Patrice came to therapy complaining of being “depressed.” Her doctor had already her on an “anti-depressant” to supposedly help her mood. She said she has difficulty completing projects of any size, has no hobbies, and is unmotivated at all except for the most important life tasks. She goes to work and pays her bills, but other than that she has little energy. She sleeps a lot, moves very little, and finds little joy in anything except her video game. Patrice is very overweight and does not eat healthy foods.
Certainly, there are many reasons for low mood and lack of motivation, but let’s examine how a person’s physical fitness can impact their mental health. There are many studies that show exercise improves mood and lifts spirits, but there is also an evolutionary lesson learned by our ancient ancestors that might be impacting someone like Patrice today.
Our bodies are designed to conserve energy — our own energy. The natural physiology of the human body is to try to keep something in the tank for later. This was probably due to the fact that we never knew when a predator or danger might pop up, so we needed to always be ready to “fight or flight” to survive. Those who made wise decisions about their energy stores survived and those who didn’t have any energy left in the tank to respond and run from the bear died.
This evolutionary trait has significant impact today on our physical and mental health and now may get reported as “depression symptoms,” such as low motivation, inability to complete tasks, procrastination, low energy levels, and general malaise. In actuality, all that is happening is our brain trying to signal us to slow down and save energy for a possible danger — which likely isn’t really needed in today’s very safe world.
In all of us, a desire to save energy is triggered when our bodies feel tired or our muscles feel overused. Our brain is taking in signals from the entire system — our lungs, muscles, nerves, blood vessels — to see if it should urge us to slow down and take a rest. If our lungs are breathing hard or our muscles are exhausted, the brain will reduce our motivation and drive to keep moving. Athletes have learned to ignore this message and “push through the pain” to finish the race.
Let’s first take a look at a case where this might play out in a fit person: Janine is a healthy weight, active and athletic. She starts her day with a yoga practice for 30 minutes, then runs 3 miles. She goes to work and comes home to cook dinner, do a load or two of wash, and get ready for the next day. She is rarely winded unless she sprints for an extra mile on her run or does 30 pushups. By bedtime she feels a healthy level of fatigue and satisfaction at a full day and so she goes to sleep easily and wakes rested.
In the case of Patrice, because she is so out of shape, she gets winded just climbing a flight of stairs or running the vacuum. This means her body is already sending signals to her brain that she should slow down and take it easy. While fit Janine can exercise a healthy amount and live a full 24-hours of life before she gets tired and slows down, Patrice has that same experience maybe 30 minutes into her day. After just walking across a parking lot, her heart rate is high and her muscles are flagging, so her body waves a surrender flag to her brain. It says: “Slow down, sit down, conserve your energy and find more food to get energy.” She interprets this as a message to move less, eat more, and “that I’m depressed.”
Sometimes the messages sent by our brains are not helpful or accurate.
Unfortunately for Patrice, the solution she needs does not feel in sync with what her brain is telling her to do. In this case, instead of exercising less as her brain says, Patrice should be exercising more. She should work to become more fit and lose weight, so that she can tolerate higher levels of movement before her brain says to stop.
Fitness levels do matter to mental health. If we have lower resting heart rates, lower blood pressure, and higher cardiovascular capacity, our brains will believe that we aren’t going to use up all our gas in the tank just walking across a parking lot. Our brains will instead get the message that that level of exertion is very manageable and that we will be able to go on and respond to future “dangers” without difficulty.
I wonder if we are in a cycle where more and more Americans are becoming overweight and obese because of the high-fat foods that are so easily available and the limited emphasis on daily exercise. As we’ve learned, they naturally feel less motivated to move as their bodies go into energy conservation mode. They interpret this as “depression” and head to the doctor for some “happy pill.” Unfortunately, the pharmaceutical industry has brainwashed everyone to believe this depressed feeling is a “chemical imbalance” of the brain, so people immediately ask their doctor for “anti-depressants.” Instead of searching for a natural fix, such as exercising and losing weight, people grab onto the instant “cure” of a pill and sink even further into false beliefs that they are defective, destined to be depressed all their lives, and dependent on a medication to make them feel better.
Normally for me, it takes a 3/4 mile swim and 60 minutes of yoga, plus a full day of work and housework, to tell me it’s time to take a break. When I had Covid and was short of breath, I felt an instinct is to hunker down and not expend more energy, which was foreign to me. If this happened every day I could see why some people spiraled into less movement and weight gain. The brain and its evolutionary survival messages are very powerful, but our rational brain can and should work to overcome them.
____________________
One of the great lessons from youth sports programs is children learn to understand a healthy level of physical stress and fatigue in their bodies. They learn they can push through the pain and be just fine. They learn to manage the mental messages that might be misleading them to quit and rest. Of course, some athletes overdo it and ignore messages that they should slow down or rest, leading to injury. The trick for athletes (and all of us) is to find a balance of listening to our bodies and minds and making wise decisions about whether to struggle on or rest.