Does lifting make you stupid?

[cephissus]

Someone with your history should talk to a doctor instead of ijits here.

I've tried in the past, but I have a hard time articulating these thoughts, especially in person.  Partly because they've always changed so rapidly.

Now that I've got something a little more narrow and concrete to ask about, thought ("why am I so sensitive to lifting?"), Im thinking about trying again.

As for try, I'm sure it would 'change my life'.  Considered it many times before, but I think it would just let me dig a deeper hole for myself.

Now that I've finally started learning to sense the connection between my thinking and lifting, diet, and, well, everything, I'm finally starting to understand the concept of 'recovery'.  For the first time, I'm not turning a blind eye to side effects as I worry about muscle mass and lifting euphoria... so many things I couldn't have imagined were related.

Also, thanks for the posts from those who relate.  Mazrim, I think you're right... trying to always skirt the edge in terms of diet, sleep, and rest for so long contributes, I'm sure, to the 'nervous frailty'.  But even in healthier times, the effects still linger, I suspect, though less pronounced.

[Costanza]

Needs a woman

^
This. In all seriousness. You getting any action at the moment Ceph?

[phreak]

Agreed. And maybe a kid or 2.

Let's keep pederasty as a last resort, shall we?

[FitnessFrenzy]

My answers,

1% of tl;dr
97% of seek help
1% of fuck you
1% of not reading that shit

    

[Henda]

Summarise in a few words or at most a sentence please

[DroppingPlates]

   

But I still appreciate his contributions to the 'what did you eat' thread

[devilsmile]

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

didn't read one word lol

[evandatp]

OP appears to be suffering from slow-acting zombification.

[FitnessFrenzy]

cephissus, I read a little of your post and you sound depressed.

But for fuck sake, see a doctor. Getbig is not the right place to get help with such symptoms.

[Disqus]

Let's keep pederasty as a last resort, shall we?

HAHAHA!!!

[Kahn.N.Singh]

A Portrait of the Lifter as a Young Man (very James Joyce-y)

As usual, a very articulate, incisive, and self-reflective post.
Happy to see that you're on an upswing, Ceph!

[Master Blaster]

Usually exercise is thought to increase brain health and well being. Maybe that's lees true of lifting? Not sure, but there is always a tapering point in any endeavor where the benefits decline and the drawbacks increase.

Running seems good for clearing the mind. Not good for the joints though.

[deadz]

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

Didn't read but you were likely stupid to begin with.

[polychronopolous]

B complex needed.

This is worth a shot. ^

it will make your piss look strange but it's worth a shot.

[cephissus]

And today, after a relatively restful Sunday, I feel even better!  Finally starting to understand the meaning of "recovery"...

This level of self-absorption is extremely unhealthy as evidenced by the mad rantings of the OP.

Maybe.  But could it be the other way around?  Maybe self-absorbtion is the the result of sickness, not a cause.

Doesn't everyone have struggles?  "See a doctor".  Isn't it possible that most professionals actually can't help?  That the people who truly can help are those who didn't stop their "inner journey" until they went further than anyone else and -- found a "solution"?

Yeah, maybe I just haven't visited the right doctor, therapist, or professional yet.  But I have tried -- and what if such a person doesn't even exist?

In the beginning, whom do the doctors learn from, anyway?  Isn't it the sick?

^
This. In all seriousness. You getting any action at the moment Ceph?

Working on it, but I've given this a lot of thought over the past few years.  My whole life, I was very wary of getting into a relationship, getting married, and ultimately having a family.

I always felt I had to justify my existence BEFORE I thought about all that stuff.  Using another person to create a family, thereby providing my "purpose" in life... I've always felt this to be an extreme danger.  I never wanted to end up like most people I see, whose motivation seems to stem entire from their family, and whose value to others utterly ends with their immediate relatives.

On the other hand, when I think of all the people I admire, their family usually seems like an afterthought.  Maybe that's a misconception, but I always see their work in the foreground, not their family, wife, or girlfriend.

From my perspective, most people seem sick, clinging to life through family.  But in the end... how often does it work out?  If your existence isn't worth perpetuating except in the service of your children -- what will their fate be?  Most likely, won't they just degenerate further under your guidance?  Maybe they'll turn out well, but the odds don't seem favorable.

To be healthy enough to thrive and succeed in the world on your own: this seems like the best precondition for reproducing.  Ironically, such individuals seem least likely to actually do so.  Aren't we always talking about the declining birth rates of first world nations, and the flourishing of... you know...

Anyway, I have to admit I might be wrong.  And for the first time, I'm starting to get the courage to think differently.  To think, maybe you're right...

This is worth a shot. ^

it will make your piss look strange but it's worth a shot.

Stopped taking my B vitamins for a while, but was still eating a lot of fortified foods.  Just bought some more yesterday.

A Portrait of the Lifter as a Young Man (very James Joyce-y)

As usual, a very articulate, incisive, and self-reflective post.
Happy to see that you're on an upswing, Ceph!

Thanks Kahn!  Funny enough, I always stopped about a hundred pages into the portrait...  every time I felt I wasn't somehow "ready" to finish it.  That I still had to overcome some challenge first... but what?  Something I hadn't grappled with yet.

Someday...

Didn't read but you were likely stupid to begin with.

Strong possibility.  Alas, possibly too stupid to ever know the difference... now that's a conundrum

cephissus, I read a little of your post and you sound depressed.

But for fuck sake, see a doctor. Getbig is not the right place to get help with such symptoms.

If you read more, you'd probably see I'm not looking for help.  I actually hope I can help others who might have gone through some of the same things.

[cephissus]

didn't read one word lol

Funny enough, one of your posts has always stuck with me.  To paraphrase one of your posts in a thread about anxiety, you said it all starts when you continue to avoid your "responsibilities".  I could write a lot about this subject, but suffice to say that exercise has for a long time been something I turned to in order to avoid other problems.  And that's where it starts to veer into "addiction" and eventually ends up... well, where you see me now.

[liberalismo]

You may have a disease.

[The Abdominal Snoman]

To me it looks you are trying to take control of every aspect of your life and including your thoughts which of course is impossible. You constantly set yourself up for failure and move on to something that you think you can control. Makes sense why anorexia would come and go from your life. It's been said that people may become anorexic because they feel its the only thing they have control over. It's their last resort. Primal shit from our beginnings is my guess. I know you're not looking for advice. But I'd like to leave this Youtube clip.

Full car crash scene

https://vimeo.com/83271649

[cephissus]

To me it looks you are trying to take control of every aspect of your life and including your thoughts which of course is impossible. You constantly set yourself up for failure and move on to something that you think you can control. Makes sense why anorexia would come and go from your life. It's been said that people may become anorexic because they feel its the only thing they have control over. It's their last resort. Primal shit from our beginnings is my guess. I know you're not looking for advice. But I'd like to leave this Youtube clip.

Full car crash scene

https://vimeo.com/83271649

Never looked at it that way before, but you make a good point.  I'm trying to understand myself so that I can control myself, I suppose.  And maybe trying to understand is as futile as trying to control.

I've actually thought about that scene a lot in the past.

[drkaje]

Sorry, Man: You aren't going to get better advice than "Seek the advice of a doctor who specializes in your condition, and follow it".

Thinking someone here is going to give helpful advice (consistent with your urge to feel in control) means things are worse than you're willing to admit.

A smarter, more tactful, person would have come up with an empowering response that lead you to the same conclusion.

[Yamcha]

we may have a new sticky thread coming soon. 

[_aj_]

I think the canonical refutation of "does lifting make you stupid" is the combined lifetime works and achievements of one Ronald Coleman.

[NordicNerd]

Never looked at it that way before, but you make a good point.  I'm trying to understand myself so that I can control myself, I suppose.  And maybe trying to understand is as futile as trying to control.

I've actually thought about that scene a lot in the past.

I think this is the best answer you have gotten yet. Constantly living with self-reflection, analyzing everything will consume mental resources that otherwise could be dedicated to purposeful action. In the cognitive scientific literature, a variety of this is called self-directed attention. It is a mechanism in cognitive failure in test/performance situations. Essentially, the self-directed attention consumes cognitive resources and limits the resources allocated to the task at hand. It is a very real problem for people with test-anxiety. People with social anxiety suffers from this, as any kind of external assessment makes them self-aware and hence clumsy and dysfunctional.

I know some very accomplished scientists and most of them share the trait that they are very action-oriented, not necessarily self reflecting a lot.

But, on a fundamental level, constantly living with self-doubt is poison for motivation and performance. One will perhaps never know what choices will be best in life, but nothing will happen if one does not commit to something.

NN

[cephissus]

I know some very accomplished scientists and most of them share the trait that they are very action-oriented, not necessarily self reflecting a lot.

But, on a fundamental level, constantly living with self-doubt is poison for motivation and performance. One will perhaps never know what choices will be best in life, but nothing will happen if one does not commit to something.

Good post and I agree with the second quoted paragraph.  The first quoted paragraph falls in line with my earlier observation: maybe such obsessive reflection isn't a the 'root cause' of sickness but instead an effect.  The weak, sick organism looks inward to find a solution, whereas the strong, healthy organism looks outward for external goals.

Also, drkaje, I'm not looking for help.  I made this thread out of a tremendous sense of self-overcoming... I sense I'm finally moving past hurdles that have stopped me up for years if not decades.

Maybe the answer isn't always to 'seek help' from others, but to double down, have so e faith in yourself, and grapple with your problems as daunting as they may be.

[doriancutlerman]

Good sir Cephissus,

You are obviously a highly-intelligent man. 

The sort of depression from which you suffer is common among people these days.  Many psychiatrists believe that such depression is largely a result of (as others of intimated) too much self-reflection.  Circa 1500-1900 or what-have-you, you'd most likely be tending to a farm -- that is, when you weren't conscripted to fight for some lord, king or ilk.

In those days, intelligent men didn't have time for navel-button inspection.  They either managed their farm, sired kids, killed their lords' enemies or they died.  Darwinism and all that.  Only a privileged few could contemplate existential shit.

Today, too many of us are free to do too much of the later and not enough of the former.  It's an improvement, to be sure, but not always for the better. 

I heartily recommend you see a shrink who will diagnose you with an anti-depressant and anti-anxiety drug (albeit preferably NOT a benzodiazapine for the latter; the shit's brutally effective, but also incredibly addictive ... I will probably be on Ativan for the rest of my life, FWIW.  Should you go for a benzo, be ready to take it for a long time). 

I've not read the entire thread, but check your test levels, too.  As long as your ticker as healthy and you can manage your depression, 125-250mg Test E/wk. will put plenty of lead in your pencil if you've not used/used heavily in a long time.  That alone will make you feel like a king and, as noted, make for some fantastic workouts IF you've stayed natural and/or not used much in awhile.

It WILL thicken your blood, however, so give blood regularly if you pursue that route. 

Apart from that, why don't you start a blog or vlog somewhere?  You are easily one of the most articulate posters on Getbig.  Venting with the weights is one thing, but when "thoughts become things" ... that's another

I kid, but seriously, I'm rooting for you, man.  I have suffered from almost crippling depression before, and while I was never ready to swing from the rafters, I can see when someone is in pain.  There's no shame in placing faith outside of your own means.  I know if it weren't for a bunch of people I really loved, I don't know that I ever would've overcome that self-arresting fog.