PH² #9 - Working out and through Depression. [E3Y25]

Hey Folks!

Video Transcript

So I've definitely got enough time to talk today. In fact, we'll probably run out of time to talk, oh, or I should say run out of talk unless I shave the workout a little bit. Observation number one: I did a terrible job racking that squat bar. All right, well, today I kind of wanted to talk about sort of the clash of depression and fitness because there's a good chance if you make it here that you're interested in one or maybe both and you experience one or maybe both. Perhaps you're having a tough time with it. I often do.

It's amazing these things that make us very happy can make us so sad. It can be really difficult when you're trying to do those happy things to find the drive to do it so you can get out of that pit. Even when you are trying to do it, be it writing or fitness or watching a show, you know, reading a book, whatever your interests are, it can be so hard to get your body to just go. Especially here, it's basically summer in the gym. I believe it's yeah, thirty-nine degrees. Fhe, it was forty-one when I started, so apparently I made it colder in here.

Yeah, I think for me, and I don't have solutions for everyone, I don't even have solutions for myself, but what I found for me at least is often I have to find some system to kind of force me to do those things. I don't know what that mechanism looks like for you. For things like coping, my general solution is to play music, just have music and headphones, because eventually that drowns out the voices and I get sort of energized to do those things. Maybe that'll work for you.

Funnily enough, I do find that music makes me really sad, no matter what it is. You start having memories connected with those songs and what you may have and may have since lost. Those kind of things. Nostalgia can be a beautiful and a horrifying thing, depending on sort of your state of being. Supposedly, I I don't recall ever looking it up, but supposedly the word means something like pleasure pain, or I don't even want to look it up, but like pain in memories or something like that. I don't recall.

Maybe it's actually the German word for it or something like that. Regardless, if I remember, I'll put it on the screen. But even though it can fill me with sorrow, I I still find that it helps get me moving. I'm sure you can notice we're working back up to the two. I think I said two was it two seventy something? Well, let's look. We've got two hundred lb there, two fifty, two eighty. We had two other thirties on that. So that was two ten. So like two twelve and a half, something like that. I think I don't remember if that's exactly what I did last time, but it's within the ballpark. It's within five, five lbs.

It was incredibly difficult. Every workout you're a different person coming in, maybe better, maybe worse. That's fine. The big thing, and I guess we'll find out tomorrow if I did this, but the big thing is listening to your body, especially if you're using something like a trap bar. Because you don't have the same cues that you would have with a regular barbell, you don't have it against your shins necessarily. So I basically have to sort of memorize where my limb should be and my feet should be.

I think the general pluses and minuses of using a trap bar, I think I have more pluses, more things than I like than I don't like. I just need to make sure to always be listening to my body. I don't know if I can necessarily say that I did that this time around. The I'm still I believe working through the warm-ups right now. It's incredibly difficult. Everything feels heavier when your mind kind of escapes you. It's like gravity increases, time it takes you to think extends, and everything tastes a little less good, just like the world is a bit less colorful.

Yeah, and it's funny too. It's one of those things I that you just can't escape. If you go on YouTube or almost any service, a lot of people will cover how bodies change as you age. The year that they mention things breaking down always gets earlier. It's you know, your brain starts breaking down in your early twenties and your bones degrade by seven percent every ten years and all these other things. Where every single person covering these things, I think that some of them have the best of intentions to get people interested, but they paint this impression of this inevitable downward spiral where your best years and your best experiences are behind you.

It's one of those things where, especially if you're not feeling very good, it does not help. It does not help. I think what frustrates me the most is all of these videos never mention any ways to avoid these situations. Things like your skin getting less elastic as you age, they never mention that if you use sunscreen frequently, you will dramatically extend how long that degradation takes. Almost everyone you've ever seen who you think, wow, they look so much younger than they actually are, it's likely because either they just don't go outside very much. Nerds represent, I I suppose. Or they use sunscreen, or in the extremely rare case, they have incredible genetics for skin. You can basically rule that out as ever being what you're seeing. It's going to be basically nobody.

The sun is a very powerful thing, and it does an incredible amount to any organic matter that decides to be around it too long. I mean, even nonsense like grass and plants, so many of them, if they have sunlight all day, darn things die on you. So I mean, even things you would expect to be impervious to the sun have to do a whole lot not to be murdered by it. Similarly, the one that I thought was interesting, and it was what reminded me of this when I was talking about depression, graying your vision. This video where they talked about how the world seemed more colorful when you were younger and it talked about how your eyes yellow over time from the moment you're ten until basically death.

I'm unconvinced. Like most things, I'm unconvinced of this inevitability. I'm willing to bet if you look into it, and I might, who knows, that this is another one of those things where excessive sun damage, poor nutrition, and occasionally just terrible luck with the genetic lottery, these are the things that lead to what we consider inevitabilities currently. Everybody dies as far as we can tell. We haven't seen anyone be born and not die yet. I mean, quite a few of us are currently a lot, but the odds are good most of us are going to die.

While that is an inevitability, I'm unconvinced almost anything else is, that isn't to say that without medical care, you won't ever get sick or anything like that. More to the point, that everything we currently think of as terminal or every disease that we think of as inevitable, these are only such with our current knowledge and with the, in some cases, the state of the environment around people. I mean, you go back into I think it was the seventies and eighties, possibly a bit earlier than that, and cars in the US, I don't know elsewhere, but cars in the US were spewing lead into the air. They had literally leaded gas, and there's no way, absolutely no way, that this didn't have unbelievable negative neurological impacts on the general population in general.

Exhaust is just something you do not want in your body. You generally don't want almost anything in your lungs that is not oxygen. And amazingly, even oxygen being literally an oxidizer, I mean, it's literally oxygen, I mean, it doesn't play nice with anything. It's better than suffocating. I would recommend to keep breathing for as long as you can. But obviously, even that doesn't come without sort of cell damage and stuff. At least as far as I'm aware, I mean, that was stuff I've learned in college. It's been over a decade, two decades almost. So things may have changed. So don't kill me.

But all of these things, while our bodies are breaking down, I I just, I think more education needs to be centered around ways to avoid these things, ways to mitigate the damage and what we're experiencing. That's it, seems sort of roundabout. But it's again kind of coming back to how I'm feeling about just sort of dealing with mental episodes, trying to find ways to mitigate it. Because when I finished that first set of the deadlifts, I felt pretty darn good. I was absolutely cooked. I still am.

Actually, I don't know if I put up the video because I record a lot more of these than I actually upload, again, my mental state. But I sat down pretty hard because I slipped on these horse doall mats, and it did not sit well with my right butt bone. I didn't think much of it all last week because I didn't really notice it. Then I went to do these deadlifts today, and oh my goodness, talk about pain. That was impressive.

So somewhere around here, I believe we'll be getting into my second set. I don't think this was as clean as the first set. I think I did a lot of things wrong here. In part because I think I've hit the upper limit of where I can lift currently, especially when I'm not feeling well. I may need to slightly reduce the weight and see about getting through two sets of twelve rather than sticking with this weight and risking a slip of the foot or something and disabling myself for a few weeks.

But you'll notice on that set, assuming I'm getting my timing right, got a stopwatch, it's kind of sloppy. I get through five and I have to stop. I recognize that if I do another one, I'm probably going to hurt myself. I can tell that my form's breaking down, and it's become more of a just get it done rather than get it done safely. So I take a break and I start trying to think and evaluate where I am mentally and physically.

Yeah, it I try again. I realize I just can't do it. I think it's good in part because I psyched myself out. Unfortunately, I just couldn't get any of my limbs to feel correct. I think it's important if you get those signals, maybe not always, but more often than not, listen. Evaluate what dangers come with what you're about to do. If you feel there's low risk and merely high discomfort because it's more of a mental block than a physical impairment, then you want to do to try and do it.

But if you evaluate your current state and you realize there's a pretty good chance you're going to hurt yourself, try and abort in that moment. You can maybe come back to it a little bit later. But in my case, for instance, I just recognize that because I'm hitting my upper limits, I am adjusting where the weight is being lifted. On more than a couple of them, it was more my lower back than it was things like my hamstrings. I tried to even that out on the first set and get sort of higher in my lifts. But ultimately, I was getting more back than lower back than hamstrings.

I could feel those muscles getting extremely on. Like, I'm talking right now, I have a wild, I guess pump would be the word, I've got a wild amount of activity in my lower back. That's fine. I'm not worried about it. But I recognized that meant when I went to do my second exercise for the day, that it was going to have to be lighter. So as you can see, I went for a lighter squat quite a bit lighter actually than what I normally do. I believe that's eighty lbs, but I wanted to see, and I'm going to have to watch back in the video, I wanted to see physically how low I can get currently without losing stability.

Because my big thing right now is because of my body proportions, I need to lean forward quite a bit in order to keep basically going down. Because if I don't, I'll just fall backwards. This isn't too weird if you watch a lot of people squat. There, human body shapes are remarkably different, and that's cool. That's what makes this interesting among other things. But it also means that one bit of advice for any sort of exercise is foolish. Anyone that does it is is likely misleading you in some way with some rare exceptions. But realistically, we're all different.

I do a pretty wide, oh, excuse me. I do a pretty wide bench press because a few reasons. One, I a few years back really, really badly injured the muscles around my scapula, ridiculously bad, and it put me out for months, months and months. It's still jacked, but it is what it is. So things like the squat and the bench press, I have really asymmetrical control over my muscles.

I recognize that if I use dumbbells for the next twenty years or something, I could probably even that back out. But what I try to do instead is I just stick with barbells for most things, and I just try and be cognizant of it. Try my best to at least make sure that any imbalances I'm hitting don't result in a motion that would hurt me. Now this may have been too light. A, I can tell, because I nearly threw it on the right there. But B, you'll notice I'm getting a bit ahead of myself.

We'll cut out some mid stuff so this all lines up a little better. But there are some of the last squats I did, I believe I nearly threw the bar from low back onto my high right on back of my neck. Because it's so light that I can toss the thing, so that tells me that I went too light. Now the reason I went light, I think I already said, was my lower back is kind of on fire.

So I recognized if I did go with a higher weight, my form was going to be just nuts, absolutely ridiculous, and I was probably going to feel it in the morning in ways that are deeply unpleasant. I don't want to build negative feedback loops into my workouts. Because if I, if I want a workout, especially in these frigid wet temperatures, sometimes literally well below freezing, I I have to make it as enjoyable as I can.

Because even if I don't do a lot of exercises, even if not all of them are pushing myself to the absolute limits, I'm still doing all right. Because if I think about it, like I said in I think my first video overall, I lifted thousands of pounds today. You figure over two hundred lbs for every single time I lifted that deadlift bar, that is more than nearly every person on earth in the last like year, right?

Not all of them. We've got other people who lift. We've got people who are competitive athletes, stuff like that. But these people make up a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of all living people. This isn't a point of bragging. This is a point of trying to find, trying to find some level of perspective on what you do and what I and for me what I do. Because as you grow, as you get better at anything, you'll probably never notice it.

A joke a lot of people make when they make YouTube videos or do any sort of art is they'll tell people, don't look at my videos from five years ago. Don't look at my art from ten years ago. The thing is, at any step of the way along that journey, they were likely doing fantastic. They were doing fantastic within the scope of not only themselves and what they had currently learned but fantastic compared to everyone else alive.

Because there are so many things to be interested in, so many things to do. There's so little time in life. It is it is a sick joke that life is so short with so many fascinating things we could all be getting invested in that you just can't do it all. Especially if you're not rich, which I respect, I'm saying this in front of a very expensive piece of gym equipment, but that was done through poor financial decisions and time. But unless you're wealthy enough that you don't have to work, you have forty hours of your very, very, very finite waking time every week eaten up by something you probably don't care about, run by people who probably don't care about you, four people they probably don't care about.

You have to find the energy on the outsides of this time, and usually it's the prime of your day, the time where you are the most aware and the most energized and the most motivated. Though I may be repeating myself. It just gets squandered. You have to find, in those hours when your body is winding down, ready to sleep, ready to get a meal in. You have to find time for nearly infinite interests. Because basically nobody is doing almost anything you do. Nearly nobody. When you've got ill people, is still a lot of people, but still it's basically nobody in the grand scheme of things.

You have to have that perspective. When you've got those mental episodes where you're feeling kind of bad, part of that is it's so easy to lose perspective. It's so easy to not realize just how crazy impressive what you've accomplished is given whatever you've got. The odds are really good that if you're hearing this, a, that's remarkable, but thanks YouTube I guess. But the odds are really good you don't agree with that.

Ironically, I would say if you did, there's a pretty good chance you probably shouldn't. I know that's paradoxical or something or, but my point there is the most confident people in the world that I've ever seen are people who really shouldn't be. Most executives, just about every famous person you've ever seen, bragging about themselves. Because in the grand scheme of things, they, much like you, are doing acceptably well or very well for their point in time given the amount of time they've had to do the thing.

But the thing is, for most of these people, that thing they're doing, they've had the luxury of doing all their life, generally with no sort of things in the way and without an extra job to get in the way. Like, if you're an executive, your hobby is likely making money and looking at people like numbers on a sheet. So your job is your hobby. You get quite good at it. You get quite good at effortlessly, oh, effortlessly firing people and having a black void where some sort of spirit or humanity should exist. But you're not better at it than anyone else who would have been placed in your position.

That should be humbling. I think most people you should be very happy with where you are. But always keep perspective in both directions. You're not God's gift to anything you do. But you should always feel good about what you've accomplished, assuming you're not like a serial killer or something. Assuming good intent with everything you're doing in life, be happy that you've done it. Be happy that you're growing and improving.

If you ever feel like you aren't, sort of observe why. Is that the little voice in your head, is that that sort of depressive monster trying to eat away at you? Or do you need to look at your hobbies in a new direction and sort of spice things up? That's why I'm not super against people who do fitness fads as long as they don't let it negatively impact them. If it keeps them going to the gym and keeps them active and keeps them happy, I think it's cool.

I'm not as big of a fan of diet fads just because that usually there's a rebound with those, usually where people eat really bad afterwards and hurt themselves. But gym fads, as long as you're being safe about it, enjoy yourself. Don't worry too much about what the best way to do things is or anything like that. More than anything, just don't get caught up in that voice in your head in basically either direction. Don't let that voice turn you into a monster.

But also don't let that voice be the monster. Try and find ways, and this is more me talking to myself than anything else, I guess. But try to find ways to live a symbiotic relationship with the you that lives inside of you, right? Because we already know, like, you can feel it. Maybe there's no scientific way to describe it. I'm not a spiritual person, so I'm not even going to get into that. But when you close your eyes, sometimes, I'm sure you get intrusive thoughts. I mean, you obviously sometimes will have nightmares like there there is this disconnect between the you that is acting and what your brain cooks up sometimes.

It's it's just it's a matter of trying to find ways to take whatever it cooks up for you and figuring out a way to make the best out of that meal, right? So for me, I did something that for me is extremely hard. That, as a the joke I think I'm going to butcher it, but like I had to open the heaviest weight in my house, or lift the heaviest weight, which was the door to the gym, and I managed it after a full work day. I lifted just hundreds and hundreds of pounds over and over and.

Did I hit my goal of seven and seven? No. Did I hurt myself? Not that I'm aware of at the moment. But we'll find out in the morning. Maybe I'll have a new pop and we can talk about that next time. Because that's what happened when I lifted three hundred about a year ago. Did my squats go as well as I'd want them to? They weren't as heavy as I wanted them to be. I didn't necessarily pause at the bottom as long as I wanted to be.

But I did something. I felt heating up in my muscles. I took an absolutely cooked back, and I did something. If you can just keep doing something, like if you can take that sort of automated process that we use right now for things like social media, if you can take that and just focus a little bit of it every day into something that you have a small amount of interest in, before you know it, you'll be really good at that thing.

As long as you remember that the reason you're really good at that thing is because you've put a lot of time into being really good at that thing, I think you'll be okay. You probably won't become an insufferable person. I'm disappointed. I realize I'm so down on myself today that I don't think I opened this with a hey folks. But hey folks, don't be too hard on yourself. Just you know enjoy the sun, get a nice walk in if your weather allows for it, and just believe in yourself because I do.

Yeah, just don't be too hard on yourself, right?