Sorry for the clickbait title.
For those who know me, you've seen my posting degenerate over the years into apparent lunacy. Well, over the past few weeks, I haven't been able to escape the feeling that my observations are FINALLY beginning to form the basis of a consistent explanation.
People have said I sound depressed. Yeah, no shit. But when did it start? I was overflowing with joy and energy as a kid. I even did great in middleschool, where bullying, competition, puberty, increasing self-awareness and the like tend to throw people off the rails for the first time. Highschool holds the earliest concrete memories I have of increasing hopelessness, specifically Junior year. The same year I started lifting.
Now, you can probably imagine where I'm going with this, but to be clear I'm not at all saying lifting is the sole cause of my problems. This is about the ROLE I'm starting to believe it's played in my life and the specific ways in which it's contributed to my "depression".
I don't want this post to turn into a generic pub-med style litany of "symptoms", so I'm going to connect each to my personal experiences.
1. Lack of concentration: In 11th grade, I attributed this to my coursework, which, for the first time, began to seem insurmountable. Between AP history and calculus, physics, and university english I felt overwhelmed. Maybe I was just too dumb to hack it at this level? For the first time I can remember, I would read over a page five, ten, fifteen times but the words just wouldn't stick. I was rushing through the pages just trying to get to the end and scribble down my summary, paper, or whatever. It all passed by in a blur -- maybe I was just bored?
Fast forward to today. The feeling is ten times worse. I barely even feel literate -- I rush through the easiest sentences and paragraphs, perceiving maybe one word in ten and trying to piece together the meaning on the fly. Slowing down to focus is a monumental effort. Again, I hate my job -- maybe it's boring? So I thought for a long time, but that changed this week.
2. Faulty perception: I first noticed this when I learned to drive -- again, around the time I started lifting. I was "seeing without perceiving". It's as if the sensory input from my eyes wasn't hooked up to my brain. As if my mind was always "turned in on itself" without processing the outside world.
As a result, I have an absurdly poor sense of direction. I can drive over the same roads a hundred times and not know the way. It's like I can't synthesize the sights, landmarks, etc. into a mental model. For a long time, if I took a couple wrong turns, I might as well have ended up in a different country.
Another example is just looking at every day objects. Looking at my hands while I type, for example. Ordinarily, I'm not focused on them. But even when I do focus, I can't see the detail -- again, it's like my mind is turned in on itself, ignoring the optic nerve.
3. Lack of energy and fine motor control. I was always an athletic, energetic kid, but again, that changed in higshchool. People started noticing, I moved unusually slowly. I walk very slow, especially for someone tall. I'm sluggish and terribly slow at manual labor. I remember working in a plastic factory one summer in college -- everyone around me seemed to be just casually flowing through the motions at light speed, while I needed to focus all my energy just to keep up in the production line.
4. Lack of emotion. While I can't connect this to concrete experiences in highschool, I slowly noticed a "deadening" that I thought just naturally came with adulthood, or repeated exposure to familiar experiences throughout life. This really came to a head last year, during my "anorexic" phase. I'm pretty sure I only experienced "excitement" once during my entire 28th year of life (apart from numerous caffeine/starvation highs or binges), as I drove home imagining myself swallowing handfuls of sleeping pills. Other than that, I didn't feel shit. When someone stole my bike? Guess I gotta get another one. Girl wants to fuck? Too bad for her, I guess. Promotion at work? Okay, can I go back to my desk now?
5. Lack of "appetite": For the past several years, I simply couldn't sit and read, write, draw, play video games, or whatever else I used to enjoy. Long gone were the days I would sit down and read 400 pages in a sitting. As mentioned earlier, I could scarcely even string together a sentence in my mind. As a result, all of my these desires seemed... utterly worthless.
For as long as I can remember now, every Saturday I've woken up with greater or lesser degrees of anxiety -- what am I going to DO today? NOTHING seemed sufficient. During "anorexia", all I could think about was putting distance between myself and food (good luck in a restaurant-packed city). Afterward, my mind would scroll through a list of things I "should" do (e.g. chores) and things I should WANT to do (recreational activities), but none of it ever seemed worth doing.
I felt like an automaton, going through the motions of existence just to exist. No matter what I chose to do, it seemed like the "wrong" thing to be doing. For a long time, thought I had some unaddressed need, a need I simply didn't know HOW to address. Like when you need to piss, you can't think of doing anything else. You're entirely driven by the need to find someplace to let loose, and everything else is furthest from your mind. Doesn't matter if someone is offering you a million dollars -- if you're seconds away from pissing yourself, you're going to tell him to hold on for a second.
Well, I constantly had this feeling -- but what was the need?
Over the past month or so, I think I finally figured it out -- there was no need. Instead, I was basically "hung over" from overexercise. But not any exercise, specifically anaerobic. And the heavier the weights, the less the "recovery", the worse the ensuing stupor.
I started realizing this during my anorexic phase, when I got so weak that, out of desperation, I started doing cardio again. Lifting had become so painful, the fasting so difficult, that I thought "well maybe if I just do 500 cals of running and eat 500 cals more, I can keep going". To my surprise, my first couple of runs felt great, and seemed to put me in a better mood for the remainder of the day. Briefly, I even stopped lifting every day, alternating lifting days with running days.
Oh, how I wish I had kept that up... I had an inkling back then, but with so many other fucked up habits (especially starvation), I just couldn't grasp then what I've only begun to re-think just now: it was the lifting.
Back then, my ability to "recover" (and what does that really mean?) from workouts was at an all time low, no doubt. Caloric deficit, caffeine addiction, <5 hrs of sleep, cardio and lifting every day, but even now, when I get 8+ hrs, massive calorie intake (4k+ daily), and only lift three times a week, the pattern has held strong: the day after a lifting session, I'm "back under" for 16+ hours.
What do I mean by "back under"? All the familiar symptoms:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Can't focus: especially can't read, or write. "seeing without perceiving". Unable to hold a conversation of any depth, the words just pass through my mind without attaching to any meaning. If I DO try to formulate a response, it's a huge effort.
"Colorless" reality: nothing seems worthwhile, all goals seem insufficient
Mental work utterly impossible: impossible to synthesize concepts from observations
Unstable: any brief spark of energy followed by a crash, which leads to
Skewed sensations: base sensations like "hunger" and "tired" don't "feel" the same as in my younger years. I might feel a hunger pang, but never a deep drive to eat. I might want to sleep, but rarely an actual pleasant fatigue which compels me to bed. Usually, addressing these drives (e.g. eating when hungry, sleeping when tired) feels immediately pleasurable. Not so in this state.
Cowardice: so afraid of making any decision while "high" for fear that I'll have to deal with the consequences while "low"
Poor motor skills: typing speed in the tank, knife skills (while cooking) laughable
Irritable: simply forgetting to lock the door on my way out, forcing myself to pick up my keys seems like the most hateful task in the world. I can't stand the idle chatter at work. Everyone disgusts me.
Anxiety: always seems like I'm at the behest of an unsatisfied need... yet nothing can satisfy me. any drug can do for a while (even "non traditional" drugs like food and exercise), but this just leads to greater anxiety: these destructive surrogates just keep me away from the "real need" and fuck my life up even more.
Exhaustion: this ties in with the motor skills. I'm slow, sluggish, and perceive my body to be "heavy". Waking up, I just sit in bed for 30 minutes feeling glued to the mattress. Impossible to maintain posture in a chair. I put off things like needing to urinate for as long as possible, just so I don't have to get out of my chair. Generally speaking, I postpone and hate all task-switching. Going up stairs, I feel like an old man.
Pain: ubiquitous low-level joint pain. muscle pains (not traditional, pervasive, pleasant soreness but localized "painful" soreness) persist for months on end, which depresses me further: is this EVER going to heal? when they finally do disappear, they're simply replaced by something else.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So what makes me think its the lifting? After consistently sticking to three days a week (MWF) for a few weeks now, a pattern has started to emerge and hold remarkably consistent:
Usually, I plan to go for a bike ride that night (it's a non-lifting day, but of course I have to exercise -- addiction at it's finest), which I've been dreading all day -- "how can I ride, feeling like this? will I have any energy at all? won't I just make the pain worse?" However, in the evening, suddenly things start "clearing up". Like I said earlier, it seems like it's about 16 hours after my last workout, maybe closer to 20 -- generally I lift around 9 PM or so.
Suddenly I feel, if not exactly up for some exercise, at least that it won't be miserable. And to my surprise, about an hour in, my bike ride usually starts feeling great. I stop for some carbs and unleash, going a lot harder than I expected to, initially. "Fuck," I think, "I've done it again... went way too hard and now I'm gonna pay for it tomorrow".
BUT I DON'T! The difference starts as soon as I get home. Even though I should be in a much bigger calorie deficit, I'm not hungry. I'm not in my usual post-workout frenzy, rushing to eat and get to bed as soon as possible. Instead, I'm relaxed. I don't even feel the need to address those lingering vestiges of disordered eating: checking the fitbit, counting up the calories in my head, etc., obsessing about food choice, hitting macros, making sure I walk the fine line between eating too much and too little.
While I tend to make roughly the same choices that evening (cook, eat, watch some youtube / read some articles), the "tone" of this time is completely different. My motor skills are drastically improved, my anxiety is drastically down, and I actually WANT to think or do the these things, instead of simply feeling like I SHOULD WANT to do them. And though I say I make "roughly" the same choices, the differences are important: when I listen to music, I listen longer; when I read an article, I understand it; when I listen to a podcast, I can laugh at jokes and follow the conversation.
The real difference, though, lies in the next day: I wake up feeling fantastic. I have tons of energy, and get right out of bed. I don't worry whatsoever about how I'm going to structure my eating and exercise for the day, what I'm going to do at work, etc. I just GO. I have a feeling of excitement in my stomach. Even if I'm hungry, I don't have any anxiety about it.
But could this just be my imagination? Would this pattern continue to hold, or would it melt away, leaving my feeling doomed and frustrated yet again? This weekend, I decided to do a test, taking things to the extreme.
On Friday, I woke up feeling great (thursday was an off day) as expected. At work, I was moving lightning fast. I was a thousand times more social, fuck I even asked a girl out (something I haven't done since college) and bantered with coworkers, whom I ordinarily despise. In the evening, I went out to lift with one goal: I was going to lift heavy, but avoid all grinding reps.
Every time I started thinking "you should stop or move on" I was going to listen to that voice, instead of pushing through it. And I had a great workout! 20lb pr on snatches, great muscle sensation (something I haven't talked about, but I could write a novel about that), even felt the beginnings of a pump. Got the "nervous energy" high I always crave, but didn't push it. Got out of there in just over an hour after stretching out. If ever there was a workout I could recover from, this was it.
And yet, like clockwork, the "workout high" quickly faded into restlessness: I hurried home, crammed food into my face, joylessly watched a video or two, and the next day I woke up feeling like my legs weighed a ton. I sat in bed wondering existential shit for like 30 minutes before getting up and proceeding with the second part of my experiment: I was going to go on an epic ride. I ended up biking for 8 hours+, and walking around the rest of the day. 105+ miles (bike computer died, so I don't know for sure, lol), 5000+ calories burned, in a 3000 calorie deficit at the end of the ride.
If ever there were a "wrong way" to address a suspicion that you might "need to recover", surely this is it. And yet, JUST as I predicted: about 5 pm or so the whole "color" of my day changed. I emerged from the stupor. My anxiety melted away, and I just rode on receiving all of the exact same sensations I had been experiencing all day in calmness and pleasure, rather than worry and dread.
I wasn't hungry at all. I went through with my usual routine: grocery store, cooking, eating, watching some videos / reading articles without any rush. I even got sidetracked texting a friend for almost an hour. Just sitting there, absorbed in conversation about trivial nonsense, completely relaxed. My usual concerns about calories and macros were completely out the window. I KNEW I was going to wake up feeling great the next day.
And sure enough, I woke up with that same excitement in my stomach, jumped out of bed and got going with fantastic energy. For once, things went EXACTLY how I expected. Actually, things were even better than I expected! The nagging pain in the back of my knee, which is 100% from cycling, was utterly gone. I was able to text my friends with all of my honest thoughts, not holding back because I felt unable to form a coherent sentence. I ate breakfast without even thinking twice about the calories, without laying out the rest of my meals in my head, without worrying about the structure of my whole day in terms of exercise and diet. And then, I did something I haven't done for two years at least: I SAT down and wrote a gigantic post. Yeah, it's not very coherent and if anyone bothers to read more than a sentence I'm gonna get tons of shit, but I don't even care. I HAD to get this out.
For years, I've been on the decline, but now I'm finally on the right track, I KNOW it. All of my observations are finally starting to come together into a hypothesis which doesn't fall apart in two seconds. I could write another 5000 words relating all the ways in which my mind seems to be effected by lifting, but there's still so much more to learn. This is only the beginning...
in before:
tl;dr
seek help
fuck you
not reading that shit
if even one person can relate to even 1% of this, it's worth it. even if they can't, i don't care... i HAD to write something
