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Comment by kristiandupont | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. And furthermore, I am continuously realizing how much my bodily well-being affects my mental state.

I am not suggesting that exercise is the cure for depression, but when it comes to a normal "feeling low", I find that the solution often relates to the body: move, stretch or relax. Same with sleep. If I can't fall asleep I often just need to make myself aware of where I have tension in the body ([link redacted])

On a higher level, diet obviously means a lot and so does air quality. I put an Awair in my office recently and have realized that I wasn't airing out nearly enough. I was basically sitting in a cloud of CO2 which I now realize was also making me feel tired.

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Exercise might not be a “cure” for depression, but it’s definitely an excellent treatment for it, potentially on par with pharmaceuticals:

https://www.psychcongress.com/article/evidence-exercise-anti...

In the theory of depression as an attractor state in a dynamical system[1], exercise would be one of many small cures for depression. To cure depression, one would likely have to combine several small cures, none of which would work on their own. For example: diet, exercise, amount of sleep, timing of sleep, pharmaceuticals, behavioural activation, cognitive distortions, social life, life circumstances, as well as any physical health issues which could be contributing to depression.

I no longer have depression, and it was a combination of small factors which did it for me.

1: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ontology-of-psychiatri...

Totally agree with the small factors take: For me, it would be diet, exercise, amount of sleep, sleep time, behavioral activation, translating unhelpful to helpful thoughts, social life, life circumstances, minimizing tempting distractions and having bluetooth music stations available at all times helps tremendously.

Did the removal of thots have anything to do with the curing your depression?

A sense of humour didn't hurt.

Escaping noise pollution, having an empty calendar and removing the phone are 3 things that help me.

I cringe when I think about how I used to seriously consider nootropic drugs while consistently staying up past midnight and hitting snooze and begrudgingly dragging myself from my bed after ~6 hours of sleep.

This seems laughable. An "Awair", to aovid sitting in a cloud of CO2? So what, for millennia of human achievement, it was only by miracle that so many people could stay alert enough to think up anything while sitting in their personal clouds of suffocating CO2 prior to the invention of these office/home air monitoring tools? Really? Sounds like nonsensical faux cutting edge woo to me.

I see.

You get used to it after a while. I've been living in an area with extreme levels of outside air pollution (think Mumbai or Beijing, but much worse) for many years, so my windows are almost always closed shut. I have a CO2 meter and it reports an average of about 2000 ppm. I feel fine, and don't feel any difference to the normal level of 440 ppm. I'm pretty certain it would show on objective cognitive tests, but personally I really don't feel any difference.

This sounds seriously unhealthy. Consider finding different place to live if at all possible. Air pollution is a killer.

If I was in that situation I would consider opening the windows twice a day for 15 minutes, then running a good (and properly sized) air purifier on full blast for an hour.

The sibling comment is right, it doesn't help very much. The CO₂ level goes above 800 ppm (which is already considered unhealthy) in ~20 minutes, rises to ~2200-2400 ppm (depends on wind speed and atmospheric pressure) in the course of a couple of hours, and then just stays there for days on end.

I put all my pollution data into Grafana and it makes making decision when to open (or close) a window that much easier. (Yeah, you have to make a thought-out decision to not feel terrible. It's a whole ceremony.)

Depending on the size of your house/apartment, you'll use up that oxygen in a couple of hours and will be back at 1000+ levels. Plus, there must be some ventilation in OP's setup already, as the CO2 levels are at 2000, and without ventilation they'd just rise until he passes out...

The biggest threat in your case is the PM2.5

In Beijing, the difference before and after the air purifier was enormous in my own experience.

what hardware/software/data are you, or anyone else, using to get these readings?

WHAT???

CO2: Excellent point. After 4 hrs in 30m2, we bathe in 1100ppm. After a night, 1800ppm. Normal levels are 500-600. After living in Australia, I’ve always attributed their taller average to being more outdoors and having well-working ventilation standards for buildings. Low CO2 might do wonders for mental development.

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