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Comment by migro23 | Hacker News Reader

Do you have access to cold water. sea lake, bath with ice? Get in on a regular basis (with necessary precautions)! Access to a sauna? Get in on a regular basis. Engage in regular exercise, cardio is great. Don't feel like it? Do it anyway, treat it like it's meds because in a very real sense it is. Get your diet in order. Sugar is the devil! Get your sleep in order. Try and get to sleep before midnight and when you wake up in the morning go outside (before 9am) and get some morning light in your eyes. It improved my sleeping pattern immensely.

It may not be a dead cert cure for depression but all of the above has accumulative effects over time and it is more difficult to feel bad mentally when you are feeling really good physically.

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> Engage in regular exercise, cardio is great. Don't feel like it? Do it anyway, treat it like it's meds because in a very real sense it is.

This is not necessarily good advice, overtraining is a thing and actually causes depressed mood. Check heart rate variability to make sure you are rested enough to exercise.

People with depression should really try to keep inflammation low, and preventing overtraining is an important part of that.

This is like saying an anorexic shouldn’t eat because they might eat unhealthy food.

Everyone should get regular exercise. Worry about overtraining after you’ve started training at all.

Overtraining happens right after you start out, because you're not used to the training at that point. You're suddenly running a _huge_ ATP deficit, and ATP (and other metabolites) can't be produced on a whim, metabolism has to adapt. Many people stop right after they started because they exhausted themselves too quickly, instead of waiting 2 days and continuing then. Everybody should be worried about overtraining. Not only for mental health, but also metabolic and heart health. You know, sudden cardiac arrest and things like that.

I don't disagree at all with doing regular training. I'm doing 10km walks almost every day now. But everybody's metabolic capabilities are different, and rest periods are highly individual. Rest isn't optional, ask any bodybuilder.

Granted overtraining is a thing but undertraining or no training is also a thing. At the level most people are at (sedentary or undertrained) coupled with the fact that people have reasonable intuitions as to when they feel tired or not, the risks of overtraining is signficantly less that the benefits of regular exercise both physically and mentally.

You do mention inflammation in a previous comment and overtraining increases it but does the negative consequence of inflammation due to overtraining on how one feels subjectively outweigh the cascade of endorphins and neurotransmitters in response to exercise that correspond to an uplift in mood or an alleviation of stress? I'm not sure but in the given context (original post) your point is valid but of much less concern probabilistically and physiologically.

I do grant however that that is only my opinion and very much up for debate.

> does the negative consequence of inflammation due to overtraining on how one feels subjectively outweigh the cascade of endorphins and neurotransmitters in response to exercise that correspond to an uplift in mood or an alleviation of stress?

Usually exercise in overtraining doesn’t feel good in the way you are describing it. It creates extra stress and the body won’t be inclined to release endorphins to encourage that behavior.

When lockdown started I built 1 mile / 30 minutes of walk every day into my routine, plus a few minutes' worth of core strength stuff etc twice per day, short enough not to bore me. (I worked out decades ago that I was never going to spend hours a day down the gym!) I think it helps, and it is at the lower end of widely agreed minimum exercise levels for physical health. And I skip it occasionally when I really want to.

None of this is going to be "overtraining" and/or earn me medals.

If you had ME/CFS, you‘d end up in overtraining. Metabolism is highly individual.

Favorite-worthy comment, thanks! I've certainly had success with some of these and would like to add more to my routine. (I've found it that having a stable, healthy daily routine helps a lot by itself. Getting used to actually getting up and making coffee immediately after I wake up has made a surprisingly large difference to my mornings)

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