to work. Not everyone works that way. And not everyone not working that way has depression. I don't think one can generalise this to "routines will fix your depression".

> but after some repetitions your mind (and body) begin to get used

I also don't buy into that. A good counter-example is tobacco smokers. Some manage to quit the moment they decide they want to quit, with no substitutes. Others try with substitute and interestingly for many who try, that also works, but for some it does not. And some can barely ever quit smoking. And a lot of this has to do with how their brain works.

Matthew Perry spoke about that with regard to his alcohol addiction. People are different. I personally never started with smoking, for instance, because I never trusted myself to be able to (want to) quit again - so at the least I was consistent in this regard (plus also, because in our youth, so many others started to smoke suddenly, and I always felt it was a very stupid reason to smoke merely because others would do so, even at an early age. Their rationales would not be mine and I failed to see the point in adopting their positions and make them my position).

For me, it was when I was in a situation where I had to work 80 hours a week to keep my job. I had to get rid of my routine for 8 months and I am happy I did it otherwise I would he poor today.

Ahnold Schwarzenegger said that the gains in an exercise program happen when you really don't want to do it, but do it anyway.

I think really successful people are ones that just don't give a shit, like full on narcissism. Like my dream is X, I need to do Y today. The dog is sick? My kid needs a ride? My parents need help? Not my problem I am doing Y full stop.

List out what needs to be done every week, every month, every season, and set them up to repeat.

Every day you do your little two minute task (clean the bathroom mirrors; vacuum a single room), so you get a little win. And they’re each so small that it never feels like you need to switch into a long “cleaning binge” that you need to dread.

When I was at my absolute depth (so far…) back in 2013, I would see my counsellor at 1130 on a Saturday. I’d be able to recount the darkness of the previous 7 days in stark vivid detail, yet cheerfully and not feeling at all depressed in the moment. The counsellor asked what I did on Saturday morning except the session and my answer was, well I do Parkrun[0] of course. I always do Parkrun. It’s in my calendar, it’s not really negotiable. It might have been the only time I managed to get out of bed all week, but, I mean, how can I possibly skip Parkrun?

I never actually linked the exercise to the boost in my mental health until I had it pointed out to me at that moment. I go for a run and I feel better because of the run. I would spend the whole 5km stewing and ruminating and maybe in tears but half hour after getting home I could function! it’s stuck with me ever since, and I’ve never (yet) been so down again.

Tomorrow will be my 429th Parkrun :)

[0] https://www.parkrun.com/

That makes me think of a philosophical comic on quitting smoking. [0] Rather than cerebral willpower, a lot of value comes from indirectly shaping what your animal-brain does or doesn't encounter/expect every day.

[0] https://existentialcomics.com/comic/13

>> Motivation is fleeting but routine persists.

Try your hardest to do each session, but if you miss a session don't try to make it up. Just get on and do a normal session the next time it falls due. You're in it for the long term, so long term it doesn't matter if you were intermittent when building the habit, or the occasional session gets missed for a reason.

Absolutely!! Don't wait to Feel Like It, or Be Motivated... and especially do not depend on another person/trainer/weather to motivate you!

Fitness is a to-do, like laundry or grocery shopping or going to work. Now where the nuance comes in is finding what you enjoy. But a nuance of this nuance is, you don't know what you like until you have done it for a while, at least one month. Don't do boot camps or hacky gimmicky things people try to trick themselves into doing.

For a while I was deep into photography and writing. In both, I read and listened to people who were experts - successful writers and photographers. I learned this - they don't wait for inspiration. They commit X time per day to doing their craft, as habit.

I write this after coming from the gym, on a chilly night, after a relatively annoying day, and I feel 80 percent better.

Now the joint soreness and constant tightness are a problem, cuz I'm getting older. But it must be done.

Diagnosis and grading is fuzzy - a cluster behavioral symptoms observed and reported by patients, family members, and clinicians.

Based on some of the genetic evidence, which can also be fraught, it is likely that something like depression is in fact a grouping of a bunch of separate underlying disorders / causes that all result in the same (easily) observable symptoms. Hence why some treatments work on a subset of patients, but are ineffective in others.

Be aware that a lot of therapists are aware of this and actively try not to do this.

Unfortunately, services like BetterHealth allow clients to select their therapists in ways which results in people doctor shopping to get what they want. Doctors want to get paid so they'll say/do whatever to keep clients.

It's like the antibiotic issue with internal medicine. People will see a bunch of doctors until they get what they want.

I take sertraline (Zoloft in the US I think) and that is cheap - $20/30 month.

Always remember, being true is not the same as being helpful.

  People talk about depression all the time.

  The difference between depression and sadness is sadness is just, you know, from happen stance. Whatever happened or didn't happen for you...

  ... and depression is your body saying fuck you, I don't want to be this character anymore, I don't want to hold up this avatar that you've created in the world. It's too much for me.

  So, a friend of mine who's a spiritual teacher has a really good take. His name is Jeff Foster, and his take on it is that they should change [how we think of] the word "depressed" as "deep rest"

  deep rest - your body needs to be depressed, It needs deep rest from the character that you've been trying to play.

See also my response to GP.

[1] https://journals.plos.org/mentalhealth/article?id=10.1371/jo...

[2] https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1348/0...).

[3] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00031305.2018.15...

Edit: Just to be clear, per my other post sibling to this, I should say that they can both seem to be very effective at turning my mood around. I do not, necessarily, think either is causal on their own.

I am more trying to claim that "just doing something" has an annoying track record of looking like "it" is what worked. I would fully believe that, in reality, the thing that worked was already at play before the success started happening. That is, fully depressed people don't succeed at any of these things.

That definition is probably too narrow.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurobiological_effects_of_phy...

This is something that has very deep evolutionary roots. A looming project deadline, a relationship crisis, feeling burned out, general malaise about your place in life - all of those stressors can bring about different neurochemical and hormonal changes that are in whole or in part dealt with in a healthy way by engaging in strenuous physical activities.

That puts you in a position to gain perspective without the immediacy of the negative emotion, so you don't have to feel anxious, or have subtle negative threat framing around everything.

You can abuse that, like anything else, and mask real negative factors in your life, or it can be a phenomenal and healthy way to deal with the negative framing of otherwise neutral or even positive circumstances in your life.

I agree, it’s tough to be honest when you’re vulnerable. Expressing vulnerability exposes how people really feel about you.