In my 20’s I had a therapist tell me that I was an addict. I got pretty defensive since I was boring, married, and in bed every night at 8:30. Our conversation went like this:
“No”, she said – “Not substance addiction – You are addicted to exercise and being healthy”
“What?!” was my response – “How can you be addicted to that? The things I do are good for me, that’s not addiction.”
For $135 an hour, she straight up laughed at me…”If you exercise out of obligation, if not exercising makes you feel guilty, or you exercise even when it hurts you, then you might be an addict.”
Her point reminded me of the old Jeff Foxworthy standup, You Might Be a Redneck.
I learned from that stint of therapy that I was in fact addicted to exercise, and that actually was a good thing. I started suffering with anxiety and depression at a young age. So do a lot of kids. All of us find ways to cope, and this usually takes one of two directions. Direction 1: Drugs and Alcohol. Direction 2: Sports and Exercise. Sports competition channeled my anger, and running long distances in the heat made me so tired that my anxiety went away temporarily. I’d found a solution that worked…at least until I was 35.
When Too Much Is No Longer Enough
I remember reading a very personal account of someone’s lifetime struggle with depression. He equated it to standing in one spot on the beach as the “tide of depression” came slowly in. When he was young the tide was at his ankles, but by the time he was 25 it was up over his mouth and he had to get help. That story always resonated with me, because I saw my depression (my crazy) as a runner closing in behind me. When I was young that runner ran a 12 minute/mile pace…super easy for me to stay ahead of. In high school he sped up to an 8 minute pace, and by college he was cruising at 6 minutes/mile, right on my heels. It took all I had to stay in front of him, and one stumble sent me into a deep depression. I only knew one way to deal with it: keep running faster and faster, training harder and harder. I hadn’t yet learned to use meditation, breath work, and therapy as a fillip to my mental health. Exercise was my only medicine. Then overtraining landed me in the hospital with twisted intestines…twice. Marci told me that she’d sat with me two times in the hospital and been fully supportive, but if I didn’t change my habits and had to go to the hospital again…I’d be going by myself.
Marci here: I’m not actually that mean…he was, in fact, over-training and damaging his body repeatedly. Let’s call it tough love!?
This was the seminal moment where my personal and professional life both took a hard reset. I had to get help, and find a way to manage my symptoms in a sustainable and healthy way. I also realized how many of my clients were making the same mistake.
Several of my clients were just like me: type A’s with high overdrive and lots of discipline. They had always been able to push hard, and took pride in that fact. Whether they were using exercise to treat their own mental health, or just felt obligated to over-exercise to manage weight, they were still getting injuries and burnout from doing too much. I knew first-hand where that led, so it was my job to rein them in.
How Can I Possibly Get More Results By Doing Less?
From my late 30’s on, I’d developed a formula to maintain my fitness, manage my anxiety, and keep myself out of the hospital…oh ya, and stay married. Now I just had to convince my clients to make the same changes, and that was much harder than I thought.
We are so conditioned to believe losing weight, getting stronger, and looking better require working out harder for longer. Go stand outside of an Orange Theory or Love Cycle studio and watch the people coming out. They are red-faced, hunched over, limping, and high-fiving because they think they’ve done something good for themselves. They have no idea that the impact stress they are putting on their bodies now will come back to them as injury and heartache later (maybe even decades later). By the time they get to me, in their late 40’s, they’ve had a litany of injuries, given up the activities they love, and can’t even play with their kids without pain. Some of these clients exercised to treat depression the way I did, and had lost their main coping mechanism. Laid up with an injury, having no way to manage depression, things get rough pretty fast.
And yet still it can be hard for people to accept how to train their bodies correctly. Marci and I gave a talk in San Antonio last month, and when we got to the part about sports like tennis being “play” and not “training”, I could tell that we’d upset one of the women in the audience.
“I hear you”, she said, “I do have knee pain, but I love tennis and I’m worried that if I don’t play 4 times a week then I’ll gain weight”. I felt for her. Her mental health was plainly tied to how she looked.
“How much weight would you gain if you blew your meniscus and had to take 6 months off?” was my response. Marci threw up our Cardio Makes You Fat slide to reinforce the point.
A guy I was helping the other day just couldn’t understand why I only wanted him on his Peloton for 8 minutes at a time. I convinced him to let me view his exercise history.
His data was a mess. His typical workout involved pounding his body for 30-45 minutes in a mid-heart rate zone with low to moderate output. He’d be fatigued, sure, just like the folks stumbling out of Orange Theory. He might even quiet his anxiety…temporarily. But after his workout he’d be high on Cortisol and starving. Now, if he went straight for a big bowl of fish and broccoli then fine, but that’s not usually the case. I got him to at least try his bike workout my way, and his new chart couldn’t look any different:
I asked him how he felt after his 8 minute, Testosterone-boosting workout?
“I feel great, but I’m really struggling with this. It goes against everything that feels normal to me…like I’m taking a shortcut and not working hard enough”. Isn’t that wild? He didn’t think my workout was doing him as much good because it wasn’t miserable. I get it, because that’s exactly how I always felt until I had to learn the hard way.
Find Your Sweet Spot
I’ve settled on a 15-hour weekly cap for my exercise. This is enough to maintain my mental health, but below the threshold that would get me divorced. Everyone’s tissue can adapt to different amounts of exercise impact, so some of my clients can handle 4 hours a week and some can handle 20 hours.
Marci again: remember, Sam is Type A (and a recovering exercise-addict, I mean that with love!). No one needs 15-hours a week of exercise. I’d say I average about half that, in a good week…I am not OCD, clearly. If you walk most days and get a couple of interval training sessions and strength training sessions in each week, you are good.
The key is finding the right balance for you. I can assure you, though, that exercise will not manage your mental health on it’s own. When my depression flares up, I balance treatment with non-impact methods: meditation, writing, breath work, and counseling. If you aren’t finding other ways to cope, then it’s only a matter of time before your system breaks down. The crazy will eventually outrun you. Don’t think about how you’ll treat mental health today or this week, but how you are going to treat it successfully over the next 40+ years.
Stay in the game.