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Exercise.
Cardiovascular and resistance exercise both release a chemical called BDNF, which causes hippocampal neurogenesis, which causes a decrease in depression.
After being on medication and in therapy for years, I basically lost my medical care and has to figure out a fallback strategy. Learned about this exercise connection, and changed my running habits from:
To:
The effect on my depression was profound. It was far more powerful than the medication and therapy
And if exercise makes you miserable?
That may indicate HPA axis dysregulation depending on the timescale.
When you exercise, how long is the miserable period afterward?
I had a dysregulation of my HPA axis that resulted in a cause-effect function like “ten minutes of vigorous exercise results in a week of insomnia, headaches, panic attacks, and muscle rigidity”.
Is it like that? Or do you just mean exercise isn’t fun during the exercise? Or something else?
I strongly dislike being sweaty and, if exercising, even walking somewhere, outside, dislike being at the mercy of the elements.
There's also that one cannot simply exercise. There are necessary activities that need to be performed afterwards if not before.
Some people take jumping into a shower for granted, for example; they don't even think about it, and just do it and it's done before their brain even engages. For me that takes a lot of mental energy, which brings me onto another point:
I do not know how much mental stamina I have for a day, so I could start an activity and run out of steam before I've had chance to get to the end of everything, making for a very uncomfortable hour or two as I drag myself miserably through whatever else needs to be done.
As such I tend to want to avoid that happening, and it's on my mind the whole time I'm doing something that takes time.
Throwing exercise into the mix only guarantees less time to be able do the things I need to, even if there are still many hours left in the day.
I figure this could be a case of needing to somehow force myself to do it anyway, but I do not know how to do that. And there's that I would then need to keep doing that every day forever in order not to fall back to where I am currently, which seems both unsustainable and unpleasant.
Probably best to start with a small amount of exercise then. Like one to five minutes.
You certainly don’t want to deplete your resources to the point of making the rest of your life undoable.
One thing I’ve found useful is to study the different resources that the body uses. This can be abstract concepts like “willpower” down to concrete molecular energy reserves like “glycogen”. Both the concrete and the abstract concepts have been studied by science, and there are models of how they work.
In my own day to day, I pay attention to:
It’s also a fact that exercise will, over time, tend to increase the capacity of the various “energy” stores one has access to. It will improve willpower, concentration, flexibility, glycogen, oxygen carrying capacity of the blood, mitochondrial health, etc.
But doing too much (which at the beginning can be just a little bit) can definitely cause problems. Especially if that willpower budget is small.
If I were in your situation, where exercise was likely to push me over the limit and deplete my willpower budget (and other resources) to the point where I failed in other parts of life, I would start extremely small with the exercise routine. Like one push-up. I mean tiny.
People ask “what’s the point” to something that small. The point is that it’s a stepping stone to being able to do more.
Of course, you also gotta make sure you’re eating enough, getting plenty of sleep, getting all the nutrients you need, etc.
Also (and I know this comment is all over the place) meditation can increase willpower budget over time.
Big, drastic changes can be overwhelming and can set a person back. This is why baby steps are recommended. “Baby steps” means basically tiny steps. Tiny changes. One push-up per day. Maybe curl 1 lb, once a day.
Baby steps are steps that, themselves, don't change one’s life. But what they do is they open the door for larger steps that can change one’s life.