I promote exercise as an excellent way to combat and prevent anxiety/depression/etc., but calling it a silver bullet is just wrong. Some people can do all the right things and still feel like absolute shit at the end of the day. There are wars that cannot be won.
Thank you for this. There are multiple comments in this thread saying exercise is the "silver bullet," but if you have a severe anxiety disorder, it often isn't.
I am much less anxious on the days I don't exercise. I still do it nearly every day because I want to stay healthy.
What works for me? Good old SSRIs. They are my silver bullet.
Too bad it doesn't work for everyone. I exercise a lot and it has made me no better.
It gets tiring and frustrating seeing exercise touted as that one weird trick online that will fix you, ignoring that depression or anxiety are highly individual and complex conditions.
It's not something to beat yourself up over, or to feel stuck because you can't do it. I think the benefit of exercise has more to do with a feeling of accomplishment than the exercise itself. I wish I had a surefire cure for anxiety, but I'm sure it's not exercise.
The only thing more consistent than the benefits exercise has brought to my mental health, is the strange irrational hatred some people have for the idea that it can help.
The evidence base for exercise as a treatment for depression is weak, and probably wouldn't stand up after better testing.
It's important that people get exercise, and it might have protective preventative effects, but it's a bad thing that people keep pushing exercise as some kind of miracle cure for depression.
Not to start a flame war with you, but in the hope that maybe I can make this panacea a little less popular I want to get something off my chest. Every time someone has a problem with mental health, whether it's depression, anxiety, drug withdrawal, etc the answer from the audience is always exercise.
I'm only one data point, but I've exercised more days of my life than not and have observed absolutely no difference in mental health between the me that exercises and the me that doesn't.
What about athletes: students-athletes, NBA players, olympians. Do they show a significantly lower rate of mental health issues?
This argument has been floating around in my head for a while. The reason I think this suggestion is harmful is because it is the most vocal and popular, and yet excludes anyone who already exercises.
Who is recommending this? My hypothesis is people who only exercise every once in a while and so they get a huge hit of endorphins and think, "Man if I did this every day I would feel great." Maybe, some people with mental health issues use exercise as an escape and are really recommending it for its temporary relief. But I'm just in denial about the majority of people being people who didn't exercise, were miserable/anxious/whatever, started exercising and now they're happy/normal/perfect.
Again, I'm not trying to start any arguments here. For those of you who have been saved by exercise, I'm envious. I would really just like to see more answers than this instead of seeing it as the go to answer. It makes the assumption that people who have mental health issues don't exercise.
Lack of exercise causes me a mixture of depression and anxiety. In a society in which we engineered physical challenge out of our lives, it's no wonder a segment of the population experiences depression.
We're not disputing the claim that it's helpful, we're disputing the claim that those who do not exercise necessarily "feel like shit" and would cease to "feel like shit" and/or would feel significantly better if they did exercise, when controlling for everything else.
> For the vast majority of people, if you feel OK, you are OK.
I think you might be missing the point entirely here.
You can "feel OK" when a whole lot is NOT OK if your daily existence is extremely sedentary and you never even move your joints through their full range of motion, let alone elevate your heart rate and break a proper sweat.
Exercise is literally about exercising your capabilities. If you don't exercise them, you don't discover they've gone missing until it's too late.
I have had similar thoughts. I think that's why exercise is so much more effective than medicine - it's making your lower physiological self think that you are doing something important and exciting. It also explains why people get so invested in the drama of others. In economically developed countries, we have far fewer life and death situations that help us appreciate it when things are going well.
The other difficulty is that our higher order functions know that exercise is, in the short term, a waste of energy and time. It's not getting us any more resources. I include myself in the subset of people with impulse and procrastination issues, which makes it very difficult to invest in things that pay off over the long term. Depression for me is being stuck in that hole, knowing there may be a way to feel better, but believing the world would be better if I was dead. Maybe my evolutionary contribution would have been as a martyr if I lived in a different circumstance.
More generally, healthcare suffers from the idea that there is "a" population. Our brains and bodies are unique, and until they can identify types of brain patterns and perform studies against those, it's really throwing pills at someone and hoping for the best. Some parts of science have entered into a dangerous dogmatic phase of "this is how we've always done it" which is the opposite of the point.
I would really like to see the mental health community rally behind getting people into recovery-style support groups where people encourage each other to socialize, eat healthier, and get more exercise. That would put all three of the most effective ways to fight depression and anxiety into practice. Of course then the problem is that prescribing virtually free services isn't in the economic interest of for-profit systems.
I dislike this black n white rhetoric from both sides. "Just do some workout" - "no this doesn't work for me". Yes, workout does help, but mental illness is still real. Both sides should try to be more sensitive and more understanding in my opinion.
I can't fix my social anxiety through workout. But I sure can feel better about myself when doing it and then approach those anxieties with more confidence, but the anxieties are still there.
I’m not sure it’s just an opinion, there is a plethora of research showing the effects of exercise on depression.
There are certainly people that are clinically depressed that are also physically active (some friends of mine are in that group). OP states as much.
But I agree with OP, if we’re not going to talk about the low hanging fruit of exercise, diet, and sleep, we’re not going to get anywhere with combating depression.
Meh, exercise didn't help my severe clinical depression in the least. It probably will help if you're feeling a little down, but that doesn't necessarily translate to improvement in clinical depression. It's borderline dangerous to hold it up as a panacea.
> I've never understood this idea of feeling humiliated at the gym or while starting a new sport.
I don't, either, but, because of that, I wouldn't presume to give out advice regarding this aspect without first understanding better what it is.
Too often, especially in the realm of mental illness (if I may work in the original article topic), advice comes from good intentions but ignorance, and that can be unhelpful, if not insulting.
I happen to have much of the same experience with exercise as the original commenter, except that it was not always so, which makes for an odd perspective.
I know what was, at least, previously possible, including the relatively immediate benefits of endorphin high and feeling more energized later that day and/or the following day. It's just that somewhere along the line of too many years of essentially no exercise at all, that stopped happening. Now, even a small amount of exercise (10-15 minutes of cardio, like walking) will result in feeling extra-lousy later that day and/or the following day, instead.
Given even this knowledge, I can tell you that the cliches (which, your advice is one of, if one of the better ones) just don't provide an actionable potential solution.
The vast majority of people may not have quite this hard of a problem to address, and maybe not even the majority of people suffering from depression, but that's part of what I would say makes depression so hard is that it can present with (or be co-morbid with) other issues that, were they not so hard, might make the depression "itself"[1] much easier to treat.
[1] I only use quotes because of the lack of distinct lines between symptoms of depression and disorders in their own right.
No one is suggesting that exercise replace any other treatment. Is that the impression you were getting? But because it has in fact helped at least some people, it seems limiting for any person to disqualify that for themselves without a try.
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