One of The Best Ways To Improve Your Mental Health

One of the best treatments, clinically proven, to help with depression, anxiety, low libido, low drive, inflammation. It's not a medicine. It's exercise, and it's proven to be better than almost any other medication available. Do you think this is a common knowledge? I don't. I do not think, although it's becoming more common knowledge. You know, if you look at, and this isn't just my opinion, if you look at the data, look at anxiety and depression, for example, and we're talking about the most common forms, right? The kind of mild to moderate forms, because extreme forms, that's a whole different category. But if you look at the data, when they compare the most effective prescription medications that we've had now for decades, right? Like SSRI, you know, drugs or other drugs that are similar, and you compare them to consistent exercise, the effects on depression and anxiety are very similar in the short term. In the long term, they start to trend better with exercise. And that's because exercise, you don't build up a tolerance to it like you do with a medication. You tend to, it tends to become more and more effective as you continue to do it. In fact, if you could bottle exercise into a pill, it would be a block, there would be nothing like it in the world. It would be a complete blockbuster. And it sucks that people only connect exercise to the physical effects. They just think it's work. Yeah, and it's the consistency, really, that provides the value. Once you really start to add that into your daily activities, your daily life, it's interesting to me because I look at it a lot like unused, unpotential used energy. And then at the end of the day, like your body starts to kind of like, you know, get restless with that. And if you're all in your head for too long, you kind of get into this loop that you can't really break out of. Yeah, there's so much to impact there, too. Yeah, it definitely improves your physical health, which will also improve your mental health. We know that those are strongly connected. But the process of exercise is very much an empowering one, where you're out doing it and you're struggling and you're finding that you're able to stay consistent. Oh, my gosh, it's working. Look what I'm doing. I like this and I feel good about myself. And it just gets better and better over the years. And there's so much, again, there's so much to impact there. Why exercise is such an effective mental health tool. And nobody really talks about it, right? Everybody talks about weight loss, looking better. You know, maybe some discussions around mobility and movement and strength, which all great, all good. But I firmly believe the most profound effects that consistent appropriate, I have to say appropriate, right? Because exercise can be abused just like anything. But the appropriate application of exercise by far are the mental health effects. And when I would train clients, it was the mental effects that you would see and feel that were more profound. And those are the ones that people actually commented on that shocked them, that blew them away. Like, oh, my God, I feel so good and I feel so happy. And this is so weird. Well, most antidepressant drugs, aren't they? Their goal is really to make it so you don't have like the high highs and the low lows. Their goal is to keep you neutral, subscribing, well, to keep you taking them, yeah. But like not to really feel like better necessarily, but just, you know, not bad. Yeah, I want to be very clear that the prescription drugs have a very, they have a place. And I don't want to downplay them because I think that they, in many cases, they're life-saving. But what I'm trying to say is that exercise, appropriately applied exercise, for many cases is so much better. And even if you're on medication, it only will make it that much more. Yeah, why not do both? It makes it so much more effective. We're starting to see now that they're starting to visit exercise as a treatment for mental health issues. And we already see that, right? Psychiatrists and psychologists will already recommend that people exercise and move and do stuff like that. But it's not a part of the protocol. But with the clinical evidence, I believe that these clinics and therapists should, I think a very effective strategy would be to partner with exercise specialists and say, look, here's a deal. We're going to do this with therapy. We're going to do this with medication. And also, here's so-and-so and they're going to help you with exercise and activity because in the studies, it's so effective. I think we're going to have to, when you look at, you know, we make that comparison about Wally. You know, we kind of like lightly joke about that, but there's some truth to the potential of us moving in that direction of like not having to move really to get access, do everything you need to do, make money, whatever. So I think that it's going to become necessary. And I think we're in the middle of that transition right now. And maybe the pandemic accelerated that a little bit of people's awareness around why it's so important that you exercise. And I think we're going to start to see that over the next couple of years, more and more people. I mean, and look at these businesses. Although, I mean, Peloton and them are tanking right now, but like your at-home fitness stuff that's becoming more popular. And the gyms are blown up again. Are they still going? I was going to ask you, have you been following up on like your prediction on what's happening right now? I've talked to a few people that are in the industry. And now it's hard to say because part of it could be that the market washed out a lot of competition. So whoever's left now is, they are, you know, they now own a larger piece of the market potentially. But you're seeing a surge. And I think part of it is because people are feeling really bad, worse than they have in a long time. And it happened so fast, right? In a two year period, our obesity rate accelerated to the point where we are at the point now with obesity where we would have been maybe in six or seven years at the pace that we had before. So it just sped up. And I think people are kind of like, I want to move, you know? So now will it stick? I don't know. That's a hard thing to predict. I hope it does, right? But I do think that, look, I'll speak personally. I battle with my own demons. I have ADD and when I was in school, I had trouble sitting still and paying attention and I can have my own paranoias and all that stuff. Exercise, and I've said this for so long, and I tell this to my wife all the time, it's so therapeutic for me. I don't know where I would be. I could not imagine if for a month and a half, if I couldn't exercise at all. Like, I mean, you guys are looking at me and I know you're trying not to make funny faces. Could you imagine how I would be if I couldn't do anything for a month and a half? Yeah. It's so therapeutic to me. It's definitely necessary. Well, most likely you would seek out something else to- Medicate. Yeah, to medicate or fill that void. And what just happens, what's great is that if you do move in the direction of using health and fitness, although it can be dangerous in itself, or I shouldn't say dangerous, it could be unhealthy. It could be abused. Right, like anything else. At least on the way there, you get a lot of positive benefits from it, right? Because obviously there are people that are addicted to exercise and fitness and their body and looking at themselves that it starts to hurt or harm other parts of their life or people that are connected to them. But in the pursuit of that or in the process of that, there's a lot of positive health benefits that they get from it, mental and physical. Yeah, and you're right. And anything can be pathological. I don't care what it is. You can make anything pathological. But if you talk to anybody, and you guys know people like this, if you talk to anybody who's been doing it for a long time, they went through that process and then came out of it. It's such a learn, it's the most underrated personal growth vehicle I can think of. You know what I mean? Like it teaches you that you'll never be perfect. That's an important lesson to learn, right? And accept it. It teaches you that it's okay to fail. You're gonna, like you try a new exercise, you suck at it the first 50 times that you do it. It teaches you not to compare to others. You have to. Because like I said, at some point you realize like, oh yeah, I'm never gonna look like Arnold did. Like I realized that in my late teens and then I accepted it and then continued. It teaches you to love your body because if you stick with it for 20 or 30 years, at some point you stop hating yourself because you're starting to enjoy the process. It makes you feel self-reliant and empowered. You feel empowered because it's something you're doing for your own health and your own sanity and wellbeing. There's so many lessons, right? So it's just this- You literally see progress happen right in front of your face. You do. And so it's just this very powerful mental health, personal growth vehicle. And it's almost never talked about in that way. And I feel like that's the angle that we should talk about it. Because I think if you set all of the value of exercise on weight loss and how you look, you're gonna set a lot of people up for early failure and then they'll get discouraged and they won't do it. But if you tell people, hey, here's how it's gonna make you feel. Here's the positive mental health effects. They will feel that. They will see that. And then what will happen as a side effect is the fat loss and all that other stuff. Do you foresee in the future, more companies building health and fitness around like their structure of your day at work? Like starting the day off with like an half hour or hour of some sort of physical activity before? We've already talked about like, what's this? I think they did this a long time ago. Like the average hours that the eight hour employee actually works in the day, it's like not even half. So it's not like it would carve into their productivity at work. Like we're, oh shoot, you got, we do an hour of fitness in the day. Now you no longer have enough time to write code or do whatever. It's like, they already are that unproductive as it is. And actually doing something that's physical like that, not only would benefit them physically, but mentally and potentially. I mean, we know, I know, it's wondering when other companies will figure this out, they'll be more productive. So at what point do companies start building that into their day? Yeah, you know what the challenge? Smart companies will. They will, but the challenge with that is you're going to get pushback from people who are saying, I don't want to, or I feel fat shamed or I'm not able to. You said that before, but I think, so I think. I mean, I think if you give them the option and then you have, you couldn't make it mandatory. It has to be part of the culture. I know in Japan, and I know Doug, maybe you can correct me. It was, it's been a part of the culture for a long time that companies would have employees start the day off with calisthenics and exercise. Right, is that correct? That's correct, yeah. And so I imagine it, so I imagine it would start at a place like that. So I don't, I don't foresee your, you know, a Google or Facebook, you know, having a strength training workout for hour four, where you're going to have a lot of people, oh, I have these injuries, these limitations. Oh, I can't do it. Versus we're going to do something like meditative or walking. Like imagine if it's just like every day. I mean, we do this, right? Off-air, we talk about this, where there's times where we get stuck and we'll just interrupt our day and go, hey, let's just go for a walk. And we find that so productive, right? Kind of clears our mind, gets us outside for a little bit. So what happens when you see, I foresee something like that. I don't foresee this. And maybe some companies will take it to the- I hear what you're saying. So let's work out. Right, so you're not going to get like the pushback of, if you can walk, walk, you should be able to do it in a structured way where we make sure. And I think just making sure everybody is walking for an hour every day, you'd be amazed on how much that will increase everybody's activity, because very few people are even stepping that much in a normal day. I think it all makes sense, but I'm so jaded by the last few years of how pushed down, like logical means of keeping you healthy, strong, resilient. Like we're just completely not even part of the conversation. Like we got a lot of work to do to get people off of pharma's teeth. Yeah. Yeah, but it's coming that way right now, don't you feel? I mean, I think some people, but honestly the mass majority of people are still think that like taking pills is going to solve problems. You know why? It's because it's a decision you have to make for yourself. Exactly. Because it's not a profitable message. So if you're a politician, or if you're a company that's selling a product, it is not profitable to sit there and say, hey, here's something you could do for yourself, and it doesn't cost any money. I feel like it's only going to take one big successful company to implement it and show positive returns for it to kick off though. I mean, look what happened when, and I don't know who did it first. Was it Facebook or Google? When they started to disrupt the way your workspace was done. Now everybody does that. Yeah. That was a big breakthrough. It was a huge breakthrough. We did workspace a very traditional way for decades. Decades. And then all of a sudden, a big company comes in and disrupts the way that landscape works. That's a good point. And now everybody models it. So all it's going to take is a Facebook, a Google, an Amazon. Yeah, a leader in the industry that's already a successful company to say, you know what? We're going to take care of our employees' mental and physical health, and we're going to start easy with something like, hey, every day, the way your first hour looks, is we go on walks or something. Maybe there's an intercom in the first 15 minutes. We're going to do these stretches. Right. I don't know exactly what it looks like. I know Virgin was, before all this stuff, was really making headway with that with a lot of corporate fitness initiatives, and they're doing a lot of cool things. But yeah, I think, I mean, I hope you're right. Like, I hope that there is like a shiny example of that that's like a very much of a brand that everybody like recognizes and is sort of leading the way in terms of like, our employees are doing this. They're way more productive. They're not missing any sick days, like all these benefits. Listen, the wild part is if you can improve it by one to 3%. Huge. Huge savings. Huge. Huge savings. So that's why it kind of- And that's the- The math definitely is in your favor. And that's scratching the surface. Right. So that's the part that kind of blows my mind that the Amazons of Facebook, these companies that employ tens of thousands of people, haven't pieced that together. It's like, we don't need it to be hella successful. Yeah. We just need it to change 1% of the lives that are out there, and that makes a huge difference. Here, I'll make it even more dramatic, okay? Healthy people are more efficient. They make different choices in the market. So healthy people are more likely to buy and want products that serve their true health, which means you'll have more innovation and more money going to those products versus products that medicate and distract and aren't good for us. Healthy people innovate better. So they're smarter. They innovate better. They solve better problems. Healthy people are less angry. They're less anxious. So you have less actions that are related to anger and anxiety. Healthy people make better parents. They make better partners. If right now I could snap my fingers and make everybody in America just healthy, you would see, it would make such a profound difference. It would be massive. I'm gonna go out and say you don't even have to make them healthy. You just have to move them in that direction by a couple of percent. Yeah. Right? Yep. I mean, that in itself will have enough positive effects from it that I think will pay back companies, pay back people. I just, I don't know, I feel like we're right on the cusp of this tipping point. Yeah, of where we're gonna go that direction. It is definitely changing. It is stupid. Let me tell you, Doug. Sal again. Andrew, could you, Sal Stradamo's coming out with the predictions. Adam and I were like, you know, the closing machines. Just threw that in there. That was a big book commercial. Yeah, no, it wasn't. By the way, you could get Sal's book at Amazon anywhere. No, it wasn't. You can, Amazon, Target, anywhere you want. Barnes and Noble. Yeah. Hey, if you enjoyed that clip, you can find the full episode here, or you can find other clips over here. And be sure to subscribe.