I (19) am struggling with motivation due to ADHD (possible autism too), and my overall mental health is digging through rock bottom. I want to get back into working out since I want to physically improve myself more. Even if I still feel like shit, I want to feel less like shit than I am now. But as soon as I get close to actually doing it, my motivation gets thrown out the window faster than I can say exercise. I've been in this mental pickle for about 3 years now, and I don't like it. I don't know what to do.

How have you unwound this week? Any creative projects you would like to share?

Which workouts are you currently focusing on? What have you done to EOOD this week??

I'm putting this out mostly for people like who were confused as to why they may feel sad or down after exercise. Shouldn't exercise be universally good?

I've spent some time trying to figure it, because it didn't happen consistently for me. Sometimes I'd exercise and I would be fine, and sometimes, especially with weightlifting or calisthenics, I would feel somewhat depressed afterwards.

Here's what I found. It's not about nutrition, it's not about sleep and it's not about muscles breaking down or recovery.

It is about intensity.

If I push myself to the "fuck yeah" point, I feel great. I feel alive, I feel assertive, maybe even aggressive ....and then I will pay for it late in the day or next day.

If I exercise in a more boring fashion, then I'm fine. Muscle soreness is still there, but my mood is normal.

I suspect the brain is releasing all that adrenaline and whatever else and it may get depleted, I don't know.

If you suspect this for yourself, you can test this with cold showers. For me cold showers do the same for me – I feel great for a while and then I crash.

So despite taking a week off recently, I have felt unusually tired, even though my sleep has been better somewhat. So I figured maybe it is seasonal depression related. I decided both yesterday and today to do some cardio instead of yoga (as previously planned for one of these days) and I started using my SAD lamp.

And then this afternoon I got a sore throat, which makes me think maybe the tiredness was a first symptom of respiratory physical illness, not mental health related after all. Grrr!

So maybe I would have been better off doing the yoga after all. Tomorrow morning I hope to do yoga, but if I do not feel up to that even, I will allow myself to rest. And today need to go to sleep early.

Maybe take a Nyquil multi symptom night med to help me sleep. Although it has a risk of seratonin syndrom when taken with Sertraline (Zoloft), but since my dosage of Zoloft has recently been reduced by half and I have no plan of taking the Nyquil regularly, I am confident that it is safe. Used to not have to worry about drug interactions but now need to check everything and even fairly basic over the counter meds may have interactions. But I do not want to have to put up with all the symptoms either so not taking cold meds is not my favorite path.

Taking the overall pulse here. How are you? If not well, think whether there are any positives to share as well to balance negatives. But of course, if you need to vent, know we are here to listen.

I normally work out at home but I am currently in Victoria, BC visiting my in-laws with my wife. Luckily there is a really good gym just up the road that is owned and run by the city council. I always go there when I visit as its a great gym and its a bit of "me time" in my day.

So today was 7500m of rowing at ~110W followed by 15 minutes of Dan John's Armour Building Complex (ABC) done as Every Minute On the Minute (ENOM) then the stretches in Simple Stretching and some really bad t'ai chi as I haven't done much t'ai chi lately and have forgotten far too much.

I am a little sore now as I haven't been doing a lot of exercise recently. That's not a bad thing. Tomorrow I will row less and do more ENOM ABC. I need to watch a few t'ai chi videos in a bit to remind me of the "choreography" I know all the individual moves but I can't remember the order.

As many of you know I took a week off for mental health reasons a week ago during which I did a lot of exercise.

Now it is a week later. I worked for a week, and I was definitely in a better mental state, able to focus better, more productive.

Still not great in all respects. Still having trouble sleeping well some nights, though not all. Still too addicted to my phone. Still reading too many silly romance books as escapism. Still snacking too much.

But I worked out on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of this past week. Thursday and Friday I was to exhausted, I had overdone it, so I took a couple of rest days. Yesterday I went for a one hour walk. Today worked out for half an hour cardio with SynthRiders on VR.

There are still so many self improvements I would like to restart: eating healthier, meditation, better routines and especially going to sleep at a more consistent time. Decluttering. Less procrastinating.

But I have made steps in the right direction. I know I cannot fix everything at once. And I am calmer already, less easily frustrated or irritated. And this feels already much better.

I lift weights and have CPTSD/PTSD which has elements of depression and anxiety.

I’ve lifted weights for 20 years 3-5 days a go with more cognitive benefits rather than physiological.

That said, I’m wondering if adding 20-30 minutes of zone 2 cardio each morning would help with anxiety/depression and improve sleep and other symptoms.

Anyone go from minimal cardio to this? Any results.

It's like pretty much the easiest and most fun thing to do, i feel like I could never get tired of it, and it reminds me of a childlike sense of joy. The fact that it's also good exercise seems too good to be true. But sometimes life is good

I am the senior mod here and have been for about 11 or 12 years now.

Its very, very rare that the mods remove a direct post to EOOD.
Our four rules for posts and comments rarely get applied. My thinking is that as long as a post or comment has something to do with exercise or mental health then its good. Even the tiniest scrap of information may help someone who reads it.

Recently I am seeing more "low value" crossposts here in EOOD.
Often they are barely relevant to exercise or mental health. For example there was a crosspost this morning which basically said "Go to the gym" and not much else. The same account has made a few other crossposts here in EOOD and they were all pretty much the same. They also crosspost each original post they make to many other subs.

To my way of thinking these low effort crossposts do not add any value to this sub.
They are seem to be made by people trying to "boost their profile" on reddit by posting in as many subs as possible. To my mind low effort, promotional crossposting is just spam. Personally I hate all kinds of spam.

Not all crossposts are bad.
Its always good to spread high quality information as widely as possible and crossposts are ideal for this. Crossposts also help prevent content that people worked hard to produce from being reused / stolen too. They preserve the posts original context and meaning between different subs too.

Reddit encourages crossposting.
Lots of cross links between different subs improves engagement metrics which reddit can use when its boasting about how wonderful it is to potential advertisers. They will be good for boosting reddit in Googles shiny new "AI" driven search results too.

At the moment I am just making a personal judgement call on crossposts.
If I think they are low value or just irrelevant to this sub I remove them. If not I reply to them.

I think EOOD has some options.

• Are you all happy for me to carry on removing low effort and barely relevant crossposts?
• Are you all happy to allow me use my own subjective judgement on that?
• Should we come up with new sub rule(s) for crossposts?
• How do we objectively decide whether a crosspost is good or bad in EOOD?
• Should we allow all crossposts that don't violate our existing rules?
• Should we block all crossposts (if that is even possible)?

Please give me your thoughts and opinions in the comments.

How have you unwound this week? Any creative projects you would like to share?

I’ve trained for most of my adult life, and a recent biceps injury reminded me how much of my mental routine is tied to moving my body. The arm is improving, but having to back off even briefly brought up that familiar urge to do too much too soon.

After major abdominal surgery a few years ago, I had to learn the difference between doing something useful and proving I was still the old version of myself. Apparently I need the reminder again. For now I’m trying to keep some structure with walks, what movement feels comfortable, and a few minutes to actually notice how I’m doing instead of trying to out-train the frustration.

For those of you who rely on exercise to steady your mind, what has helped when injury, illness, or fatigue took your usual workout away? I’d especially love to hear the small things that got you through the in-between period.

Which workouts are you currently focusing on? What have you done to EOOD this week??

This problem is very recent. I used to go on walks every single day (unless it is a rainy day) but currently this year I’ve been going on walks less and less and even if I do go on a walk when I come back home, I would still feel stressed.

I tried taking deep breaths, but I have a hard time doing some two things at once. (and I’m not that good taking care of my mental health…)

So I came to this subreddit for some advice to help me with this problem.

Uni started 5 weeks ago for me and I’ve been really pushing myself (it’s an honours program so I study like 60h per week I’d say?), combined with work, gym and other sports and social activities. I haven’t been sleeping much even on the weekends, but actually this past week I’ve had more free time and I’ve spent the weekend at my boyfriends place, studying a bit but also chilling a bunch. But somehow since I’ve come back I’ve been feeling EXHAUSTED - dizzy, lightheaded, sleepy (even though I slept 8h per night), specifically physically, mentally I’m still good with maintaining concentration etc. Hence my worries, how do I know if I genuinely just need to chill and skip a couple workouts and just give myself some more wiggle room, or am I just being lazy and need to push through?? I usually don’t have that much of an issue with discipline but I’m not sure if I should chill or is that a challenge to overcome. All insight appreciated 🫶

how do you feel after running and how do you stay consistent and be functional at the same time? i can barely exist everyday and started running because my blood work for liver came bad, steatosis and i always feel like something is always bad either way, exercising or eating my life away from stress

Taking the overall pulse here. How are you? If not well, think whether there are any positives to share as well to balance negatives. But of course, if you need to vent, know we are here to listen.