Tag: depression

Health and fitness learnings for February: “There’s concrete evidence that meditation calms your brain similar to valium”

They buried the lede on this new study. It’s not that exercise beats out SSRIs for depression treatment, but that *just* dancing has the largest effect of *any treatment* for depression.
Dancing Depression

Power and benefits of sprinting / HIIT: https://twitter.com/jaguarcadillac/status/1753894907784425618

The right brain is in charge of present-moment awareness, and this is the part of the brain that meditation takes to the gym. Essentially, the longer we meditate, the more we’re able to balance the right and left hemispheres of the brain. The result of this is more attention, awareness, and computing power for the task at hand.

Excessive nose picking can lead to infections and increased likelihood of developing Alzheimers (!!)
https://people.com/nose-picking-linked-to-alzheimers-disease-dementia-report-8558918

one study found that fidgeting or other non-exercise movement (which was more common among lean than obese individuals) could burn up to 350 calories a day (30-50 calories per hour)

There’s concrete evidence that meditation calms your brain similar to valium. Actual structural and measurable changes within brain itself

Herbs are often solely used as garnish but in actuality provide the perfect opportunity to deliver a boost of flavor and nutrients to any dish.
Nutrivore Scores:
Parsley 5491
Chives 3531
Basil 3381
Cilantro 2609

While aerobic exercise elevates neurotransmitters, creates new blood vessels that pipe in growth factors, and spawns new cells, complex activities put all that material to use by strengthening and expanding networks. The more complex the movements, the more complex the synaptic connections. And even though these circuits are created through movement, they can be recruited by other areas and used for thinking. This is why learning how to play the piano makes it easier for kids to learn math.

Now you know how exercise improves learning on three levels: first, it optimizes your mind-set to improve alertness, attention, and motivation; second, it prepares and encourages nerve cells to bind to one another, which is the cellular basis for logging in new information; and third, it spurs the development of new nerve cells from stem cells in the hippocampus.

Of the six areas that the FitnessGram measures, two seem to be particularly important in relation to academic performance. “Body mass index and aerobic fitness really stuck out in our regression equation,” Castelli says. “They were the most significant contributors. I was really surprised it was that clear-cut

Paleolithic man had to walk five to ten miles on an average day, just to be able to eat.

I think the most interesting part of the paper is the finding that walking improves creativity not due to environmental stimulation, but due to walking itself. Whether outdoors or on a treadmill, walking improved the generation of novel and appropriate ideas. Surprisingly, this effect extends to sitting after a walk

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Burnout Society: “Depression, rather than oppression, is now the sickness of our age”

Byung Chul Han. This guy thinks.

Some great insights from his book Burnout Society, thanks to Philosophy Break:

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No longer do we live in a society characterized by hard institutional power, a society described by the 20th-century French philosopher Michel Foucault as closed, brutish, oppressive — a “disciplinary world of hospitals, madhouses, prisons, barracks, and factories,” Han writes.
For, in the 21st-century, such a world has been replaced by “a society of fitness studios, office towers, banks, airports, shopping malls, and genetic laboratories.”

We are no longer the “obedience-subjects” of disciplinary society, Han claims, but the “achievement-subjects” of achievement society.

The complaint of the depressive individual, ‘Nothing is possible,’ can only occur in a society that thinks, ‘Nothing is impossible.’

We might sloganize such an approach as follows:
* Less calculation, more contemplation
* Less optimization, more leisure
* Not ‘side hustles’, but cultivation

As Nietzsche’s Zarathustra declares:

All of you who are in love with hectic work and whatever is fast, new, strange — you find it hard to bear yourselves, your diligence is escape and the will to forget yourself. If you believed more in life, you would hurl yourself less into the moment. But you do not have enough content in yourselves for waiting — not even for laziness!