Another Day, Another Squirt Of Cortisol
I'm paying rather a lot of attention to my states of mind and body these days. It's a necessary form of self-involvement. I haven't actually had a full night's sleep in over a month...usually I snap awake at anywhere from 2:30 to 4:30 in the morning, with a big knot in my chest. From then on, if I'm lucky, I can doze. If I'm not lucky, I lie awake while my thoughts, like things alive, do their damndest to overtake me. A bit uncomfortable, that. Makes my mornings...what's the phrase? Oh yes: suck ass.
This sort of thing used to be easily remedied by the liberal application of Absolut. Now that I no longer take that particular medication, I'm left to my own devices. Just me and my brain, alone in the dark.
So, naturally, I joined a gym.
There's an extensive body of research detailing the positive effects of exercise on a depressive brainlump such as myself. Here's a bit of it, all scientifically lingoed and whatnot:
The preliminary general model described here is based on the assumptions that (a) some neurotransmitter cascade (primarily nonlinear) affects the whole brain in a lateralized fashion, and (b) with more prolonged exercise, more favorable receptor subtypes are recruited for all the neurotransmitters involved.From our previous studies [1,43,44], we found that the deleterious behavioral effects of stress were less pronounced in the "exercised and stressed" animals, and the beneficial effects became more pronounced with time (more prolonged exercise), as indicated by the results of the behavioral tests.
An "exercised and stressed" animal is, typically, a lab rat in a tub of water. It's called "forced swimming." Oddly enough, a rat swimming for its life is less stressed by, say, being given unexpected electric shocks than a rat sitting in its cage being fat. Exercise does all sorts of good things for serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine levels. Exercise, when combined with antidepressant medication, is much more effective than medication alone.
Thus, and so! I walk a rapid 4 mile-per-hour pace on a treadmill for half an hour listening to my iPod and reading the subtitles on the TV screen in front of me. Then I go upstairs where the machines are and do another half hour of weight-style activities. Afterwards, for two or three hours...I feel normal.
It's quite remarkable, actually. For a long while, I was convinced that this particular mechanism was simply broken in my head. After all: I rode 2,000 miles, and felt like shit the whole time. After I arrived in Santa Barbara, I spent a week doing daily rides of 22 miles, capped off by a 50-mile ride on my birthday. Still felt like shit. So I gave up.
However: there is, apparently, something to be said for tweaking the neurons with a bit of bupropion. The mechanism is working. Only for a little while, but it's working. And, like a rat pressing the lever for his food pellet, I am highly motivated to continue. As in "getting up at 6AM to work out before going to the office" motivated. I'm usually up by then anyway, so instead of struggling with the usual Morning Craziness, I will go walk, and lift heavy things. I will continue to do this until my steadily-slimming corpus resembles statuary and my head is right with whatever neurological gods have seen fit to fuck with me for the past two decades. I hold fast to the promise: "the beneficial effects became more pronounced with time."
Oh yes. There will be a change. A fellow can only stand so much, you know?
