[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...