Now that I am in a healthier state of mind, I find that exercise helps a lot more as long as I can do it in a healthy way.
I find that exercise without adequate sleep grinds me down into a twilight zone state of everything seeming a bit unreal.
Last time I had a period similar to yours, the problem was too much screen time on social media and gaming, which was disrupting my sleep.
I cut those out, started feeling tired enough to sleep again, and bounced back to normality.
Therapy is what finally taught me how to actually process my thoughts and feelings, and let me make real progress against depression.
And now, when I go for an outside run or walk, I can spend that time focusing purely purely on my internal thoughts/feelings. Done like this, exercise can be a great therapeutic activity - but it's not the dopamine or act of exercise itself, it's creating the time for self-therapy.
> Physical activity had medium effects on depression (median effect size=−0.43, IQR=−0.66 to –0.27), anxiety (median effect size=−0.42, IQR=−0.66 to –0.26) and psychological distress (effect size=−0.60, 95% CI −0.78 to –0.42), compared with usual care across all population. The largest benefits were seen in people with depression, HIV and kidney disease, in pregnant and postpartum women, and in healthy individuals. Higher intensity physical activity was associated with greater improvements in symptoms
I think comparing exercise to drinking is pretty silly and doesn't suggest a wide berth of knowledge on the topic. I'm glad to hear that therapy was the silver bullet for you, but if there's one thing that's _abundantly_ clear about mental health treatments, it's that there's no one-size-fits-all solution.
What about the studies with clinically depressed people who treat their symptoms as effectively as SSRIs with exercise? I'm thinking specifically of a running therapy study that was done recently, I haven't read the study linked by OP.
I agree with you about therapy and medication: in my experience, they are the only things that work. Expensive though.
As a side note, I sort of feel triggered by this kind of article.
Depressed? Have you:
- exercised enough?
- drank enough water?
- slept enough?
- meditated enough?
- gotten outside enough?
It's passed as "helpful advice" by well-meaning people but always makes me feel like I'm not "enough". If I've done all those things but I'm still depressed, I must not have done those things "enough". Does that make sense? I'm so tired of trying to explain how hard I'm working, I just don't talk about it with people for fear they'll bring out "the list" of things I ought to be doing, and I'll have to explain that, yes, I get 8 hours of sleep a night. Yes, I drink a gallon of water a day. Etc.
Luckily I had been building up the habit for years in advance but that was the most I had ever exercised and it was also the most I had ever been depressed. In my case I don’t think the exercise helped at all. Perhaps if I hadn’t of been exercising maybe I wouldn’t even be here now though… I’m not entirely sure. Finding the right medication and getting therapy has been what has really helped me. With those two I can see an almost day and night difference but with the exercise I noticed no difference at all. At least I had a great physique though!