Acute aerobic exercise to recover from mental exhaustion
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Making this comment because I suffered (and recovered from) ME/CFS myself.
Burnout, however, does tend to respond positively to exercise over time. Burnout and ME/CFS are very different conditions.
> Making this comment because I suffered (and recovered from) ME/CFS myself.
How were you able to recover from ME/CFS? It seems spontaneous recovery does happen to some, though for others it is a chronic condition that will likely require some future medical advances to overcome.
That's not quite true, because it isn't all exertion that causes PEM. Generally it is only doing too much that triggers it.
Importantly, the delayed worsening can clearly be measured by light exercise testing. It isn’t the same as normal post-exercise recovery or soreness. It’s far worse and can even be triggered by strenuous mental activity (perhaps energy expenditure in general).
For many, it has a distinct viral trigger. They can be fine and healthy one week, then become chronic CFS sufferers after an infection with a number of notable viruses (EBV is common).
Sound familiar? It has a lot of parallels to “Long COVID”, but it just never got the same attention because it’s not attached to a global pandemic in the 24/7 news cycle.
I'm really grateful to have seen your comment and that you answered me, I will do some experiments and tests to asses my situation better and check if some of the solutions can help.
My wife has had ME/CFS for more than a decade. Honestly many of the touted remedies she finds online sound like snake oil, but if you are suffering and nobody has a good clue, you try each one in turn hoping you might be one of the lucky people who responds to a given modality.
Cort Johnson runs the website Health Rising, which acts as a clearing house for recent news about ME/CFS (and recently long covid as it relates to ME/CFS) and there is a community built around that site.
http://www.cfsselfhelp.org/library/fred-friedberg%2525E2%252...
https://forums.phoenixrising.me/threads/dr-friedberg-intervi...
Another anecdote - As a kid I was "hyperactive" and struggled a lot in school until my freshman year. Coincidentally, my problems of hyperactivity and poor grades both stopped at almost the exact time I started doing "competitive" endurance sports. I was just now diagnosed with ADHD as an adult in my mid twenties. My diagnosis probably took so long because I've been "self medicating" with exercise for the last ~10-15 years.
I definitely believe the results of this study and I've found them true in my own life. I've consistently used exercise as a reset from studying / working, and often attributed consistent exercise as a key to my productivity.
Judo, with it’s focus on grappling standing up is ridiculously hard on the body, and is not something you just pick up late in life and chill with. You’d break in all sorts of ways.
Carmack seems to have a serious interest, starting with wrestling in highschool.
> My wife for Christmas once got me a year of privates with Carlos Machado which put me up several levels. There was a period there where I’d have Judo with one of my coaches one day, then privates with Carlos the other day.”
https://bjjtribes.com/john-carmack-details-his-bjj-and-judo-...
While working at Bletchley, Turing, who was a talented long-distance runner, occasionally ran the 40 miles (64 km) to London when he was needed for meetings, and he was capable of world-class marathon standards. Turing tried out for the 1948 British Olympic team, but he was hampered by an injury. His tryout time for the marathon was only 11 minutes slower than British silver medallist Thomas Richards' Olympic race time of 2 hours 35 minutes. He was Walton Athletic Club's best runner, a fact discovered when he passed the group while running alone. When asked why he ran so hard in training he replied:
I have such a stressful job that the only way I can get it out of my mind is by running hard; it’s the only way I can get some release.
That doesn’t say he ran back, to, though. Maybe call that a half-commute?
https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Extras/Turing_running:
Alan Turing ran a little while he was at Sherbourne school, usually when football was cancelled because of bad weather. He did not run while an undergraduate at Cambridge, preferring to row, but once he had won his fellowship to King's College he began to run more seriously, his frequent route being from Cambridge to Ely and back, a distance of around 50 km. He did a little running while at Bletchley but only when he moved to the National Physical Laboratory did he take up running more seriously
> I was just now diagnosed with ADHD as an adult in my mid twenties. My diagnosis probably took so long because I've been "self medicating" with exercise for the last ~10-15 years.
Also, Jesus. It's as if ADHD is a manufactured diagnosis to pathologize a healthy response to living conditions humans should find intolerable: sitting at a desk all day. I won't link to Born to Run, but it's easy to see that pre-industrial humans (i.e. 99% of the homo sapiens lifestyle) had lives full of physical activity. We call exercise "self-medication" when it is really a sick society that we should address.
I'd love for this to be true but all the evidence we have is that it is not true. I don't know if you're diagnosed with ADHD yourself or not, but as someone diagnosed with ADHD this sounds like a cool fantasy. I've also heard people say "well it's just cellphones and TikTok giving everyone ADHD, people just need to practice focusing". I grew up playing ~3 sports at any one time year round, with plenty of outdoor physical activity, running around the neighbourhood. I read books constantly, had very little access to computers, no access to cellphones. I also had terrible ADHD symptoms my whole life, and the only thing that helps reduce the symptoms effectively is medication. I have plenty of coping mechanisms that help but they are not preventative.
I would love not to take medication, as I'm generally averse to taking medication unnecessarily. It's the only thing that lets me choose to work on the things I want to work on, whether chores, listening to people, projects at my job or in my personal life.
The scientific evidence we have about ADHD is that it's highly heritable, that there are clear physical differences in size of certain parts of the brain in people with diagnosed ADHD, and that some children grow out of it as those parts of their brain catch up. It's one of the best examples we have of a disorder with clear physical causes, and the mechanism of the medications we have is also one of the best understood of all brain disorders. It's a dream to suggest it is just some hunter-mode human capability that modern society doesn't have a place for.
It sucks to have it and I wish I didn't, and that's because I want to be able to pay attention to the people I love when they talk to me, not because of some desire to be a perfect cog in a corporation that wouldn't exist in pre-industrial society.
There are three ways to slice this fact, depends on who you ask. And I've asked a lot of people, because India treated "sports" as the refuge of those who cannot cut it in academics & I had two decades of people telling me to "quit running around, sit and study" which I had to unlearn in my 30s.
First is that thinking is not just limited by the "hardware" / displacement of your brain engine, but the consumable for doing it - that when I go for a walk and kick up my heart to 130 bpm, my brain is getting the equivalent of a turbo boost (literally, more oxygen to burn). The same applies to the glucose out of the liver, where a runner trains to feel the second wind coming even when the thing burning through glucose is their brain. And I've found that I can burn through a lot playing chess - heart-rates up by +30, extremities go cold and hunger stops when I'm thinking hard (or losing). Lower your heart-rate sitting still, the more boost you can push when needed.
But there's also a problem with selection bias.
Second is that running or endurance sports is not entirely physical. Nobody is chasing you to run, you are running on pure internal motivation & that selects for people who are good at staying on a chase. The mindset needed to keep running 10+ miles is basically why we tell people "this is marathon, not a sprint" when it comes to putting in time into something new. Because the mindset is about pacing, not absolute pace (the swimming scene in Gattaca comes to mind). I think this is selected for but like muscles it grows with use; you can evolve your mindset closer to being a persistence predator of ideas, beyond boredom.
Third is that the resources needed to be an amazing endurance runner and a PhD candidate are correlated - you need to focus away from paying the bills and work on doing something which has a slow burn with a very delayed reward. You need a healthy childhood, you need time to go running and you need a culture which values physical fitness as either a military tool (the himalayan hikes I went to were full of israelis in their 20s) or social status symbol (a somewhat post-scarcity economy).
I can't run as fast or in competitive fashion, a half marathon is my distance of choice, but I running for the first two reasons and can keep doing it for the third.
How did you arrive at this ritual?
Just do any exercise that’s convenient and don’t overthink the details. Make it as easy as possible to get up and do. The more complicated you make it, the less you’ll actually do it.
Can be done in 1-2 minutes right next to the desk.
It doesn’t replace a true gym trip but it comes much closer than I ever would have thought before I started doing it.
At first I didn’t realise this was a verb followed by a noun, and thought to myself “damn, these slam slam balls sound like fun!”
I think the issue that most people won't gather up the will to do aerobic exercise after they are mentally exhausted -- even that they know it works to some extent.
Following this, I believe, without scientific proof, that genius (or others who can contribute significantly more than other people) have their mind wired completely different from other people. For example, I know people who are super smart, super energetic, and (in the context of OP article) can switch between tasks efficiently. They don't seem to need cooldown, they always have the will to do something as long as they know it's good for them. In one sentence, they are more like machines.
I wonder if there is a way for ordinary people to achieve that "machine-like" mentality. I'm curious to learn from your experience if you are able to grow from a "weak-minded" people to a "strong-will" one, however painfully. So far I haven't seen one example.
Additionally, do you have kids? Have you ever tried working out and then immediately chasing around a toddler? I regret it every time. The exercise, not the toddler.
Train brazilian jiu jitsu, or another martial art that involves actual physical contact. Mental toughness is a skill that you can develop quickly in endeavors like those.
Generally, pick something that is difficult, or uncomfortable - and do that thing over and over again. It could be as simple a making yourself take 1 minute of cold shower every morning.
However barring becoming a mentat I've noticed this variation within myself as well and I've noticed the times I am able to go and go and go is when I have a lot of momentum. It seems that doing things that require will naturally result in more will so it isn't that the task is easier but rather my ability to overcome is increased and it is a smaller % of my overall energy expenditure to do.
In accord with this I've noticed that for me taking a "break" is when I get far less done and it becomes much harder to do anything.
I've also seen that when I have things booked back to back to back no matter the density it seems I can keep going so long as I don't stop to think about how tired I am and just keep going. It's when I get breathing room that it seems like everything I've already been doing is impossible.
The other big help for me was Adderall, I have ADHD bad so if I am not working under pressure and a deadline sufficient to release adrenaline I can't do anything. That was until I got my medicine then I finally felt like I could be who I could be without being a nurveous burned out wreck all the time.
That's just my perspective with n=1.
I also found that I work pretty well when under pressure or someone request something challenging (especially if it's a girl I like :D). However, both are external forces and they don't come very often. It's VERY difficult to find jobs that consistently provide enough challenge because those jobs are very picky about candidates. Neither often there is any request coming from other people.
It would be nice if I can grow an internal force.
https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/tag/will
I suppose it might be a question of whether having enough willpower to start the exercises disqualifies one from being 'weak minded'
I always found growing strong discipline from thin air similar to pulling one's hair to leave the ground.
I worked for a startup from 2015 to 2017.
During that time I'd sometimes work 10-14 hours for 2-3 days in a row.
When I was tired after lunch I'd just tell my colleagues I was tired and would take a gaming break and then go play 1 or 2 maps of CS:GO in casual mode before working 5-7 hours more after the brain fog had lifted. It actually worked very well back then.
Not exactly the same as TV since was very active and not relaxing but I feel it was worth mentioning since to counter the idea that only physical exercise can work.
Later I figured out that if I just drop breakfast I don't get hit by brain fog after lunch. This is funny since every health specialist have always told how important a correct breakfast is to stay sharp during the day.
During the pandemic I tried this again but stopped it since now it seems 20 minutes of gaming just wastes 40 minutes of my day. There are some obvious between now and then but I have no clear idea which of them are responsible for why it worked back then but not now. (During the pandemic I worked from home, I also don't eat breakfast mot days and I am older now.)
I used to do a large, sometimes carb heavy breakfast (french toast was my goto... with syrup of course). Brain fog killed me. Switched to 2 strips of bacon and 3 eggs instead (bacon done in the microwave, so easy) and that fog has lifted!
Some of my happiest days were when I trained boxing and weights 2 hours six times a week. It's hard to be depressed or anxious when you are physically exhausted and the feeling of physical strength just makes you feel better. Working out to the point of exhaustion feels like a "reset" for body and mind.
Eating is another thing. When I hike the whole day or backpack for days my eating gets naturally balanced without effort. I eat what I need and that's it. When I work for 10 hours a day at a desk I start craving junk food and have to be careful not to put on weight. And not moving much is physically exhausting. I think that's because in the past usually when you had a lot of mental stress you were under physical threat (e.g. chased by a predator or enemy) and therefore probably needed physical energy. So we react to the typical modern workplace stress by wanting more energy but we never use it.
Any ideas for a career that balances physical and mental effort better (and pays well)? A few years ago I worked near a place where they shot a lot of movie scenes and film production seemed pretty attractive. They spend a lot of time in the office planning things but then they go out for extended periods of time and do the actual shoot.
Those folks are SMART
Decide + gruelling work.
But it is a choice (to be candid, one I haven't executed on yet)
Most of the time you're waiting near the spot where you need to be, or staying perfectly still, or moving but only very slowly.
Film work (even small-scale local stuff) can be really fun but 90+% of the physical activity will be goofing off, for most of the people involved in most shoots. And of course most of the work before and after filming is sitting in front of a screen, like any other office job.
1. If I'm understanding this correctly, it seems like the active control (stretching) performed worse than the so-called passive control (watching a "popular sitcom"). The Cohen's d for the active control ranged from 0.214 to 0.737, and 0.102 - 0.286 for the passive control. So watching a "popular sitcom" is closer to aerobic activity in its effect on recovery?
2. The abstract says the passive control was watching a "popular sitcom", this is weird. Does this mean the researchers picked a show for the subjects to watch? That doesn't make any sense, if I had to watch a show I didn't select that would be annoying and possibly interfere with recovery. But maybe the researchers didn't
A Cohen's d of 0.2 is considered small and the values for the passive controls top out at 0.286, and apparently there's even a negative relationship with restlessness.
My bet is that if someone tried to do a similar study but instead of picking a sitcom for the subject they allowed the subjects to simply watching whatever TV they would like to watch at the moment, the effect size would disappear.
I am assuming I'm just missing something here, but from my fairly basic, non-expert understanding, it's not possible to draw the conclusions that the authors drew. Furthermore, the design seemed flawed from the beginning (although kudos for providing an active control). The main issue seems to be that their passive control wasn't really passive, it was making subject watch a show that they might not normally watch for relaxation purposes.
If I feel sluggish and in a generally negative mood on a day when we're having friends or family over for dinner or whatever, my wife makes me play beat saber and it really does help a lot!
My ADHD can make it hard for me to just boot up the playstation, even if I need it and I know it will help, so having a loving wife is great too :)
But if you can run and don't have joint issues, sprints can put you in the best shape possible in about two weeks.
In their experiment they find that 30 minutes of moderate exercise is effective. I'd be curious to compare that with for example 10 minutes of high intensity exercise?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-intensity_interval_trai...
I often feel that the most refreshed I feel is if I combine high intensity aerobics with the outdoors -- something about the ocean or forest always bring peace and makes me feel focused for the rest of the day. It would be nice to dig into how setting us also helps.
Watching sitcoms stresses me out. And I hate most of them.
Weight lifting is not aerobic, it is anaerobic.
If you run/cycle/etc beyond your lactate threshold heartrate, you've now switched from aerobic to anaerobic.
Easy to google for more info if this seems interesting/important to you, just a "heads up" to the concept.
Heavy low repetition lifting is anaerobic, but around 15-20+ repetitions with lighter weights it becomes aerobic.
If it's beyond 70% max heart rate, you are likely going anaerobic, muscles and heart start switch from fat to glycogen to ATP as the demand increases.
It's like a runner doing "speed work" on a track. First 800 relatively "easy". By the eight repeat, not so much.
On the other hand I’ve done high rep air squats and while I wasn’t wearing a monitor, it felt very much like the cardio zone.
I think the Wahoo ticker-x is the only one that meets all those requirements and I think it can work without a watch too. I have the garmin hrm-pro which can save/download but it needs the watch to be connected to start working which is bad design. Check DCrainmaker website for latest reviews.
(I'm not assuming that a single schedule is applicable to all circumstances or persons.)
(Naturally, the mind is part of the body, but the mental benefits are drastically under-emphasized!)
Morning exercise a few times a week (at Orangetheory, in my case) lead to fairly large productivity boosts. My head feels so much clearer and I seem to have a lot more focus on tap, and just raw motivation to get things done or what I call “mental oomph”.
They may be old fuddy-duddies, but damned if they aren't right more often than not. Even when we'd rather they weren't.
It works every time (you still feel tired, but you can concentrate).
1: http://cpxinternational.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/028_B...
Once you get used to it, yes.