← Back to home

In Motion

2021-8-1

I spent two years trying mindfullness meditation, and I failed to stick to the habit for more than a week straight, ever. I've successfully stuck to a daily running habit for 2 years in a row, missing not more than one month (spent-in-bed-recovering-from-surgery).

Perhaps because of my ability to stick to it, running has been incredibly good for my mental health. Meditation has done jack. More than that, even when I just started both habits: running immediately made me feel better, and mediation often left me just as anxious.

So here's my theory:

  1. Most humans in history weren't as anxious or depressed or bad feeling as We are. Mentally unstable people hurt themselves way too much for it to be an evolutionarily stable trait, really. The current mental health pandemic is really a current one.
  2. The primary reason for this anguish stems from human beings moving dramatically less than they used to. As recently as 100 years ago, >50% of all humans worked physical labor, all day, pretty much every day.

I quote from George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London:

There was—it is hard to express it—a sort of heavy contentment, the contentment a well-fed beast might feel, in a life which had become so simple. For nothing could be simpler than the life of a [...man who works 16 hours a day of physical labor]. He lives in a rhythm between work and sleep, without time to think, hardly conscious of the exterior world.

My mental anguish comes from thoughts about the future or past. To be clear, it's not that I am perfectly in the present when I'm running. The pain of running just makes it much harder to ruminate on much else well.

But if physical activity solves my anguish, why did I end up sitting on a couch and meditating? Why would a mental problem would have a mental solution?

I meditated because I thought this is what one did when they were feeling anxious. I thought this is what one did because society prescribed it. I think society has been created this prescription for two reasons:

  1. A protestant-esqe belief that dealing (in the most active sense of the word) with problems is the only way to really solve them.
  2. The convenience of a couch-for-meditation being a close hop from a chair-for-looking-at-a-screen. Meditation is easier to start. Exercise is inconvenient.

Dealing with problems is, obviously, the only way to solve them. But my problems aren't problems to be solved. There's no amount of natural, human thinking that solves issues that haven't arisen yet -that I'm just catastrophizing about. I'd be better off just forgetting about them and going on a run.

And fair - sitting on a couch is a close hop from my chair where I sit and program most of the day. There were apps that will guided me through my first meditation - how hard can it be to sit there?

It's in fact very hard.

With running, it's impossible to have a session of running where you cannot run (save an injury). It's very easy to have a session of meditation where you cannot quite the voices enough to get a meditation in edge-wise. I know - that probably still counts as meditation - but it sure-as-shit doesn't make me feel any better.

The convenience of meditation over running takes a very explicit form, I think: you don't have to shower after. A 15 minute meditation is just 15 minutes. A 15 minute run takes 5 minutes to get ready for and 10 minutes to shower after - it's actually a 30 minute run.

The other notable point here is the length of physical activity that is required to keep me feeling normal.

A ten minute walk in the morning, and a 15 minute run before lunch are nice, but that doesn't keep me on the wagon. A walk in the morning, a 2x20 minute bike-ride, and 20 minute run, and 30 minutes of climbing does. I'm sure this varies person by person, but I generally think we're severely underestimating how much physical activity our body requires.

Not all of it is high-intensity. In fact, most of it is very low intensity. I'm just moving my body enough that it's all I can do. I'm just moving.

On the convenience of running, I offer my situation-specific solution that works well for me. I don't think it will work for most people, but maybe for some people some days:

  1. Work from home.
  2. Run in the morning/early afternoon.
  3. Accept that you will be sweaty all day.
  4. Accept that you will be sweaty all day.
  5. If you're going somewhere that is <30 minutes away by some physical means (walking, running, biking, swimming), take the physical route. No cars, no subways.

Pretty much, just be sweaty all day. Aim for 2 or so hours of movement, on average. More is better, if you can get it. I've been living like this for the past 3 months or so, and on average, it's been the best my mental health has been since I can remember being sad.

As long as you wear deoderant, most people don't really mind hanging out with a sweaty person (even in a nice-ish resturant, surprisingly). The waiters might give you weird looks, but you won't be anxious, so who cares.