[aphextron]

So much of "mental" health is really just physical health. As a young person with mood issues I could never really understand why I felt the way I felt at times, and would always just chalk it up to some vague self diagnosed mental disorder. But the older I get I realize it all comes down to my physical state. Am I tired? Have I slept right? Have I eaten? Too much caffeine? Too much alcohol? Have I exercised? Practically every bad mood can be traced back to these. Yet people will ignore all that and convince themselves they need to take a pill to make themselves feel better.

[chrischattin]

Agreed. This has been my experience as well. Whenever I get to a dark place, I eventually pick up the weights again and w/in a few weeks I'm feeling much better. Fixing mental health issues with working out is a meme in the fitness world too.

Probably not a popular opinion among the HN crowd, but I think there are way too many anxiety/depression cases caused by lifestyle. It's like, you sit in front of a computer screen for 12 hours a day chugging sugary lattes, no shit you have anxiety. Go do some hill sprints until you're exhausted.

[handrous]

An awful lot of "night owls" or "insomniacs" who just "can't" go to bed early are a result of lifestyle, too. Specifically, hyper-stimulative home environments and very bright nighttime household lighting—not just screens, though that's part of it. Limit lighting to low-double-digit candle power per room, at most, and take away the on-demand 24/7 carnival that is modern multimedia entertainment past ~8PM (or dusk, whichever's later, it's seasonal), and watch most of the "night owls" who just "are" that way shift to normal sleep patterns.

... of course, this means abandoning evening/night-time computer-based work, and cutting back a ton on pop-culture experiences—if you've got kids and a job and you try to spend at least some time active outdoors during the day, when are you going to binge that HBO show everyone's talking about, if not at night? When are you going to play non-kid-friendly video games? Doom-scroll your social media? Work on your "side hustle"? Do anything at all with people that involves screens or bright lighting? Well, you're not. Or at least, not very much. You're practically giving those things up, as significant parts of your life. People are too attached to one or more of those things to take the plunge—me, too, aside from some highly and immediately effective, strictly-followed trials of at most a few weeks at a time.

(yes, of course some people actually have problems sleeping beyond lifestyle issues, nowhere am I denying that—but as many people as apparently do? No, the epidemic of sleeplessness is largely a lifestyle thing.)

[unifiedtheory]

definitely. I was a 'night owl'. spent most of university awake at night. after implementing a strict 10 pm bedtime, I go to sleep in 5 minutes and sleep like a baby. then I wake up before 7 am with no alarm. 'night owl' indeed...

[TeMPOraL]

On the other hand, you may get all of these things right, and still experience no improvement.

Personally, I'm starting to feel that most "diet and exercise" advice is just a subtle way of showing a middle finger. Sending someone on a wild goose chase, thus making them go away. In my circles, I've never heard of a single case where a medical problem - whether physical or mental - was solved by changing diet or a more active lifestyle. The closest I've seen was shuffling meals around because of a bad interaction with a drug.

Keeping sleep, diet and exercise truly optimal, against challenges of the modern world and already compromised physical or mental state is a full-time job on its own. Even if it could help - which I doubt - few people have enough time and energy to go this route. Hell, finding the optimal balance in the first place is essentially a full-time N=1 research work.

Pills are good thing. The right ones, administered in correct doses, under supervision of medical professionals - they work wonders. Modern medicine in many ways a miracle. Being able to function again, to feel good, to spend quality time with people you love, can be as simple as popping a lozenge at appropriate time. It's infinitely better than structuring your entire life around managing your condition with "natural" remedies.

To be clear: I'm not saying we should be medicating ourselves for everything. Not all drugs are good, and all drugs have side effects. They're still very crude tools. I'm trying to offer a counterpoint to the (what I feel is) growing trend of rejecting modern medicine just because it smells too much of industry (as if that was a bad thing). In my view, the problem with medication is just that it's not good enough. But it's getting better, year after year.

[samatman]

What you're doing here is exhibiting the shadow side of people who reject medicine and insist that diet and health are the only valid treatment for mental and physical malaise.

Lifting heavy weights is the only thing which keeps me sane. It might not work for you, but unless you've tried it, you don't know that.

None of my business if you do or don't, and a six week commitment to something like Stronglifts 5x5 is pretty serious so I'm not surprised most people don't try it.

But don't conflate it with hopping on a treadmill or exercise bike, or just pushing some dumbbells around once or twice. Heavy, repeated, and compound lifts are uniquely effective for me, and for a remarkable number of other people.

It's not a fuck you, man. That's insulting.

[speapr]

Perhaps interventions in diet, exercise and sleep and 'talking cures' such as therapy are both required for a real improvement in mental health.

So there are lots of people who claim that effort spent on general health did not solve any of their mental health issues, and others who claim that therapy was useless because they still had the same bad sleep and diet patterns and generally felt physically crappy.

They are both right.

[PaulKeeble]

We don't know if this is the case yet but I suspect that the grand majority of ailments currently treated with Psychologists and Psychiatrists will turn out to be things in the future that we know the cause of and can treat properly at a biological level.

There was a paper maybe a month ago about Penile dysfunction in a Covid long hauler who died. Post Mortem DNA analysis of the dysfunctional area showed Covid19 was causing the dysfunction, it was persisting in those cells nearly a year after the initial infection. This person did not show positive on covid19 tests and none of the long haulers do, this person did not shed viral load and infect others, but clearly that virus was still present causing a raft of problems in their body.

I would bet big on other viruses doing this in our body and causing all sorts of local problems and if we knew what we were looking for and had ways to kill the infected cells we would cure a whole raft of chronic conditions. What you suffer from is likely a combination of the virus that is doing it and where it is persisting. It is becoming an increasingly accepted position with a variety of papers showing viruses stick around, control cells and maintain presence and cause all sorts of weird effects in the body and I suspect we are going to find them the cause of a lot of problems we call mental currently.

I am all but certain that right now what we call mental health is really just physical that we just don't recognise properly because we haven't done the DNA analysis of sufferers post mortem to understand the real root cause. I also think the current practice of Psychology is hurting the chance of the biological research from occurring at the sort of pace and funding it should while it does research that doesn't look deeply into the biology of common conditions.

[Clubber]

Many years ago, when I was much younger, I had anger issues. I started to play sports (football, wrestling, track) and they vanished. I told myself I was always too worn out to be angry. Now, whenever I don't feel right, I can just go for a walk. I'm so out of shape today, a 30 minute walk can wear me out enough to get my head right.

[frereubu]

Exactly. The overcomplicated way people think about things like this reminds me of the counterpoint Michael Pollan quote about what you should eat: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." If people made sure they slept properly, didn't drink too much (caffeine or alcohol) and got regular exercise, they'd feel transformed. It took me until my 40s to realise that!

[ad404b8a372f2b9]

I think at this point everybody's aware of what it takes to be healthy. People live their lives pumped up by stimulants and numbed down by alcohol and terrible food because their life is already terrible, it's a symptom and an escape from deeper problems caused by the inhuman environment a lot of us are stuck in.

[frereubu]

Reminds me of that Irvine Welsh quote: "If 'it' wasn't so shit, people wouldn't be trying to get 'out of it'." Not sure I agree that's anything like the sole cause though. I think there's a lot of people who've drunk the kool-aid of miracle fixes when being kind to yourself is the much simpler (and cheaper) option.