Exhortation to develop those good habits in the good times, I suppose.
When there is something that you want to do regularly (exercise, doing the final boring part of some sideproject, cleaning the house...) you remove willpower from the equation and set a day and a time.
For example, everyday from 18 to 19 I work on my sideprojects, or saturdays from 16 to 18 is house cleaning time. There is no question if I want to do it, it is set at that time and I have to do it, period.
The nice thing about routine is that the first times it is hard, but after some repetitions your mind (and body) begin to get used and it transforms into a routine and then it's like it's written in stone. That time period of that day X is for Y and it is what it is.
Routine can be used for bad things but also for good things.
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.
If you're a real go-getter, though, you'd wake up at 6am and do some vibe coding for an hour on that side hustle.
Super simple.
It can be possible to decide to do something in advance, and then... just do it. The more times you do it the easier it gets. My wife comments on this sometimes. I guess not everyone has this? Maybe it can be learned? I don't know.
Then there are the things I'd like to do.
Don't sell your house if you don't have a realistic place to live lined up. Don't divorce your wife if it's not worth the work.
I'm not saying everyone can or should be grindset hustle bro. Probably no one. I'm just saying that it is sometimes possible to decide what you're going to do in advance. If you already have too many obligations, that could include deciding which ones to fail. That's probably better than trying to do everything and just rolling the dice.
It's surprising how controversial this idea is, but it works for me. I hope you find something that works for you.
Some might say it's offset by all the luxuries so widely available. But I personally find it hard to enjoy minor luxuries when so much of life is swallowed by obligations. And I'm one of the luckiest members of my cohort. Most of my high school friends still live with parents or several roommates, have lower paying careers, and/or have to care for more family with serious medical issues. (Though on the latter I seem to be catching up quickly)
It’s actually insulting to people who work hard that some people assume they have it easy somehow, like the “must be nice” comment upstream. Not everyone takes the view that you can’t control what happens to you, it’s pretty easy to see who does.
Thanks again
In my opinion the first step to taking responsibility is acknowledging reality. That reality can includes brains and bodies being different, sometimes extremely so. If someones brain or body is different but they deny it, stick their head in the sand, ignore it, then they are at a disadvantage when they try to take responsibility for something and may fail due to failing to acknowledging reality.
- Alarm at 4:30. 5 mins of breathing exercises, 20 mins of meditation.
- Make coffee, have breakfast, out the door to work by ~5:30.
- Get to work's gym by 5:45, cardio for 60 mins.
- In my office by 7:00-7:15.
- 3:30, 25 mins of breathe work and meditation again. Tuesdays and Thursdays, this is 3:15 so I can fit in ~30 mins of strength training.
- Head on out, pick up my youngest from school, home by ~4:15-4:30-ish. Ballpark depending on traffic, actual gym times, etc.
- Cook dinner (kiddos often like to help), eat with family, hang out with and play with my kiddos until 7:00PM.
- Kiddo bath and bed time, wife and I take turns doing this every night. Whether I'm "done" at 7 or 8, it only takes me ~30 mins to shower and prep my shit (clothes, lunch, etc.) for the next day.
- Leaves me with ~1-2 hours each night to hang out, read a book, and enjoy my wife's company before heading to bed at ~9:30.
It's busy, but I don't feel like I'm overstretched and I don't feel like it leaves me missing out on anything.
You fall asleep instantly every night or function on less than 7 hours of sleep long term. You have a 15 minute commute. You don’t seem to need any slack time to deal with any issues that pop up.
4 year old has a meltdown because the 6 year old ate the last fruit snack. One of the kids decides to wake up at 3am. Friends come over for dinner and throw off the routine. Oops forgot to buy an ingredient for dinner, now you have to load up all the kids and go to the store. Ugh piece of plastic is lodged in the garbage disposal better get the flashlight and chopsticks.
And that’s not even mentioning regular household maintenance. Laundry, dishes, cleaning, grocery trips etc…
I’d need at least 2 extra hours in every day to handle all of those unexpected and expected issues. Probably closer to 3.
>You fall asleep instantly every night...
Actually, yes! Two points there. First, when I'm out of my routine, not working out, drinking lots of coffee and eating like garbage, I sleep like ass. When I'm in my routine, eating well, and only having a cup of coffee with breakfast, I'm incredibly energized throughout the day and end up suddenly feeling tremendously tired right around 8:45/9:00.
The second part is that my father's side of the family is notorious for falling asleep anywhere, anytime. There's a litany of photos of us passed out on couches in the middle of packed parties.
> Meltdowns
They happen, but they don't really rock the schedule in my experience. Bedtime somehow always ends up being bedtime. Might shift by ~15 or so occasionally, but never in a way that nukes my bedtime or anything.
>One of the kids wakes up at 3am.
This is entirely YMMV, but we sleep trained. For whatever absolutely fucking weird reason, neither kid has ever got themselves out of bed in the morning, they always wake up and wait for us to come get them. Earliest I hear one of them is occasionally 6 on the weekends, usually closer to 7. I feel tremendously lucky here, and recognize how not normal this is.
>Forgot dinner ingredient and load kids up...
Nah. I do my best to buy ingredients on the weekend for the week. Definitely isn't foolproof, but usually we just pivot to a meal I'd planned for another night, or we always have easy to make shit like mac and cheese or grilled cheese and tomato soup lying around to fall back on. Life doesn't need to be perfect and I'm cool with pivoting and not sticking to plans.
>Friends coming over
For our own sanity wrt my wife and I's schedules, we hang with friends on the weekend. Weekends are a lot more freeform for us.
>Household maintenance
Naturally, whoever isn't playing with the kids just falls into keeping the laundry moving and cleaning the kitchen. I'll take the kiddos to the grocery store on Saturday. Dishes happen quickly, we all help there.
> neither kid has ever got themselves out of bed in the morning
My wife is a pediatrician. This is so incredibly not normal to have 2 kids that absolutely never get up early that you won the lottery. And not the regular jackpot. You won the powerball multi-state $500 million lottery.
> For our own sanity wrt my wife and I's schedules, we hang with friends on the weekend. Weekends are a lot more freeform for us.
I wish I knew what a weekend was. My wife works in the ER, as do many of our friends.
> Naturally, whoever isn't playing with the kids just falls into keeping the laundry moving and cleaning the kitchen.
There’s so much more daily maintenance work for our house than an hour a night for one person.
Just making my kids lunch for the next day takes me 15 minutes. It takes me 20-30 minutes to fold one load of laundry.
And the irregular things I mentioned were just a tiny part of it. The other day my 4 year old got a whole stack of puzzles down and the 2 year old immediately dumped out all the pieces. Took me 2 hours to sort that out. Last week the tankless hot water started randomly cutting out and I spent 2 hours dealing with that.
Yesterday we took 2 of our 3 kids for a well check to their pediatrician. For some reason it took 1.5 hours instead of the 30 minutes we had planned. A few months ago one of my many spoke alarms started randomly going off once a night for a few days until I could track down the problem. 3 months ago my 2 year old tripped on the very bottom stair and had a freak fracture. That took hours of time up front and then reverted to crawling for 9 days. And for 6 weeks he had to wear a boot that I had to remove and reapply multiple times a day.
Our 2 month old blew out her diaper a few days ago and I had to take all the padding off, wash it, then figure out how to put it back on. Big storm recently knocked most of our Christmas wreathes off and I had to deal with that.
My kid was recently “snack leader” for his preschool class, which means for a week I had to make healthy snacks for the whole class.
All of that is just the random stuff that has popped up over the last few months that I can think of.
The original post who mentioned this kind of thing isn’t feasible with kids was correct. 2-2.5 hours of exercise/meditation and a full workday isn’t something that most people with kids can pull off.
- fall asleep at 9:31 and function on 7 hours of sleep
- or fall asleep at 10:30 and function on 6 hours of sleep
If I'm not getting 8 hours, I feel like a zombie the next morning.
But yeah, I imagine I'll need more as time continues to pass and I get older.
/shrug
Edit: To say nothing of my mild fear of an inadequate amount of sleep in middle age possibly contributing to dementia, but I digress...
I hope my comment doesn't come off as dismissive but learning to meditate is practicing to "let it go". It isn't a switch. You're teaching your mind not to get "too attached" to anything you consider unwholesome.
I was trying to make the point that self- help easy fixes are not always successful. I spent decades actively learning to sleep. It works most of the time. It is good to learn. I use a mindfulness sleep meditation most nights. I also learnt from sleep hygiene that going to bed early is normally a big mistake for me, precluding much of the 'go to bed earlier, get up and exercise' advice.
I have also hit periods in my life where I simply couldn't mediate for weeks on end despite regular practice over a decade. I was mentally ill. No routine or hacks was going to get me to exercise. I needed therapy (EMDR) and rest, and when I got really self-destructive I needed sleep medication (useful only for a very short time). The 'hack' people just made me feel bad about myself for being unable to get a grip.
That is what I want people to see, exercise is only useful if you are well enough to do it. If you are not well enough to shave, then don't beat yourself up for not getting exercise. Put a pin in it, and do it later.
My latest illness was (psycho-somatically) interfering with my cortisol levels, and it made any exercise crippling. I couldn't recover. I didn't get the boost. I beat myself up about not being able, and it made me worse.
Exercise and therapy rather than exercise or therapy might be better advice.
Edit, typos
My body doesn't feel the passage of time consistently. So my mind is never prepared to switch activities when it needs to.
And there are times my brain stops working on a particular task and nothing can get it started again. It's like a leg going out, you just can't stand on it.
This isn't occasionally where habit could be picked back up. This has been a problem every day of my life.
In my experience, this has been the death of every bit advice I've gotten from a neurotypical person. A lot of them keep circling back to discipline or trying harder as a solution to a problem they can't make sense of. Lack of understanding isn't their fault, this is so far outside their frame of reference they can't make sense of it in a single conversation. Fortunately understanding isn't required, only the acceptance that other people have limits they don't have themselves.
What modern people usually lack is not time, but lack of energy. Usually this is thought as the energy to do stuff (like coding a side hussle in the evening). But often it manifests in a lack of energy:
1. to make a decision (to do something)
2. to slow down, to stop the current activity and to think with the rational mind.
So you need to recognize these things and do certain decisions beforehand to solve the problem. Stuff like:
1. Go to the gym in the morning, when you still have the decision energy.
2. Create a habit, linking a new habit with the old ones, in order to decrease the energy expenditure
3. Increase the stakes, like getting a gym buddy
4. Decide stuff beforehand. Pack the bag, set up the alarm clock (to go to gym, to go to sleep)
5. When you are tired, actually rest. Don't turn the tv on, don't scroll social media, stop touching yourself via phone. If you are tired, eat, go to gym or a walk, go to sleep or simply sit in your chair or lay on the sofa looking at the walls. I guarantee, watching at the wall for 30 minutes straight will give you great motivation to do something else more productive. Don't let the monkey in you convince you to do the unproductive things I mentioned. Stay strong and make a rational decision what to do instead of looking at the wall. Do the right thing, not the thing that may feel nice in the midst of it.
6. Take care of the nutrition/sleep in order to increase the energy reserves
I hope that helps.
I didn’t mention energy because energy has no relevance.
I’ve literally broken down crying because I really wanted to work but my brain refused to move. I was having such a great day and was really motivated. I spend hours and absolutely exhausted every bit of energy I had trying every advice that I’ve spent my entire life hearing. I could not get a single word out of my brain.
Nothing worked. I spent my entire childhood trying harder and got nowhere. I probably shouldn’t say this, but I get quite pissed off when people tell me to try hard harder.
I dont mean to say you implied it, but its easy to dig a larger hole when you believe you are special, or you have tried "all" the advice.
Every problem has a solution, and I beg you to search deeper to what you do even in task-paralysis states. That might be where your mission comes from.
It helped me to have a life goal that was bigger than life, ego, or energy. Maybe you havent found it yet. If you have, I apologize if I sound cocky!
I am brilliant at certain aspects of my job. I have read the books, had coaching etc. And yet today I still miss important meeting because I don't realise it is time to go...with a watch on my arm, outlook reminders popping up etc. I just hold attention so deep that I am never going to notice. It is what makes me great at my work. So now I am a manager I have developed some solutions. I hire people who compliment me, and I am open about my problem. It is normal for my team to walk in my office and say, 'are you coming to this meeting?'
You also totally missed the point of suggestions entirely. I assume that happened because you were out of brain/willpower energy.
My suggestions were not to try harder. They were the exact opposite, they were about:
1. constraining your energy output
2. being careful where and how you spend your energy
3. do a better targeting with your energy
4. hacks to do the same (or more) with less energy
5. restoring energy
Please reread my previous message after you sleep and with a good mood. Assume that I actually know what I am talking about (because I truly do) and my goodwill. Assume that I did not spend my time writing a long comment in order to anger or troll you, but because I wanted to help; I saw clear indicators of certain problems, to which I am able to provide solutions that work in practice.
This is backwards. In practice, it should be the exact opposite. ADHD people should be MORE vigilant regarding the correct behavior, rules, habits. It is neurotypical people who have some leeway to be lazy with what and how they do stuff, but ADHD have way smaller margin of error!
Sometimes there are things (noise in the room, other distractions, mess in tasks, etc.) that neurotypical can safely ignore, but that will make an ADHD person not able to work at all.
The fact that life is harder to organize and manage for ADHD people only means that they should pay EXTRA attention to doing right things the correct way.
Sure, ADHD people have their own peculiarities (as does any other neurotypical person), but in my experience this is a drop in a bucket of issues that are actually solvable with typical means without reinventing the wheel.
ADHD doesn't manifest the same way for everyone.
> pay EXTRA attention to doing right things the correct way
I do wrong things a different way all the time. I'm a maverick. I'm known to have creative solutions other people can't find. Not little ones either, 'we have been trying this for 20 years' ones. $multi-million strategic ones. I can't do the boring task list work you normies can do, but I have super powers you don't.
The breakthrough started and my recovery began when I stopped listening to people like you and focused on what I am good at.
But last night, I wanted to get to bed at 10pm, but I got some music stuck in my head. I had some music on to chill out, but something gripped me and I picked up my guitar. It felt like a moment of time but I look up and it is 1am. If I had gone to bed I would have lain awake all night. Meditation would have had this music dominating it and dragging me out of it. I'm in bed late on Saturday morning typing this, which will upset my whole weekend, but I wouldn't have slept, which would have been worse. So, I just went with it.
I envy people who can keep a routine, but I now pity people who don't have extraordinary moments of inspiration. I embrace my super powers and accept my life won't be normal. It will be exceptional.
Most neurodivergent people I’ve met accept my limitations and don’t expect what works for them to work for me. It might take a little explanation but they didn’t seem to get upset about it.
The few that have expected me to be like them, expected other people to be like them as well. So it wasn’t specific to me.
In this regard neurotypical advice _did_ actually help me I suppose. However, when applied to a habit not immediately linked to your existence, it is quite alienating to receive.
Those don’t bother me because they don’t fundamentally misunderstand the problem.
I have ADHD, and hate the feeling of being a victim. "I have this, so I can't do that. It's just the way it is." No! Not for this. Not when there are so many treatment options.
I accept that things may be harder for me than a typical person, that I may have to put in more work than other people to get the same results, that this is something that's very real that I have to deal with and manage at all times. That there will be times when I will fail and my stupid monkey brain will win the moment. But I won't let it define me, I won't let it dictate who I am and what I can and cannot do.
EDIT: Also, I mean to agree with you here: there's a point where no amount of discipline will work, and the advice to "just try harder" sounds like an alien telling you to just grow wings and fly. If you find yourself at that point, medicine can and will help. It also helps you be able to get in a routine of actually doing exercise, which in turn helps even more, and it becomes a sweet positive feedback loop.
There are better examples in my opinion than just doing something at 18:00 every day. There's a technique called habit stacking where you identify all the habits you already have at a given time (like when you first wake up), and then you add one more at the end. It's easier to introduce a new habit this way, and it becomes ingrained more quickly, resulting in less need to use executive function.
There are still more techniques. An example from my personal life: in my whole adult life, I've never gone to the gym... unless I sign up for a gym that's right across the street from my workplace. Then it happens like clockwork. If all I need to do is walk across the street, I end up in the gym, and inevitably, I work out. If I need to drive 20 minutes though, well my willpower just ain't that great, so it basically never happens.
The best book I've read on this topic is Atomic Habits by James Clear. He goes deep down the rabbit hole of these techniques you can employ and touches on the research it's all based on. The brain's not a computer so I mean it's not all just going to come together automatically, but in my experience this stuff does work.
I think it can be generalized as:
Find the thing to do that doesn't require much effort but puts you in the context of doing the effortful thing. Do that thing. See if you "want" to do the effortful thing. Otherwise go home.
Cleaning? Put the vacuum in your hands and see if something happens.
At least I think that's how it works for me.
The points when it's hardest to make it work is when there's lots of distractions. Like when you try to get into a routine of doing work at a computer.
If you don't have that, the skill needed to develop it is the skill to get someone to prescribe you amphetamines.
It’s not easy for anyone to develop these style of habits and routines. It’s just hard mode and takes much more effort for folks with executive dysfunction.
The first rule is choose one thing and stick to it. With realistic goals. Mine was: I am going to walk at least 6,000 steps a day. No matter what. Zero excuses.
Since schedules are insanely difficult for me I set none. If I remembered I still needed to walk and I could do it in the moment I simply prioritized it. It’s surprisingly easy to fit in 10 minutes of walk in throughout your day, even when working a desk job. It could simply mean pacing while on conference calls.
Another rule was “if I fail to achieve it one day, I must achieve it the next” to avoid the “all or nothing” mental trap.
This was to the level of getting into bed, checking step counter, and if I was under target literally getting out of bed, putting clothes back on, and walking until I hit it. I had all sorts of technical widgets to enforce this and help remind me.
It totally sucked for the first couple months. Then it started to just become a thing. Then I ramped it up to 12k/day until I hit a weight goal.
It’s the best thing I ever did for my mental health since it started a snowball in other areas of my life. I was able to swap out a few days of steps for an hour workout (beginning with a personal trainer to force me to show up 2 days a week minimum). I was and still am constantly 10 minutes late to my session but no matter what I show up to them.
The weeks I miss them due to schedule conflicts or travel I feel much worse mentally. And it’s easy to give into the anxiety and panic over not having enough time in the day to fit it in after procrastinating on other items. You also start to realize that those other items are probably not as important as you thought.
I find routine and habits over schedule and calendaring are hyper-important for my dysfunction and have leaned into that. It’s more of a “this thing before that thing” sort of deal vs “at 3pm I do the thing” since the latter would go off the rails immediately.
It’s possible. Just the hardest thing I’ve maybe ever accomplished in life so far.
Gonna be different for everyone and you probably need that one moment of clarity to get the initial motivation. The motivation will go away, but the habits and discipline will probably stick around.
Been using this same method to build habits and routine into other areas of my life now as well.
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 :)
I still have no idea what it really is. From the name I'd think you're going for a run at a local park. The website calls it a "5k and 2k community event", what that's supposed to mean I have no clue. It insists you either "join" or "volunteer", all while being as non-specific as possible why I should even care
2/5k what? people? distance? currency? number of events? It almost reads like in-group speak of a cult I don't partake in.
-- Rant over --
I capitalise it out of muscle memory. That’s all. FWIW Wikipedia capitalises it as well.
I called it out with a link because I expect many folk to be unfamiliar with it, but the nature of parkrun itself — rather than simply going for a 5k[m] run — is intrinsic to the point I was trying to make.
5k is perfectly well understood to be a distance, especially in context, in British English and I’m a Brit. My bad I guess for not adding “m” for (some of) the HN readership. [EDIT: actually, I said 5km! Not my fault if parkrun says 5k, but they are a British organisation)
Regardless of that, you were correct that parkrun is indeed a run around a park. I won’t explain any further nor link anywhere lest it be misconstrued as advertising (something that’s proudly free, mind you). Besides which I need to get to and get my running kit on.
I answered that question already, try reading my earlier comment. And if you think it's weird, take it up with people from last century when they started using that abbreviation.
And even in the UK, where many people still measure longer distances in miles, I've never heard anyone talk about a run being however many thousand feet or yards or chains or whatever.
All of the first page results for a USA-based google search for "5k" are running-related too, so it can't really be all that ambiguous there either.
I mean I feel annoyed every time I see a new technology on hn, only to find it is another js framework after clicking the link, finding it says nothing useful, then typing it into Wikipedia. I don't typically come on and complain about it.
> 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).
Dogs are the best.
And perhaps because we have both, they all will play games together (and with us humans): the cats are like dogs who can do gymnastics.
the cats will walk outside on leashes but look annoyed and embarrassed. however our feral ancestry dog is like having Richard Simmons on meth...and makes me amused at people who are like "a border collie is a handful". i'm like tell it to her paw.
(speaking from experience, 5 rescues here now, lots of activity for lots of fun...thankful for WFH flexibility)
Ahnold Schwarzenegger said that the gains in an exercise program happen when you really don't want to do it, but do it anyway.
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.
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.
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.
This is tautological: if the action doesnt persist, it isn’t routine.
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.
As for narcissism, the optimal amount is not zero. If you want to continue being of value to your family over the long term then sometimes you have to take care of yourself first. Unless it's a life-or-death emergency, others can wait a bit for help.
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.
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.
I've had routines at times in my life for months. And they disappear in a matter of days when I get stressed or my schedule changes or whatever.
Nothing in this life is a must.
Right after New Year’s Day, he said pretty much what you said. Discipline beats Herculean effort that’s sporadic.
All of which is to say -- these exhortations can play a useful role. :)
> 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?
You've certainly hit upon why they use the same password for every single thing.
It was an intense deluge of SMS codes, flipping back and forth to the Authenticator, dismissing welcome popup modals, security email notifications.
I was frazzled by the multitasking and can only imagine how hard it would have been for some senior citizen that was badgered into updating their device.
This goes for coping with a lot of executive function problems and disorders.
Part of how I have to manage my rather severe ADHD is specifically crafting an environment that's as ADHD friendly as possible, much to my wife's dismay.
That means nothing can ever be hidden away or out of sight, otherwise I will immediately forget it exists. It means every bill must be on autopay, or it will not get paid. It also means living as minimally as possible, for me. Even something as "simple" to a neurotypical like washing dishes or doing laundry is a seemingly impossible mountain for me to climb. I solve that by owning as little as possible, and I also remove choices by, for example, just owning multiples of the same exact outfit.
The moment any sort of friction or context switching is involved in a task, I am going to fail, so I have to architect my life in a way that reduces friction as much as possible.
For work, that's mostly just luck. I'm a solo sysadmin for a non-tech company, and I work from home so I have a great deal of freedom. Outside of interruptions for help desk level tickets/emails (which suck and do throw off my flow), no one really oversees what I do and I set my own deadlines for the most part so I can work when and however it suits me to take advantage of days where I have good flow state.
I also know that if I overeat, I have a strong urge to keep feeding (more chips, more pizza, more chipsahoy). Whereas when I eat a proper meal, I'm fine when the eating of that meal ends.
Kids often still need to learn that punching yourself in the face hurts.
While at a certain level of abstraction you can reduce both to A -> !B -> C, that generalization seems to obfuscate specific important differences that impact pathways to treatment. Craving is not the same as lacking energy. Craving, while subversive, energizes, depression does not.
The only thing that helped my depression, apathy and executive dysfunction was realizing I was going to rot anyways, I was never going to be happy, so I may as well start the startup, go on runs, and succeed.
Let go of the expectation you will want to/be in the mood or feel good from it
Life is not chocolate malts and gummy bears
So the advise or admonishment of the normally weighted that losing weight "just requires willpower" is true but facile.
If we were to medically induce a constant feeling of hunger and insatiability into a person of normal weight, I'm sure they could keep the weight off, but would find that their willpower is highly depleted.
There are medications that cause increased appetite and weight gain (ex: some bipolar depression medications, prednisolone). This effect is so pronounced, that if a doctor sees the patient not gaining weight, they will suspect non-compliance and have to rule it out. Of course, some patients use extreme diet and exercise (willpower) to avoid these effects, but a normal person accustomed to expending a normal amount of willpower to maintain weight will find themselves gaining.
So I dispute this statement with some enthusiasm.
https://www.history.com/shows/alone
...not losing weight on a limited diet would be a huge advantage over the other players.
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.
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).
Exercise is a side effect free treatment that works for some people so it’s worth a shot because it sometimes works.
I wouldn't knock the effectiveness of any of them with the caveats that: (1) you can get anti-depressants from you primary care doc, the best practice is to start on something, ramp up your dose and try something different if it is not working or you don't like the sides. I really thought Vanlafaxine was a comfortable ride but it raised my blood pressure to the "go to the ER" range. Call on the phone and lean in about adjusting your meds. (2) Getting an appointment for talk therapy can take a while these days. (3) In a hard case you can get a more complex medication cocktail from a psychiatrist but the wait could be worse than the talk therapy. (4) People in the military do insane amounts of cardio because it helps dealing with insane amounts of stress. 2 hours a day of cardio helped me deal with a business development process that went on for years before ultimately failing.
it might help with stress too, but that isn't as clear
This is giving the military way too much credit for organized stress management. If military people give the impression of doing "insane amounts of cardio" it's because that's what the physical fitness tests are biased towards.
And we also won't talk about the fact that getting a psych diagnosis, especially in fields like aviation, can end your career, while managing stress via alcohol gets a wink and a nod as long as you don't have an alcohol-related incident.
SSRIs are not well understood. Their side effects are not great. Getting off them is miserable. I had them. I felt dead inside. Mission accomplished. Depression was gone, so was my desire to eat, have sex, or do anything else. I wasn’t depressed, I was a zombie. 8 adjustments and medications later I got off them and realized they’re yet another pill to fix a problem 98% of people can fix other ways if they tried.
I do not understand this intense desire to be medicated. Exercise, go outside, talk to people. Get good sleep. Once the rest of your life is squared away get some meds if necessary. Psychiatrists and psychologist walk the razors edge of quackery every single day. Talk therapy is a program to take tremendous amount of money from people and funnel it into their account. It’s absolutely nuts the average talk therapist bills at over 300 dollars an Hour. There is no reproducibility in mental health. in their “science”. Therefore, there’s no reason to believe their magical pills will fix problems they barely understand at a biological level.
As a final note people in the military do a ton of cardio because running and rucking is hard work you train for. It is certainly not to “stay sane”.
Would you rather take a pill and keep working while you sort things out or would you try to rebuild everything after you burn it all down? Talk therapy and exercise may be just as effective or more so long term, but may not be effective enough in the short term.
We ban accounts that do this, and I'm afraid you've been breaking the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) in other places as well, including other personal attacks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46530967.
It also looks like you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle, which is not something we allow here (see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... for past explanations of this point).
Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules? We'd appreciate it. You're welcome here as long as you do that, but we really need commenters to stay respectful, avoid posting in the flamewar style, and (above all) use the site primarily for curiosity, not smiting enemies.
[1] https://ebm.bmj.com/content/27/2/69.abstract
[2] https://ebm.bmj.com/content/25/4/130.abstract
[3] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/1744-859X-12-26
[4] https://doi.org/10.1192/bjp.bp.116.187773
[5] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/18515...
However, since this takes time, and most depression is temporary, it is hard to know if you really are tailoring the medication to the person in many cases, or it has just been long enough you are seeing regression to the mean (or a placebo response, which is still strong even in treatment-resistant depression https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...).
There aren't really any double-blinded or even just properly placebo-controlled / no-treatment controlled studies to test this, but the closest thing to looking at the sequential approach also doesn't find very impressive results (https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/13/7/e063095.abstract).
I do believe the drugs help some people, and almost certainly take some experimentation / tailoring. The average effects are just very weak.
You've been a good contributor to HN for a long time and most of your comments aren't like this, but there is also a long history of us asking you to stop posting personal attacks:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46012112 (Nov 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21867262 (Dec 2019)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21327013 (Oct 2019)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17371604 (June 2018)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16017705 (Dec 2017)
Moreover, your account has continued to be in the habit of posting aggressive comments recently, including personal attacks (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46478121, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46463522). This is not cool.
I don't want to ban you but it's important to preserve this place for its intended purpose of curious conversation (which depends on thoughtful, respectful comments), so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stop doing this going forward, we'd be grateful.
I did get the sexual side effects but because men often come too quick it can be a blessing as much as a curse, personally I found it took longer to orgasm and when it did happen it was a much more complex and richer experience with a definite periodization I haven't had before or since.
When I was taking ADs I did have problems I blamed on the ADs that really had to do with the "non-drowsy" antihistamine I was taking crossing my blood brain barrier anyway.
When I did stop ADs I tapered over a month and the physical effects were not bad at all. It was the beginning of a time of personal growth that I can look back on now and think it worked out great but was challenging for the people around me for a while.
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.
Exercise forms the foundation of a biologically healthy brain which is required for all conditions. For some conditions it’s all you need for others it’s not enough
Honest question, but what do you mean by this?
I've played competitive team sports my whole life and have a very competitive drive. If its not team sports, its rock climbing where I feel like I'm competing against myself or my brain trying to solve a route. If I'm hiking, I'm competing against the clock or how far I can go. If I'm lifting weights, its about how many sets I can do and what weight in order to push myself.
So even in what most people deem "non-competitive" activities I'm still competing against a clock, or my body, or my brain.
I'm just curious what you meant is all.
EDIT: Typical HN. Ask a question and get downvoted. Logging off the day - thanks.
Someone might train for marathons, body building, etc. I don't.
The article doesn't claim exercise is a universally effective treatment, so whose statements are you questioning?
I was like 60% depressed but on my way there. I just took my first computer science class in college but I was overly ambitious when I participated in an undergrad CS research. The stress and imposter syndrome was shoving me to the downward spiral.
I posted some gloomy thoughts on an online forum. It was long ago, but I remember the post contained how I could kind of relate to the villain while watching the movie The Dark Knight Rises.
Some online person advised me "lift weights". I had never tried seriously lifting weights, but I was living in a student apartment 10 minutes away from the student gym, so I decided to give it a try. I can't forget the sensation when I did a set of bench press. After a period of amassing so much stress, each rep felt like I was reaching my hand into my brain, directly scooping out the waste and tossing it away.
I became much more active after that, and successfully finished the research and the degree.
It's like how homelessness is more reversible for people who became homeless less than a year ago, and why organizations focus on those groups.
Every additional coping mechanism you add, that works well for you, provides defense in depth.
I normally feel much better after walking and cycling. Also I think doing something repetitive like walking allows you to think, tune out of other things.
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.
If one needs to justify it by quoting authors, that suggests it isn't self evident and they are just trying to justify something that they know isn't good.
Writers have, obviously, written about how walking in nature is nice. Does me saying that now mean that walking in nature is awful?
Maybe you're doing other people a favour by staying away from them, sheesh.
No it isn't. Anytime you make an fairly straight forward statement on any website you get some unnecessary contrarian response.
There are a bunch of downsides to doing any sort of outdoor activity in an urban environment. That is just a fact. It is noisier, often there it nothing to look at, repetitive (in a bad way) etc. etc.
Therefore I would not recommend walking as a form of exercise in that environment as the vast majority of people wouldn't enjoy it.
Whimsical writings by 19th century French poets aren't relevant to those facts.
> Maybe you're doing other people a favour by staying away from them, sheesh.
What an unnecessary comment to make. I never said anything about what you are like.
Walking in an urban environment is generally not very pleasant. It is often repetitive (in the bad way), noisy and there is little to look at. It the reason they often carve out space for parks and commons.
Source: Myself.
you just _cant_
If you've seen a distinct "low bar", its nearly impossible to get straight up above this bar
The most important thing to get started with working out is just to start doing some exercise. You can start on one push up a day or something. It's all about creating momentum and habit.
Once you do it, then you can increase the time and the intensity and optimize exercise and all. But doing sport should be about doing one push up a day and thats it. About starting as slow as you can.
Sleep is the same in that we try to sleep as much as we can, and get as much REM and deep sleep, and these are not the right metrics for most people. The most important is just to go to bed and wake up at the same time everyday. That's it.
People are obsessed with trying to go to sleep at some point in time. Don't. Go to sleep when you're tired, wake up sleep deprived at the right time, the next evening it'll be easier to sleep at the right time
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!
This is what medication for more severe cases of things like depression is supposed to offer: an opportunity to learn, usually through therapy, to cope with the condition in a healthy way.
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.
This seems to work for me at least. If I start trying to reason with myself why I should get out of bed at 5am to go to the gym rather than excuse XYZ, I will talk myself out of it.
If I simply start "moving" and start doing "stuff" without engaging my brain, things happen and within a short space of time, I'm pumping iron and feeling great.
I'm not a big believer in discipline.
From studies like this, maybe more awareness and perhaps funding to solutions providing smaller steps
Shameless plug, I am building one: Low friction mini games, social, squats/situps/pushups. Feelgoodcrew.com
You don't have to exercise so much as get moving.
I'm the best I've been in 37 years, and it's because in August I started forcing myself to just keep walking whenever I went out to have a cigarette. I was in Boston, and would end up ~nowhere and exhausted.
Then started doing random stuff: "might as well walk to Harvard Square instead of the bike path again" "might as well go to a bookstore instead of somewhere random" "I should use the skate park, I don't fit in*, but I miss rollerblading from middle school"
Then my dog died, 2 days later I severely sprained my ankle at the skate park and couldn't walk anywhere substantive for a couple weeks. By the time I'm able to do a sustained 10m+ walk it's winter.
Went to visit California as a not-tech-employee for the first time, so I saw San Luis Obispo and Los Angeles for the first time. And the same habit kicked in, in SLO I ended up hiking for the first time on what I find out later was not a real trail, end up hiking every day that week.
Get to LA and it's nothing like I would have thought. Egalitarian, tons of stuff to do, and Waymo is a godsend. Whenever I get antsy there's somewhere to go and a way to get there.
2 weeks later, I got an apartment in LA, moving away from Northeast for the first time in my life. I could see me just spending another 4 months decaying in Boston until its barely warm enough out to take a 30m walk, and I'm tired of that cycle..
All that to say, I'm fit, I had a great career in high school sports, I played basketball occasionally, but couldn't really get active consistently. Treadmill was never stimulating enough to keep my attention on anything other than being bored. In retrospect, I really wish I heard this old saw ~all of us know and heard it as "moving around" instead of exercise.
(n.b. this was all under active mental health care x medications spanning a decade+. It's not that the mental health care was useless, I don't think I could have done what I did without it. But it couldn't "fix" me on it's lonesome, only enable me to get moving.)
* in retrospect this was wrong, plenty of newbies, and one of the most welcoming social environments I've been in. just people out there all trying to do the same thing and supporting each other.
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
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.)
There's a difference between what something is and what something is perceived as. For whatever reasons they may have, many people have a strong negative emotional reaction to the idea of exercising, ask them to go for a two mile walk around the neighborhood with you and they'll balk. But then you take them to a city like Rome and they'll walk 20 miles in a day without even realizing it.
You definitely want to build that habit when you're at your best.
A LOT of quiet unassuming people are INSPIRINGLY motivated to push through INCREDIBLE pain and obstacles, every day. Many that prevent them from 'just exercising until life gets better'. It is bullshit to say they lack motivation/character/willpower.
> For the 57 trials (2189 participants) comparing exercise with no treatment or a control intervention, the pooled SMD for depressive symptoms at the end of treatment was −0.67 (95% confidence interval (CI) −0.82 to −0.52; low‐certainty evidence), showing that exercise may result in a reduction in depressive symptoms. When we included only the seven trials (447 participants) with adequate allocation concealment, intention‐to‐treat analysis and blinded outcome assessment, the pooled SMD was smaller (SMD −0.46, 95% CI −0.88 to −0.04). Pooled data from the nine trials (405 participants) with long‐term follow‐up provided very uncertain evidence about the effect of exercise on depressive symptoms (SMD −0.53, 95% CI −1.11 to 0.06; very low certainty evidence).
Like, what does -0.67 really mean in this context. I read the study and it is not really explained. Maybe I'm too dumb to get it, though.
ssri don’t fix any underlying condition and barely work long term, that if they really work at all.
That's a pretty substantial improvement - consider someone who's more depressed than 75% of the population becoming completely average. (Because the 75th percentile is about 0.67stddev above the median.)
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...
You can't make decisions / determine clinical value from standardized effect sizes sadly, so when I see studies like this, my assumption is unfortunately that the researchers care only about publishing, and not about making their findings useful :(
In practice, this is a change of about 3-5 points on most 20+ item rating scales, or a relative reduction of 20-30% of the total (sum) score of the scale [1-2]. Unfortunately, anti-depressants are under or just barely reach this threshold [3-4], and so should be widely to be considered ineffective or only borderline effective, on average. Of course this is complicated by the fact that some people get worse on these treatments, and some people experience dramatic improvements, but, still, the point is, depression is extremely hard to treat.
Unfortunately, this also means that if exercise is only nearly as effective as therapy for depression, it may mean that the benefits of exercise are not actually really clinically observable, if measured properly and not just based on arbitrary statistical significance.
EDIT: There is less data on MCIDs for therapy, but at least one review suggests therapy effects can be in the 10+ point range [5]. But the way the exercise study is presented, with standardized effect sizes, we have no idea if the results matter at all [6].
[1] Button, et al. (2015). Minimal clinically important difference on the Beck Depression Inventory - II according to the patient’s perspective. Psychological Medicine, 45(15), 3269–3279. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291715001270 [https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychological-medici...]
[2] Masson, S. C., & Tejani, A. M. (2013). Minimum clinically important differences identified for commonly used depression rating scales. Journal of clinical epidemiology, 66(7), 805-807. [https://www.jclinepi.com/article/S0895-4356(13)00056-5/fullt...]
[3] Hengartner, M. P., & Plöderl, M. (2022). Estimates of the minimal important difference to evaluate the clinical significance of antidepressants in the acute treatment of moderate-to-severe depression. BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine, 27(2), 69-73. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjebm-2020-111600 [https://ebm.bmj.com/content/27/2/69.abstract]
[4] Jakobsen, J. C., Gluud, C., & Kirsch, I. (2020). Should antidepressants be used for major depressive disorder?. BMJ evidence-based medicine, 25(4), 130-130. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjebm-2019-111238 [https://ebm.bmj.com/content/25/4/130.abstract]
[5] Cuijpers, P., Karyotaki, E., Weitz, E., Andersson, G., Hollon, S. D., & van Straten, A. (2014). The effects of psychotherapies for major depression in adults on remission, recovery and improvement: a meta-analysis. Journal of affective disorders, 159, 118–126. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2014.02.026 [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24679399/]
[6] Pogrow, S. (2019). How Effect Size (Practical Significance) Misleads Clinical Practice: The Case for Switching to Practical Benefit to Assess Applied Research Findings. The American Statistician, 73(sup1), 223–234. https://doi.org/10.1080/00031305.2018.1549101
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.
That definition is probably too narrow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurobiological_effects_of_phy...
That being said, I do believe that exercising, eating right, maintaining a healthy sleep schedule, etc., all the boring lifestyle things have been key to preventing myself from slipping back into that depressed state, years after stopping medication.
If therapy for depression were a pill, I'm not sure it'd demonstrate enough efficacy to get approved.
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.
To bring it back towards exercise, it's fair to say that it literally cannot hurt and might help, which is more than you can say about therapy. And at least it is very, very telling whether a therapist is working questions about sleep/exercise into the very first interactions. Anyone who does not is definitely a quack.
Some people probably do have issues quickly resolved by SSRIs. Others are magically fixed by bupropion while it spikes anxiety in others. Others have major trauma that they have to work through and many therapies (like internal family systems therapy, as one example) are great at handling that. Others are stuck in cognitive distortions and merely learning about them and handling them (through cognitive behavioral therapy) can be life changing.
But if you have major trauma in your past, exercise is probably not going to do much. If you are heavily overwhelmed and your body is stuck in perpetual flight or fight) exercise and meditation might be a giant help.
But right now the practitioners are aware of this, but it's really hard to double blind test these divisions until people can do the analysis first. And at that point, you've basically already started therapy.
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.
One of the most frustrating things when your really low is people giving advice like do exercise to feel better - please don’t do this.
This is a debatable. As far as I understand things: 'chemical imbalance' has no tests to confirm that's actually true, That's just a story they tell to relax people.
Which is orthogonal to the point that antidepressants can work for some people.
We don't know how depression works. It very well may be many little things dressed in a trench coat.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266656032...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01661-0
https://www.neurocaregroup.com/news-insights/the-death-of-ch...
Context: I'm "using" SSRIs, talk therapy, psychotherapy, strength training and endurance training -- all in parallel right now.
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.
Always remember, being true is not the same as being helpful.
EDIT: For a recent overview, see https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01661-0
Exercise was how I stayed mildly sane for a good majority of those years, but when I started taking medication it was like the entire world changed. I wish I had started earlier in life. It helped me to become a lot more introspective as well, being able to better examine why I was feeling the way I did.
There are some things that no amount of exercise or "healthy living" can fix, that's unfortunately just the human condition. It's nothing to be ashamed of.
And yet many other times, it can be caused or exacerbated by situational and psychological factors, including "being stuck at home all day".
> One of the most frustrating things when your really low is people giving advice like do exercise to feel better - please don’t do this.
Worse, antidepressants actually cause significant harm to many people who take them, often without even improving their depressive symptoms. This is very bad, and I would say significantly worse than giving general advice that might be inapplicable to some people.
There's no one-size-fits-all solution, and some people probably are legitimately just in need of more motivation to go running or biking or whatever else will get them the exercise they need.
But I have to say the "chemical imbalance" theory either means no more than "depression responds to an antidepressant (sometimes)" or it is false/meaningless. Neither neurologists nor psychologists have a sufficiently detailed understanding of the workings of the brain to make such a claim.
Again, I'm glad drugs work for you. I would note that there three ways drugs can go for people; working with few problems, not working, working but with significant physical and/or psychological side-effects. Especially, taking any substance daily for the rest of one's life can stress the organs responsible for digesting/processing regardless of whether than substance is otherwise a great fix.
So I think we need to look beyond a glib "this fixes it for everyone" rhetoric even if this fixes it for you (and yeah, some of my friends should at least drugs, I'll admit).
I take sertraline (Zoloft in the US I think) and that is cheap - $20/30 month.
The £9 is for the administration of the prescription - if th drugs are super expensive heart medication or whatever, it would still be £9 (or free).
I stand by NHS being the only great thing we have left.
I had to pay $3K for an MRI in cash one time, which yeah you get what you pay for but my buddy pays $2.8K/mo in insurance for his family, like that's a big chunk of his monthly pay
Oh I want to be clear no snark towards you this is the cliche topic of healthcare in US
Regarding the topic at hand though, yeah I lift 5 days a week and do a half hour of maximum inclined walk for those days as well. Mental health but also I want to be ripped. Helps my job has a gym and I'm the only one in there in the mornings. We also walk like 2 miles at work, in circles around the parking lot, talking to co-workers 4 days a week.
My main problem is anxiety, like I wish I could walk downtown in a city and do street photography but I fear that someone will ask me for money or get robbed. The funny thing is I'm a big guy, like 6', I bench almost 300 lbs. I'm not like a stick. I have a fear of crowds too I can do shopping but sometimes in like a WalMart that's a lot of people and of course I'm terrible with women, the fear even if I have the bod. I'm just scared of eye contact and low self-esteem even having a six-fig job my self-determined value is whether a woman will say yes to me or not, it's funny. I don't have a fear of speed I can drive 160mph+ on the highway, helps to have a good car.
But for the moment I'm working towards freeing myself from debt and then being able to live a life where I'm not in fear of losing my job. I'm a privileged person, this is brought on by myself eg. dropping $1.2K a night at a strip club or $600 Venmoing a band to play song requests. I'm complaining about therapy cost lmao.
As long as you don't factor in your taxes.
You're not factoring in the most critical piece of financing - the mental burden. You don't want to be stuck figuring out how to get enough money to pay for mental health services when you need them the most. That's when your earning potential is at its lowest, and every minor obstacle to getting help gets magnified ten fold.
That may as well be a death sentence unless you're privileged enough to be able to easily pay for it with savings. Realizing that you need help, figuring out how to access it, and actually following through is hard enough as it is without any added financial burden.
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2022/jul/analysis-depression-prob...
What incentive do they have to give you immediate and durable results? Why do most only take cash?
I did some ML work with an addiction psychiatrist at the peak of the opioid crisis. He said,”To pay my bills, I have to treat rich people.”
I find taking long walks and speaking candidly about how I’m feeling is always the most effective way to deal with tough emotions.
I agree, it’s tough to be honest when you’re vulnerable. Expressing vulnerability exposes how people really feel about you.
This world view is extreme, not true, and directly harmful to your mental health.
You should consider talking to a psychotherapist about why you feel that way :^)
In all seriousness, the world is a much more pleasant place when you discard extremist views and accept the good with the bad.
Exercise has always been a mental drain for me. A day when I go to the gym is a day when I give up mental capacity that could have been used for something else. I'll be less effective at work and less organized at home. It's like my IQ's dropped by double digits.
I drink enough water and electrolytes, in case anybody's wondering.
I got great success converting friends and coworkers to... walking.
Not going on a multi-hours hike on the weekend, but just walking around the block or in a park for half an hour at mid-day, and going through the same routes so you don't have to think about finding your way.
By doing so, not only you are physically active, which is a big positive overall for most of office workers, but it requires so little of focus to achieve it that your mind is now free to wander as it please.
During this free period, you can come up with a solution to an issue you've been stuck on during the morning or for days, or you'll think about plans for the future, or you'll just get back to work with a clear mind, ready to tackle the issues of the afternoon.
> I give up mental capacity that could have been used for something else
That's the beauty of _just walking_, it requires no mental capacity, it frees it actually. Don't overthink things, like where should I walk, when, do I have the right gear... Just get outside, put the appropriate clothing depending on the weather and, enjoy your free mind compute credits!
Once you see how it works, it feels like cheating.
Afterwards you'll feel better physically and mentally.
All the gym/running/zone 2 stuff is something different altogether that could come up once you're converted to the light exercise/big effects of _just walking_.
A waste product of exercise is Adenosine. Adenosine build-up leads to increased sleep pressure, and improved Neural Function of Sleep, not just "being unconscious".
This is where things get a bit interesting when we look at depression. For many people, depression results in decreased Neural Function of Sleep (specifically slow-wave activity) even though sleep time often increases.
However there is also some evidence that restricting slow-wave activity can act as a "reset" button. The researchers I have spoken to about this are either in the "too dangerous to do the research" camp, or "distrupting slow-waves for a very short period, then increase slow-wave activity".
Of course, sleep and exercise would only be a single pathway to improving depression outcomes. Exercise alone, and the dopamine, oxygenation, and many other outcomes are also likely to come into play.
Comparing this to pharmaceutical or behavioural therapies, I can see why they'd be as effective. You're treating the entire system, not just trying to change a single chemical in the brain, specifically when we aren't even measuring the chemical before or after treatment.
Found out that there's some research on this: https://www.biotechniques.com/biochemistry/exercise-lactate-...
I don't think this works for all type of depression though.
It's unhelpful because I got tired, and then I stopped workout entirely
Now I just do fast walking and it's nice
Try HIIT 1 minute walking, 1 minute running
stimulating for the brain, safe, fun and an easy way to ease into running.
I also notice my mind better after workouts.
What got me out of that place was improv comedy lessons. Highly recommend to anyone. Improv schools and theatres should be as ubiquitous as gyms.
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.
Cleaning dishes yes, reading a book no
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.
That since for 100,000 years humans were roaming the landscape gathering or hunting, and for 10,000 years engaged in heavy agricultural work, is the modern day rise in depression not just correlated but caused by the modern day reduction in daily heavy exercise?
It’s such an obvious idea I am wondering if folks know of any research / studies on it?
I think physical activity, even just going on walks makes one feel change is possible. If something sucks and I sit home all day on YouTube, then it continues to suck. If I can change my environment, do things outside, see new people and find myself if different situations, then the thing that sucks starts feeling like maybe it also could change.
For example I doubt exercising in a basement just by yourself on 1 machine is likely to materially help with depression. At least not as much as going out doing a variety of things, or playing a game of basketball at the local gym/community center.
I highly recommend the audiobook as it is read by him and he is very enthusiastic about his research.
The one quote I remember from the book is that he stopped prescribing Prozac and started prescribing treadmills...
It's in my top 15 books that changed my worldview.
Some key highlights:
1. In 2001 fit kids scored twice as well on academic tests as their unfit peers.
2. German researchers found that people learn vocabulary words 20 percent faster following exercise than they did before exercise, and that the rate of learning correlated directly with levels of BDNF.
3.Specifically, every fifty minutes of weekly exercise correlated to a 50 percent drop in the odds of being depressed.
Exercise improves the biological health of the brain which can be fixing the underlying condition.
If you are depressed because your brain is biologically unhealthy, therapy isn’t going to do anything
Some people don’t suffer from chemical imbalances, unhealthy habits ruining their mood, or whatever your snake oil will magically cure. There’s a term called Shit Life Syndrome and some people just have that as their long term situation.
Standardized effect sizes like the ones reported here have no clinical meaning, they are purely statistical. To measure if these kinds of changes matter, you need to determine the Minimal (Clinically) Important Difference [1-2]. I.e. can clinicians (or patients) even notice the observed statistical difference.
In practice, this is a change of about 3-5 points on most 20+ item rating scales, or a relative reduction of 20-30% of the total (sum) score of the scale [1-2]. Unfortunately, anti-depressants are under or just barely reach this threshold [3-4], and so should be widely to be considered ineffective or only borderline effective, on average. Of course this is complicated by the fact that some people get worse on these treatments, and some people experience dramatic improvements, but, still, the point is, depression is extremely hard to treat.
EDIT: There is less data on MCIDs for therapy, but at least one review suggests therapy effects can be in the 10+ point range [5]. But the way the exercise study is presented, with a standardized effect size, we can have no idea if the results matter at all [6].
[1] Button, et al. (2015). Minimal clinically important difference on the Beck Depression Inventory - II according to the patient’s perspective. Psychological Medicine, 45(15), 3269–3279. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291715001270 [https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychological-medici...]
[2] Masson, S. C., & Tejani, A. M. (2013). Minimum clinically important differences identified for commonly used depression rating scales. Journal of clinical epidemiology, 66(7), 805-807. [https://www.jclinepi.com/article/S0895-4356(13)00056-5/fullt...]
[3] Hengartner, M. P., & Plöderl, M. (2022). Estimates of the minimal important difference to evaluate the clinical significance of antidepressants in the acute treatment of moderate-to-severe depression. BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine, 27(2), 69-73. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjebm-2020-111600 [https://ebm.bmj.com/content/27/2/69.abstract]
[4] Jakobsen, J. C., Gluud, C., & Kirsch, I. (2020). Should antidepressants be used for major depressive disorder?. BMJ evidence-based medicine, 25(4), 130-130. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjebm-2019-111238 [https://ebm.bmj.com/content/25/4/130.abstract]
[5] Cuijpers, P., Karyotaki, E., Weitz, E., Andersson, G., Hollon, S. D., & van Straten, A. (2014). The effects of psychotherapies for major depression in adults on remission, recovery and improvement: a meta-analysis. Journal of affective disorders, 159, 118–126. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2014.02.026 [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24679399/]
[6] Pogrow, S. (2019). How Effect Size (Practical Significance) Misleads Clinical Practice: The Case for Switching to Practical Benefit to Assess Applied Research Findings. The American Statistician, 73(sup1), 223–234. https://doi.org/10.1080/00031305.2018.1549101
Even an amateur could read the headline and instantly understand this critical point the experiment's design, and yet it's not even acknowledged under the "Risk of bias" section.
[0] https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...
2024 has been a rough year. I didn’t begin any real recover until around march-may 2025… when i started going yo the gym and lifting weights. Yeah sure i’m doing therapy and all that jazz but the real improvements started with weight lifting.
If so, that is a risk that is very dependent on local laws. I would be much more cautious about seeking mental health care in Florida, where the Baker Act makes it very easy, than in Connecticut [0]. The risk of being involuntarily committed also, of course, has to be balanced against the risk of forgoing mental health care when you need it and then injuring or killing yourself.
[0] https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ps.201900477