Can exercise cause depression?

Factual Questions
1

I’ve always been a bit overweight but I seem to have a real phobia for exercise. Just thinking about it makes my heart sink and saps all motivation from me.

I know it’s important to get fit in order to prevent an early death and/or disease, and to look good for my wedding photos this coming September, but every time I have thought of exercise, and indeed actually done exercise, I normally feel worse than most times in my life.

I’ve done regular gym and I have done swimming, jogging, home fitness routines, and just the thought gives me pangs of self-loathing. I just want it to end. And lo and behold, I can’t stick to it. I find excuses (and almost instantly my mood picks up - I’m normally pretty jolly).

I’ve consulted my doctor but unfortunately they recommend doctors who only operate Mondaty 9-5 :rolleyes:

So is this just a lame excuse, or can it actually be true? And how can I handle it?

2

In general, exercise is recommended to combat depression; it usually makes people feel better.

3

Exercise used to make me feel panicky and trapped. I found that the secret was to start with very short, easy sessions (like less than five minutes) once a day and increase the duration very, very slowly. This gives you time to learn how to get your brain in the right exercise space, and while it may seem “pointless” to exercise so little, it adds up quickly and before you know it you are exercising an hour a day and it’s no big thing.

4

I’ve found it best to avoid all well-meaning people who tell me how fabulous exercise will make me feel. Avoid articles that talk about “runner’s high” or endorphin release or even the mood elevating effects of exercise. 'Cause you know what? It’s just not like that for me.

I view exercise the same way I view washing the dishes. No, I’m not going to like it. No, it’s not going to feel good. But it’s got to be done, and yes, I’ll admit the kitchen looks a bit nicer when I’m done.

It’s great if exercise makes you feel good, but for those of us for whom it doesn’t, hearing that over and over makes us feel like we’re doing it wrong. It can breed a great deal of anxiety and paradoxically encourage quitting when it doesn’t feel as good as we’ve been lead to believe it will.

I suspect your relief and good feeling when you decide not to exercise is the relief and good feeling I get when I procrastinate doing the dishes. The dishes are not causing me to be depressed, but yes, it feels, fleetingly, good not to address a loathed task.

Of course, those dishes aren’t going to wash themselves, and this cellulite isn’t gonna work itself off my butt. Darnit.

5

Sounds like it’s not the exercise that’s making you depressed, it’s the anticipation and avoidance that is.

I go through this too, and I’ve found the only way actually to do it is to trick the lazy part of myself into getting out there. Get up in the morning and ‘accidentally’ put on my running clothes and shoes. Go outside ‘for a walk’ in those clothes and ‘have a little jog’ without actually committing myself to doing anything, and eventually I’ve started to do it. It’s bizarre and pathetic, but it works for me.

I do feel bad for anyone who doesn’t/can’t get runner’s high. For me there has to be a minimum of 40 minutes of sustained activity (running/walking if your stamina isn’t so great) for it to kick in, but when it does it feels like I’ve done a fat line of coke. When I was depressed I didn’t get the high, but I did feel completely normal for about 2-3 hours after I’d finished exercising before the cloud of depression came back over me.

I may be preaching to the converted, but have you looked at the couch-to-5K program? It’s so well designed that it doesn’t ever really feel like a chore.

6

Pretty much anything can cause depression (just like anything can potentially trigger migraines).

Mostly however exercise is of benefit in alleviating depression; the hard part is getting moving if your primary interest is curling up into a ball.

There are other strategies for dealing with depression if the thought of regular physical activity is loathsome.

7

My advice would be to either :

do as WhyNot says, and make exercise a simple chore. This requires willpower and an exercise that can be done alone, so nobody with a different attitude gets you down
(And housework like cleaning also counts as exercise! As does taking the stairs instead of the elevator, if you do it often enough).
to choose a different kind of exercise. A lot of people think of the usual sports - running, biking, fitness studio with machines, swimming; team ball sports - and nothing further. A lot of these sports are heavily populated by those lucky people who actually like sports - not good in your case. A lot of the team ball sports carry not-good memories of high school.

So look for a sport that’s completly new for you (no bad memories), that sounds exciting or interesting and not too strenous (inliners or ice-skating), and is rare enough to not attract the super-fit types. An example would be Muggle-Quidditch, which is cropping up at some universities. Or Korfball, a new invention to make basketball more fair to the shorter people. Or Tai Chi. Or something with your Wii. (Not optimal, but better than nothing).

Sure, it will take some time to try out and find obscure sports in the first place, and esp. team sports might not have a club in a small town. But if you manage to find an activity you like, it will be more than worth it.

Because for your health, you need to do 30 min. of moderate exercise two times a week at least. Spending all that time hating it is not as good as finding something that you like.

Also, like with food, what you like today you can get tired of after 5 years, only to discover a new sport. (That’s why fitness studios invent aerobis, Tai-Bo, spinning etc. - to keep people interested in taking their courses).

8

I second the Wii Fit recommendation. It’s not a very strenuous or rigorous workout and there’s a ton of lag time in between exercises. Some of them are like video games, though, so the idea is you’re having too much fun to notice that you’re actually exercising.

You won’t lose 50 pounds and turn into a svelte hardbody with a Wii Fit. But it might get you up off the couch and soon, seeking other, more rigorous forms of exercise. I think it’s a nice, easy, mild way to get started.

9

Some links on exercise and depression:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=exercise+and+depression+study&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart

There is good data about exercise helping alleviate the effects of depression. It’s not universal, but it does seem to have significant benefits in many people.

10

I have to agree with the idea of making exercise more of a chore. Yes, I generally feel better after going to the gym and I have an intense and strict regimen, but most times before I go I’m feeling tired and anxious about it, especially before particularly brutal days. The thing is, I’ve been sticking to my routine long enough that though I generally am in a better mood afterward, it’s no so much the idea that I feel better after that keeps me going but knowing that if I don’t go I will really start feeling like crap physically, mentally, and emotionally. For me, it’s much more of a mood stablizer than a lifter’s/runner’s high.

But for the OP, if it’s that bad, it will probably help to ease into it. I see a lot of people try to take the plunge and go from doing nearly nothing to as much as 6-8 hours a week and it’s no surprise that that can be overwhelming. If you need to, start with as little as 10-15 minutes at a time or whatever it takes to make it so you can stick to it. Maybe you need to look at doing other types of exercise. And after you’ve gotten into the routine, it’s easier to add another 5-10 minutes here and there. Hell, I didn’t always do my 11-12 hours a week, when I picked back up after a year off after high school, I was probably only doing 30-40 minutes 3x a week, and now I’m in for 2 hours at a time or more.

11

Almost anything associated with past bad experiences can provoke anxiety and/or depression. I find exercise for exercise sake to be mind numbingly boring, and forcing myself to do things that bore me tends to be depressing. OTOH, commuting and shopping via bicycle, walking the dog, and hiking in the mountains have a point other than just exercise…so these work well for me and have significantly reduced my depression.

12

If you haven’t been exercising, and you start up, you might feel lousy for a while. If you have a problem with depression, this could exacerbate it. But I would think that would be a short term effect, and eventually the exercise would make you feel better.

Now if by exercise you mean going to the gym, I think this can be depressing for a lot of people. But it’s not the exercise, it’s seeing so many people in better condition than you are, not struggling to get through their routine, and then being happy about it.

13

I was going to post something almost like this but WhyNot said it just fine.

I hate, hate, hate, excercise. My favorite one is a nice brisk sit. I hate being hot and sweaty. I have found on gym that has a pool and I try to time my sessions so that I will be able to take a swim afterward, which is my reward. It’s more expensive than I like, but I’ll keep it up as long as I can.

Sometimes I tell myself I will go today so that I don’t have to go tomorrow.

14

I suspect a lot of people think that ‘exercise’ requires pushing their body until it hurts, sweating bullets, and being in pain for days afterward, while still feeling like crap that they didn’t do half as much as the skinny guy on the treadmill next to them. Realistically, aerobic work is supposed to be about 70-80% of what your body can do. It should be enough to raise your heart rate and maybe break a light sweat (depending on how much you naturally sweat), but not so much that you’re out of breath or unable to talk normally.

For me right now, that’s a brisk walk. It’s downright pleasant compared to, say, trying to go for a mile run. (Hah! Like that’s going to happen!) I like the elliptical machine for this, since it can provide a workout that’s halfway between jogging and walking in intensity. Yes, you really do get results when you’re working that ‘lightly’. Maybe not as fast as if you dive into an athletic training regimen, but I’m all about the plan that doesn’t make me dread doing it again tomorrow. Besides, you’re a lot less likely to injure yourself that way.

Just my $.02, hope it helps someone.

15

I always hated exercise by itself and still do, but if I get paid to do it, I’m good. Pulling my mower behind my bicycle halfway across town and then mowing a yard for some cash made for a good workout. I got a summer sales job at a nursery (plant kind) that lasted seven seasons. Carrying trees and shrubs around and unloading semis kept the weight off me then. Now I do yard work I don’t want to pay someone else to do, and my new puppy is giving me some good walky time.

Exercise is easier to do for me if it bears some other immediate reward than just making me move about.

16

No one has asked this, I don’t think. What kinds of thoughts do you have that make you feel bad?

Do you feel like whatever you’re doing is not good enough? Or that you’re not doing it “right”?

Those kinds of thoughts may indicate that the type of exercises you’re doing aren’t the right fit for you. You may need to find something so simple that you don’t have to worry about proper technique or people judging you.

Walking is good for this. It’s also good because it allows for attainable goal-setting. If you feel self-conscious, don’t go to a track where others will be (plus, walking around in a circle is boring as hell). Just walk around the neighborhood. Get an mp3 player and fill it with your favorite songs. Or get a portable radio and listen to your favorite talk show.

I don’t think you should expect to be overjoyed afterwards. That’s ambitious for most people. I walk all the time, and the planets have to be perfectly aligned for me to feel really good afterwards. Most times I just feel relieved. But I don’t feel so tired that the idea of doing it again is a source of dread. That’s the key.

17

I personally tend to feel better after exercising. If my muscles are sore I just tell myself that this is the feeling of them getting bigger and stronger.

That said, I think I might understand where you are coming from. Here’s a hypothetical situation: Let’s say that the road that you live on is full of litter. One day you decide to pick some of it up. So you go out with a garbage bag and start picking up pieces of trash. Every piece that you pick up makes your neighborhood look a little better, so you keep picking up trash until you decide that you are done. This would probably make you feel better.

Now, let’s say that you committed some crime, and the judge sentenced you to community service, and you job was to pick up ALL of the litter on this road. Instead of feeling better about each piece of trash that you picked up, you would constantly be thinking about all of the trash that was left to be picked up.

I work on the weekends at a restaurant. At the end of everybody’s shift we have to do some prep work. Sometimes this is washing dishes. Now, if my boss said “Do all of the dishes and then you can go home” then I would look at the huge stack of dishes and be miserable as I worked on them. On the other hand, if he said “knock out some of the dishes and then you can go home”, then I would happily do each load knowing that I could technically leave any time that I wanted. I would keep doing one more load, and then one more, because the more I do, the less I leave for my coworkers. However, the fact that I can, technically, do as many as I want and then clock out makes me less stressed than if I HAD to do all of them. I might actually do all of them, in fact.

One more ancedote: I hate running. Always have. When I was in boot camp I never had a problem with pushups or situps, but the 2-mile run was a bitch for me. One time I was talking to a buddy about it, and I said something about how I just kept thinking “7 more laps, 6 more laps, etc…” He looked at me incredulously and said “Don’t look at it like that. Think ‘one more lap’, then ‘OK, one more lap’, then ‘OK, one more lap’,etc.”

I said all of that to say this: When I do work out, I don’t go in thinking “I’ve got to do 3 sets of this and 4 sets of that… etc.” I think “I think I’ll see how many times I can bench press this weight, and then I’ll see what I want to do next” If, after 2 sets, I want to do a third, then I will, but I’m not following any schedule, so I never feel like “Aw crap, I can’t wait to get done with this”, because I can quit whenever I want to. I usually choose to not quit until I can’t really do anymore.

I don’t know how you work out, but maybe it would work out better for you if you quit going in with a certain regemin in mind but instead just decided to work out until you were ready to quit.

IANapersonal trainer

18

It certainly depresses me, though not in the clinical sense.

It’s the most pointless, painful, pointless, stupid, pointless, depressing activity known to privileged first-world man.

I think the thing to do is to find a physically exertive activity that is not “exercise” but rather is something enjoyable. A sport. Hiking. Pillowfighting. Whatever floats.

19

I also hate exercise. Hate hate hate. When I actually had an exercise regimen, I never got to the point that it was enjoyable or even tolerable. I always felt sweaty, disgusting, sore, and dead-exhausted. Like I could literally fall asleep on my pilates mat. Thinking of it like a chore that I had to schedule into my week only worked for so long. Eventually I worked out less and less and finally I just quit.

What actually worked for me was to hide the exercise into my daily life like some people try to hide vegetables in their children’s food. Parking farther away from my destination than necessary. Doing the housework in a very vigorous manner. Going for a walk around the mall: I can walk a lot further without getting bored when I’m staring at clothes. Also, I work with children, so if the kid I’m working with wants to be dangled upside down or race back and forth, I’ll do it over and over knowing I’m getting a workout.

Also, in my personal experience, exercise has very little effect on weight. Between lazy and active, my weight changed very little. When I wanted to lose weight, I did it entirely through calorie-counting.

20

(bolding mine) This sounds like perhaps you have a pre-existing depression that is merely unearthed, or picked raw, by the concept of exercise and the seemingly impossible task needed to be done. It’s not the exercise; it’s how you feel about yourself and your body in relation to the exercise.