Has working out ever helped cure your depression?

Has working out ever helped cure your depression?

Specifically cardio? I heard cardio helps circulate the blood and shit and eventually lifts up your mood.

I don't know if I'm gonna make it bros ;-; my depressions getting worse and worse...

It didn't flat out cure it, but it aleviated it enough to inspire me to change all the other shit in my life causing it too.

When I was unemployed for 8 months, it helped me feel better about myself. I was depressed every morning.

Now that I have a job, I'm still depressed that I'm almost 30 and still a kissless virgin, but I've learned to stop caring.

Hitting the gym and doing cardio just makes me forget about all of the bullshit.

I ran for 8 years and was depressed the whole time. I started lifting and chipping away at negative feelings simultaneously. Lifting helped, running didn't. There's something about getting stronger that made me feel awesome AF.

In my experience. It's kind of like saying Heroin cures depression.

Except one is good for you and the other one will hurt and possibly kill you lol

You have to keep doing it to stay happy? I mean at least it's a positive impact on health for your average person whereas Heroin just chips away at you the more and longer you use it.

My depression led me to exercise addiction and I was going to the gym everyday for two hours and doing cardio when my legs were already aching for the endorphin and dopamine hit

yes, there was a time when i couldnt get it up because of the sheer horror that my life was

but ever since i met my bro (no homo) my dick has been getting hard like a proper burschweirmansche bratwurst

Cardio? No. All cardio does is bore the everloving fuck out of me.

But overall, getting in shape has definitely helped alleviate my depression.

I've struggled with it since I was young, hit me hard and I took a hiatus from college. Fitness, mostly Martial Arts but also lifting and running, were able to almost entirely keep my depression in check. That was averaging 4 hours a day training. I then decided to go dick around with some friends who do parkour, and wound up with an ankle sprain.

Me being obsessive, I kept training on it. A month later I injured my other foot, then kept going. I wound up with ~70% of both the medial and lateral ligaments torn, thankfully none of them completely. It sent me spiraling into a deeper depression than I've ever experienced, and I've barely been struggling with the basic willpower to rehabilitate my feet.

I decided to finally see a psychiatrist after dealing with this on my own for about 12 years, and I'm slowly feeling like my old self again. I intend to get off the drugs once I'm back up to my full training regiment, but I know that without them I probably won't make it back to where I was physically.

If you don't get better, look for help. Otherwise my suggestion is just to make yourself as busy as humanly possible. Push yourself; the you of tomorrow will thank the you of today for deciding to grow.

i believe that MOST depression is all in your head. you need to get yourself out of it.

>inb4 you've never experienced depression

i had horrible depression and social anxiety.

a combination of things helped me so much. you have to find a WHY in your life and let it fuel you. show your passion and energy.

find your why and your life will come together.

>mental illness is all mental
Wow, who would've guessed?

Doesn't mean it can't have physical (ie. chemical) symptoms.

because I was emotionally neglected as a child and was raised by a mentally ill single mother

I have no idea how to overcome this. And they've showed childhood trauma literally shapes receptors in the brain

maybe instead of making smart remarks that are obvious, but people completely forget, you should focus on fixing YOUR problem and making YOUR life better.

i'm sorry for whatever happened to make you into the person you are today. things will get better, i promise. momentum can be on our sides at all times if we so choose.

Sadness is a NATURAL human response to unwanted conditions. You shouldn't take medication to relieve a natural symptom of being in a position you don't want to be in

>b-b-but it's an imbalance! I have to reason to be sad I just am
Oh yea? You're right where you want to be in life forever? You're extremely successful and have your dream job, dream home, and dream girl?

No, you don't. Once you REALLY have no excuse to be depressed, then you can decide if you have depression or not

>>have to reason
have no* reason

So you're saying it's impossible for the brain to get sick? It's just like any other organ.
>chemical imbalances in the circulatory system lead to cardiac arrythmia
>chemical imbalances in the nervous system lead to....

Re-read my post

Cardio will MAKE you depressed

Lift instead, it's fun

Transient sadness is normal. Long term depression isn't.

Your argument is like saying that comas are normal because sleeping is necessary for human survival.

It helps.

It gives me something to look forward to and a reason to eat healthy. I still have frequent periods of deep depression, but I can usually still manage to go lift ( I'll end up skipping cardio during these times). I know that I'll feel much worse if I skip a lifting day,

Idiot

That's like saying you can't decide if you like lifting unless you're the worlds strongest man

fucking kys

not even close faggot

you're never going to make it
You can wake someone out of sleep thought. maybe you can come up with a better analogy?

It's perfectly close and you know it

try to argue instead of saying not an argument, because that is literally not an argument

in short, kys

one is about knowing if you like doing something before being done (you're never done though)

the other is about your brain telling you "hey man don't live alone in this shitty apartment anymore, get out and make your life better". but then you say "no, fuck you brain. I'm going to take meds and live here forever and be HAPPY about it"

I was diagnosed with major depressive disorder for about 18 months. During this time I stopped working out due to an injury and became a massive alcoholic. I went from 200lbs 10% body fat to 240lbs 35% body fat. I was depressed that I wasn't working out and I looked like shit, which made me want to drink more, which made me get fatter and look like worse shit, which made me feel guilty about not working out and looking like shit, etc...

I don't remember what it was, but I decided to just stop drinking. I just woke up one day, said "I'm not doing this anymore" and I stopped. It was incredibly fucking difficult to not drink for the first 2 weeks afterwards though. My drive home from work passed by 3 different liquor stores and I would almost be having an anxiety attack the whole drive home as part of me tried desperately to justify having a drink, while the other part of me knew how guilty and terrible I'd feel if I gave up yet again on stopping this.

After those first two weeks, I started going to the gym again. This somehow motivated me to not want to drink even more, so I wouldn't lose my gains. I'd work out in the mornings, enjoy the endorphin rush, feel pretty good throughout the work day, and it was easier to stop wanting booze because I knew it would make it harder to want to work out the next day. Basically I found a new addiction in the endorphin rush from exercise.

cont...

Running gives me something to get up for in the morning

Okay, but in that case it's obviously wrong cause depression doesn't help anyone achieve their life goals
It may cause you to lose your job, oversleep, become a shutin among other things

It's not a response to your life being bad, in that case virtually everyone who's poor or live in various poor countries would be depressed and we know they aren't

It's been 10 weeks since I quit drinking and every day I feel better about myself. I hit the gym 5-6 days a week, doing a mix of cardio and weight lifting each day. I feel energized and alive after my morning workout, I no longer fall asleep at my desk, I actually have the energy to leave the house and do something other than play video games after I get home. I even stopped taking my anti-depressants and sleeping pills.

tl;dr It's hard as fuck to motivate yourself to get to the gym when you're depressed, but it will have a huge impact on your mental health and depressive state if you can force yourself to just do it.

There have been few studies on the mixed effect of cardio and mindfulness meditation and they look very promising in combating depression symptoms and preventing relapse. It also generally just improves your mood and well-being if you're not depressed.

Why they work so well together is unclear. One idea is that while cardio helps in the creation of synapses and neurons in your brain in the prefrontal cortex, they usually quickly decay and don't stay over a long period of time. Meditation however counteracts this and helps them to nurture and persist.

I didn't say it helped you. I said it's a natural response to not being successful. Life wasn't designed to be easy princess

Sort of. It made me start feeling a lot better about myself as I stated to progress. It also helped me a lot with goal setting and following things through; which in turn showed me that I wasn't a complete piece of shit like my mind always told me I was. All in all it definitely helped me but more as a catalyst to start being proactive in making my life better and something that I wanted to live. Of course I still have bum days but exercising helps me at least have something to look forward to

As someone who comes from a family of heroin addicts, I can tell you with authority that people do not do heroin because they are happy. They do it because they are the complete opposite of happy.

Holy fuck are you ever ignorant. Sadness /= Depression. And nobody CHOOSES or DECIDES if they are depressed or not. Seriously, kid. You sound like me when I was 15.

So.. do you have a perfect life? If you don't, are you depressed?

I feel better and I now have some sort of goal in my life. Gainz.

I did. You seem to believe that chemical imbalances in the brain are impossible.

Why? It's just like any other organ. If the heart can get electrolyte imbalances, why can't the brain get serotonin imbalances? Why can't there be problems with the neurotransmitters?

The brain is not special.

Can we stop giving that retard attention? There are lots of things to be said about depression in terms of the control the patient has over it (learned helplessness etc) but he has obviously no idea what depression actually is or means.

That's what he is saying, user.

This is bait. no more replies please.

re-read the post you fucking retard

This. I feel fantastic while running and for a bit after, but the mind starts up again once I'm no longer tired out.

look

I was until I recognized the problem, and now i can maintain it by working out, eating well, and staying busy. I don't let myself sit at home alone and I don't let myself think about what a miserable person I would be if I stopped. You can't go through life that way.
I said at the end, that you'll know if you're depressed when you have everything and you're still sad. If you step on a lego your foot will hurt but that doesn't mean it isn't working correctly

Then you were not depressed, you were just sad about your current situation

which is what I'm saying. Most people have it this way. But a lot of people just assume they're depressed, and then never fix themselves and either mope about it or go on meds. Only once you've gotten everything can you know for sure if you're depressed

Four scoops cured everything.

If don't have depression or haven't had depression you can't understand, it's like trying to explain pain to an alien who doesn't have pain receptors, they can pass a fucking biology exam in pain but they can never feel or understand it

being depressed is not the same as having depression

in short, kys

Just Stop.

Tfw about to relapse until friday

Why? I'm enjoying myself

>just starting to get control of life via Veeky Forumsness
>learn more about family medical history

I have four uncles dead young from massive heart attacks and four others living with extensive heart work. These were mostly blue-collar workers who never weighed more than 170 at largest.

I don't think cardio can fix everything.

ehh not really. When I'm working out I tend to forget about all my troubles and I feel bretty good. That good feel lasts maybe a few more hrs after my workout and then my depression starts to slowly come back.

shits been like this for years now. I've done therapy, I've done drugs/booze to kill the pain and I've even tried herbal organic medicine.

nothing really seems to work though.