You've to move it move it.

My son has a birthday card he got from his grandparents. It's one of those annoying singing birthday cards that have no audio fidelity at all but makes a 4 year-old crack up. The song is I like to move it. (by a band I've never heard of called "Reel 2 Real".) Whatever the band's name is or the degree of annoyance of the song, it's a catchy tune and an apt title for this post. The NYT reports:

Each volunteer exercised for four months, while continuing to take an antidepressant. At the end of that time, according to the study published recently in The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 29.5 percent had achieved remission, “which is a very robust result,” Dr. Trivedi said, equal to or better than the remission rates achieved using drugs as a back-up treatment. “I think that our results indicate that exercise is a very valid treatment option” for people whose depression hasn’t yielded to S.S.R.I.’s, he said.

I like to think of early depression treatment as targeting one or more of the areas affected by Major Depressive Disorder:

1. Cognitive
2. Somatic (physical/energy levels)
3. Sleep
4. Emotional
5. Motivational

There are others things that need to be targeted but the majority of patients in early treatment for depression have a lot of work to do one one or more of those areas and it's extremely relevant to their situation. It's nice to see something so clearly affected by depression, yet so incredibly simple to do, gets continued attention in the press and research literature.

Exercise and memory

I stumbled upon this article while surfing the web (which, despite my assertions, is not really exercise). It's a little on the technical side but here's a choice quote:

Our data show that 14 days of exercise increased the rate of acquisition in the Y maze, improved retention of previously ac- quired information, and facilitated reversal learning. The fact that exercise had a positive effect on Y-maze acquisition ... We show for the first time that physical exercise not only promotes the acquisition of a spatial learning task but also is beneficial for the retrieval of spatial reference memory.

It's fascinating how the brain can work like this. We know that exercise helps you sleep and eat better and help your mood in the process, but that it can also help your memory? Now we just need something to help us remember to exercise and we'll be golden.

Addiction is addiction

Slate asks: Exercise and drug use: What do they have in common?

There's another, slightly more disturbing theory for why exercise helps stave off relapse—that working out helps people (and rats) resist drugs because of its similarity to those drugs. Have you ever felt irritable after skipping a yoga class or two? Or a little depressed and lethargic when you don't have time for the gym? These might be construed as withdrawal symptoms—the eventual outcome of an activity or habit that mimics, in some important ways, the effects of morphine and cigarettes and dope.

It's an interesting question. I've worked with women who have had extreme cases of exercise addiction and I've also worked with many people with substance use histories. If I were to read transcripts of our discussions with one or another of these types of clients, and the transcripts were scrubbed of the words "exercise" and "drugs", I'd be hard pressed to tell who was talking about what. The addictions are scarily similar.

Give this article a read and follow-up on some of the links therein. There is a raft of research on exercise addiction and its harmful effects on the body and the mind. As with many things, it's all in moderation.

Prevention tips: exercise during leisure time

The BBC reports:

People who were not active in their leisure time were almost twice as likely to have symptoms of depression compared to the most active individuals, the study found.

This finding is hardly surprising, but the researchers point out two particular tidbits that may be new:

1. Exercise during leisure time is the important part, not just physical activity in general.
2. The intensity of the exercise appears to be unrelated to its protective effects.

That means it's time to get up and get moving, even if it's just a little while for a little bit.