<story><title>A new study looks at how exercise can help alleviate anxiety and depression</title><url>https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/what_type_of_exercise_is_best_for_mental_health</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hinkley</author><text>I don’t know if this has changed for younger generations, but a lot of people, particularly those in intellectual pursuits, suffer to one degree or another from thinking of themselves as a brain being carried around as a meat sack.&lt;p&gt;We are learning more about mind body connections and this is very not true (the ways the vagus nerve can totally fuck with your mental state is terrifying, and there are people with dysfunctions that are five times worse).&lt;p&gt;Any exercise where you think about your body as “you” helps with the dysphoria, and being integrated helps with a whole lot of other things.&lt;p&gt;Especially for men, who are conditioned to not give themselves permission to have feelings and sensations affect their behavior (and then surprise! Are affected anyway, with zero attempts at healthy coping skills).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mudita</author><text>The thing that made me transition from a mindset of “I have a body” to “I am a body”, was actually Zen meditation. This was surprising to me. Before I tried it, I thought of meditation as a purely mental thing, I didn’t expect that the first really noticeable effect of regular meditation would be a changed relationship to my body,&lt;p&gt;Much later I discovered contemporary dance, quit my phd in machine learning and became a professional dancer, which really deepened my body awareness and transformed my relationship to being a body even more.&lt;p&gt;I remember, in the beginning of my dance career, after a three month dance intensive I applied to a (Haskell) programming job  again to finance my dance education and went to a computer science conference. It was a bit of surreal experience. The people at the conference were very nice and intellectually curious people and I liked them, but the contrast to the environment in dance communities was very strong. I felt like almost everybody there thought of them-self as a brain, piloting a body like a big mecha. In the dance environments, even during lunch breaks etc., it always felt like there was a lot of subtle awareness in everybody about their own body, the other bodies in the space, the distances and empty space between bodies, a non-verbal channel full of quiet energy and information. In the computer science conference this channel was just dead.</text></comment>
<story><title>A new study looks at how exercise can help alleviate anxiety and depression</title><url>https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/what_type_of_exercise_is_best_for_mental_health</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hinkley</author><text>I don’t know if this has changed for younger generations, but a lot of people, particularly those in intellectual pursuits, suffer to one degree or another from thinking of themselves as a brain being carried around as a meat sack.&lt;p&gt;We are learning more about mind body connections and this is very not true (the ways the vagus nerve can totally fuck with your mental state is terrifying, and there are people with dysfunctions that are five times worse).&lt;p&gt;Any exercise where you think about your body as “you” helps with the dysphoria, and being integrated helps with a whole lot of other things.&lt;p&gt;Especially for men, who are conditioned to not give themselves permission to have feelings and sensations affect their behavior (and then surprise! Are affected anyway, with zero attempts at healthy coping skills).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>haswell</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;suffer to one degree or another from thinking of themselves as a brain being carried around as a meat sack&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;This was me for most of my life.&lt;p&gt;Yoga has been life changing. Cultivating full body awareness and presence opened my eyes to states of being that I didn’t know I was capable of experiencing.&lt;p&gt;I can feel the subtle changes in strength each day, or a touch of soreness, or the exact spot that anxiety has settled into in my gut.&lt;p&gt;Gaining the level of focus needed brought with it a deeper and broader awareness of my emotional states, and the realization that I have some separation from them, i.e. they != me. This in turn helped me unwind some big things I’d been dealing with in therapy.&lt;p&gt;In retrospect, it makes so much sense to think of my body as an integral part of who I am and how I feel.&lt;p&gt;But that’s a mode of thinking that I was certainly never introduced to as a kid, and never experienced by default.</text></comment>