[isk517]

Exercise is great, just make sure to take sometime to evaluate where you are at mentally. I was running about 40 miles and doing 5 hours of lifting per week to try and stay a head of my depression, and when I finally burnt out everything came crashing down all at once.

[MikeNotThePope]

Exercise is great for addressing feelings related to being physically inactive. It won’t address other mental health issues, such as learning to control your emotions & fostering healthy relationships.

[observationist]

There's a deeper level to the way you calibrate your mental operation. If you're under a lot of mental stress, your body is evolved to prime you for physical effort, beyond the fight or flight responses. By engaging in exercise, you're resetting your physical condition, and that can put you in a much better position to mentally cope with whatever is happening.

This is something that has very deep evolutionary roots. A looming project deadline, a relationship crisis, feeling burned out, general malaise about your place in life - all of those stressors can bring about different neurochemical and hormonal changes that are in whole or in part dealt with in a healthy way by engaging in strenuous physical activities.

That puts you in a position to gain perspective without the immediacy of the negative emotion, so you don't have to feel anxious, or have subtle negative threat framing around everything.

You can abuse that, like anything else, and mask real negative factors in your life, or it can be a phenomenal and healthy way to deal with the negative framing of otherwise neutral or even positive circumstances in your life.

[cpncrunch]

The problem is when the exercise is excessive and/or the depression is caused by stress/overload. In that case the exercise can lead to burnout/CFS/overtraining, resulting in worse depression as well as debilitating physical symptoms.

[nerdsniper]

> Exercise is great for addressing feelings related to being physically inactive.

That definition is probably too narrow.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurobiological_effects_of_phy...