It's a known fact that exercise and good lifestyle are good for the mental health. But isn't the inability to maintain a good lifestyle one of the first symptoms of depression ?

- good diet with no junk food, alcohol, drugs and stimulants

- regular exercise and outdoor time

- good sleep hygiene

- regular healthy social interactions

- eliminate environmental stressors (job/financial stress, relationship stress, noise pollution, etc)

Of course, not everyone can have everything and some of those aren't 100% under your control, but ultimately it becomes your responsibility to try fix them if you want your situation to improve, since nobody else will.

Plus, the grand of majority of people would rather NOT move around and continue to eat junk food regardless. Animals evolved to be lazy.

"Intention to treat" analyses, now ... very different conclusions.

I mean, yes, but we already knew this. So good that this is a finding that passes replication.

Here's the paper: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41500513/

It's a review/summary of existing research, not anything new.

The fundamental problem with studying alternatives to therapy is that "being in a study" may be as effective as therapy! It's a structural placebo effect.

For a depressed person, "Exercise guided by a researcher" is different from "trying to make myself exercise".

> Authors' conclusions: Exercise may be moderately more effective than a control intervention for reducing symptoms of depression.

> Exercise appears to be no more or less effective than psychological or pharmacological treatments, though this conclusion is based on a few small trials.

> Long-term follow-up was rare.

Nothing new:

> The addition of 35 RCTs (at least 2526 participants) to this update has had very little effect on the estimate of the benefit of exercise on symptoms of depression.

If you actually get into a sport there will be second order effects such as better diet and possibly finding others with interest in such activities as you will invest more time into it.

If I'm sweating already and warmed up, I might as well take a walk to cool down. If I'm already walking and a good song comes on, I might as well jog. If I'm feeling sore already, I might as well lift some weights to gain some strength. To boost this all, I might as well eat more protein. If moving around is kinda making me feel nauseous sometimes, it's probably a vitamin thing so I go for more veggies. Hey veggies are slowly replacing bread and other empty carbs! Then my nerd brain kicked in and developed an obsession with cooking.

On the other end of this, I was doing more housework because I was inviting people over more often and otherwise working from home. The mess became harder to avoid. I think we all did a little of that because of the cultural shift in the first half of this decade. That also meant entertaining more which meant trying to put out better food.

All the incentives aligned to break me out of a cycle of bad habits for long enough that I genuinely can't go back. My life is objectively way better and I know exactly how it got that way, so there's nothing intimidating about it anymore. The level of effort also went down as all the new habits were streamlined into a coherent lifestyle.

At the risk of sounding condescending, I think most of this is really just a matter of growing up anyway (I entered my 30s during this time period). I just wanted to share how it happened to me.