384
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
384 points (98.5% liked)
Asklemmy
42431 readers
2387 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
I was in a similar boat and I really can’t overstate how much working your way into an exercise routine will help. It feels impossible to start at first, but if you just commit to 30 minutes daily of walking/stretching/yoga, you’ll be amazed how quickly it goes from being an awful chore that takes tons of willpower, to a regular part of your routine that feels weird to skip.
Exercise is like a weird super power that genuinely makes you more confident, gives you more energy for mental tasks, and makes the rest of your life better. When I think back on my adult life, my mental health has always tended to go down when I would stop exercising, and it’s only when I would start again that things started getting better
I'd like to add to that that if you have ADHD the "quickly goes from chore to regular part of your routine" might never happen. That's not your fault, you are not lazy, you are just not able to form routine habits.
Well, fuck.
30 minutes was too much for me to even contemplate when I was at my most depressed, so I started at 5 minutes of just doing arm rotations, hip rotations, and ankle rotations.
Still helped, and I didn’t have the added physical fatigue of a full workout on top of my anhedonia. And eventually, since I was already out of my bed, it also got me thinking about what else I could do in 5 minute intervals.
I’m not saying it cured my depression, cleared my skin, and did my taxes. But the 5 minutes of dedicated movement of my body every day was my first step in managing my mood and tackling the monster depression had become in my life.