No, not at all. It made things worse. I really think it is very good that many people benefit from exercise. However, it can in some cases also harm your mental health. I think it is important for people to know this. The benefits of exercise are so well known, that the people who it is harmful for often are pressured into exercising anyway and made to feel like a failure if it does not benefit them. It took me a long time and a lot of pain to find this out. I want to tell my story in case someone is in the same boat as me.

Years ago I was feeling so bad I could not get out of bed for a couple of months. The psychologist I was seeing kept pressuring me to exercise. So, I tried it and I hated it. I really had a lot of trouble even doing the smallest things, like making food for myself or go to the supermarket. It all seemed like an impossible task. Now I had to spend the little energy I had to regulate myself to go to the gym or to run.

When I was exercising, it felt like genuine torture. I just hated every second. Afterwards, I would just feel extra tired and very sad about the pain Inhad been in and anxious about having to go again next time.

I was too timid to really stand up for myself and I did not want to fail at yet another thing. I thought it was just my fault and I just was too lazy and should be harder on myself. So, I tried to keep going, even though I could not sleep the night before and I went there crying. When I said something about it, the psychologist kept pressuring me to do it like it was some magic fix for everything. I just needed to do it often enough.

On my way to the gym, I started to wish more and more that I would be in an accident and get wounded so I did not have to go anymore. One time, on my way to the gym, I tripped and fell. I had a big bruise on my knee, but it was not bad enough to not have to exercise anymore. So, I sat on my knee on the bruise the whole night in the hope that it would get worse. It hurt, but it was not nearly as bad as exercising. When I told my psychologist she said that she could not help me if I self-harmed and I should go somewhere else. However, I was not self-harming to harm myself. I was actually protecting myself against something that was bad for me. I could not explain that at the time.

Years later, I went to a psychosomatic physiotherapist. In the years in between, I got the advise to exercise for my mental health numerous times. Each time I tried it, I failed. No matter how much I tried, it keep feeling like torture, my mood got worse and physically I did not improve at all. I always kept thinking that it was my fault and just not trying hard enough.

So, when I went to the new physiotherapist, I started out with telling him that I knew I should exercise and that I was stupid foe not doing so. He immediately stopped me and told me I should not exercise at all. He explained to me that when you exercise, your stress levels go up temporarily and then they go down and usually lower than they were before you started exercising. That is why most people benefit from stress reduction after exercise.

However, in my case, my stress levels were extremely high, all the time. They were so high that if I started to exercise, they would be pushed up above the maximum that my body was able to handle (he drew a chart where the line hit the top of the chart). So, for my body, exercise did not feel like a temporary increase in stress that would go down after a while, it felt like an extreme emergency situation that it could not adapt to. This would further disregulate my stress system. That is why it felt like torture, and why my mood got worse and why I did not have any physical improvement from exercise.

He told me moving was good to calm my nervous system. So, slow walking in the forest and things like that. And just quit as soon as I did not feel like it, or it gave me stress and just try some other time when I felt like it again. And that worked like a charm. I walk now for 4 to 6 hours a week and it calms me down. I do not have to push myself. I just feel like doing it and if I don’t, I just won’t go.

So, the point is that exercise can be great to help with stress, if your stress is maybe at 70% or 80%. However, if your stress level is consistently at 95% then it is harmful and you should not do it. (Mindfulness probably will not help either in that case btw.) If exercise keeps feeling like torture and it does not help you, do not feel like a failure and keep torturing yourself. It is not your fault if it does not work for you! Go to a psychosomatic therapist instead that has expertise in stress management. They might be able to help you.

Yes.

Don’t wanna. Do it anyway. Feel better.

That’s how it goes every single time lol

It has. Easier to go to sleep after exercising and so. But the most major benefit is that I got out of the house and did something. Felt great!

Exercise will not magically cure your mental health. I believe being active and not having a sedentary lifestyle is generally good for mental health but it’s not going to necessarily cure depression or anxiety.

So thanks everyone for posting here, I appreciate it.

So the context is that I’m a very sedentary person. I basically get up, go to my computer and stay there all day. I don’t even stretch every hour or whatever. Over the last two (well, now three) days I’ve tried to go on short (like 10 minute) walks during lunch breaks and… Well, it’s kinda working, I think? Or it could be a coincidence or a natural “high” in the sine wave of depression.

Interestingly, I’ve been told that I should feel better right after walking, but I don’t really. Like, I feel basically the same as I do when I start the walk. Perhaps even a little worse because it just gives me a chance to worry about the things I worry about. If it does help, it seems to be in the next few hours or days.

Anyway, at the very least, exercise will stop me dying when I hit 40. :P Still, it is worrying the number of people that say that it eventually goes away when the “novelty wears off”, so to speak. That tends to happen to me a lot with a bunch of the stuff I try; I lose motivation, break the habit and go back to how I used to be… Blegh.

Obviously I’ve seen all the articles saying it’s amazing, but I’ve also seen articles saying it’s overblown and a myth or that there’s no evidence. Standard article stuff, really. Figured it might be a good discussion topic to get some activity going on Lemmy and spark some interesting discussions.

I have recently started making myself go on a walk at least once a day, and I can definitely say it increases your mood over time. It’s not noticeable at first, but after a week or so I was definitely feeling more ‘fresh’ and energetic than before.

Going for a walk also forced me to get some vitamin D which helped keep me going too.

It’s 100% worth it.

It does. It’s kinda funny, waking up an hour early to lift weights makes me feel better for days. I get sleepy earlier but I have more energy during the day.

Long distance cardio is tiring but it feels good after and life stuff is easier to handle with that endurance.

Yes.

Also, don’t take anyone else’s recommendation; any kind of movement is exercise, so figure out what you want to do. Any activity counts as exercise, so bike or swim or swing a broadsword or a katana or a baseball bat. Even singing counts as exercise and joining a chorus is a great way to get out and meet people.

Hiking helped me a lot. I was out in the wilderness, touching grass, actually doing something for my health. Exploring the Alps was one of the best ideas I have ever had.

I used to suffer from clinical depression, and part of that I believe is because I used food as a coping mechanism to deal with inescapable stress and other pressures of toxic hyper-capitalist society (basically like anyone else with a substance abuse problem, except my substance was pizza).

Eating pizza every day, makes you fat. Being fat, makes life harder in general, you weigh more, are constantly fatigued, doing simple actions requires more effort, and dating is well - I mean, it’s tougher.

Add the depression on top of that and it’s like those jokes: “Sick, fat, lonely and tired.” A recipe for disaster.

I began working out, but the word is wrong. I began training. I didn’t follow the same policies and procedures of the lethally infirm/sick society that made me sick in the first place, but I went and struck it out on my own.

I went to the outskirts of the city, to No Man’s Land, and I cycled in the mid afternoon summer’s heat, 4-5 hours at a time.

I know what you’re thinking, “where does someone find the time to cycle 4-5 hours a day while holding down a job for 8 hours as well” and the answer is, your instinctual response to this tells you everything you need to know about how our society is organized and how we approach diet, exercise, and living in general.

I didn’t “work out”. I didn’t “exercise” to look good. I didn’t meticulously drive 3 miles to an air conditioned gym to run 3 miles in place on a fucking rolling machine.

I crawled through the gaping maw of hell and emerged the other side, intact. Alive, and without the depression around my ankles.

So yeah, it helped. :)

Well, my lack of exercise has definitely helped make my mental health worse. My anxiety brings “inability to act” or “action paralysis” (not sure what the correct term is in English). Been on sick leave for over 10 years now and I’m stuck at home 95% of the time. I’ve tried so many times in so many ways to get exercise but as soon as I have any inkling of anxiety, which is the vast majority of the time, my body just shuts down and I’m unable to do anything but just be in the spot I’m in at that moment.

Walking while concentrating on what i feel in different parts of my body helps me in high stress situations, and longer walks once in a while when I’m not completely stressed out helps clear my mind. swimming in thermal water also helps keep my overall stress level down when I’ve got enough capacity left to actually do it.

so yeah, the right exercise customised to my actual capacity to do exercise helps a lot - but i have to allow myself to just stop doing it without beating myself up if I’m not up to it.

I started swimming while I was in the depth of depression (induced by external factors) and yes it did help manage the depression, but didnt solve it. What solved it was leaving my alcoholic ex and getting control back over my life.

I have continued swimming and I also do a lot of cycling as well as some hiking/tramping and the ocassional bit of mountain climbing, and they do help with managing stress and mental health but they are no longer the primary reason I do them. The health benefits I get from exercise are mostly physical but those benefits also play into making me feel better about life too.

It was very helpful for me. I have trouble working out now however. Funnily enough, I tried an experimental ketamine treatment and now that I don’t feel negative it’s harder to make myself exercise

Exercise helped me, but didn’t work by itself.

Adding therapy helped more, but didn’t work by itself.

Adding meds helped more, but I don’t lean on them alone.

Which is just to say, it’s not either/or. :-)

That said, I started going on long nature hikes, usually 4-5 miles but up to 17 sometimes. Download podcasts and music for offline access. Later, my therapist suggested taking notes after my walks, about how I felt / what was on my mind – now I do it more often than not, and it’s been helpful too.