"The thing that made me transition from a mindset of “I have a body” to “I am a body”, was actually Zen meditation."

Checks username... yeah that checks out. ;)

Something that struck me years ago was in the documentary about Philip Glass - Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts. He did a weekly physical class that is meant to tie mind and body together (I forgot the name, I watched this like 15 years ago). As he said he did it for like 5 years and felt like he got nothing out of it but did it regardless, until one day it just all synced up and he 'got it'.

A similar thing happen with me over the years, the more I got out and moving, the less I found myself involved in the realms of high intellect. Not in an 'ignorance is bliss' kind of way, but not identifying with it as much. It went from "why dance, lift, walk etc - it achieves nothing" to, that is it. It is the flow of the world. It doesn't achieve anything because it doesn't have to, it is a happening, like all life and the universe itself is but an happening. I have had a very similar experience to you with these conferences, it just feels kind of dead in a way, or more you can sense the lack of potential.

That disconnect between the bring and the body is something I have seen many times with those that partake in Buddhism and its many flavors. It was Ajahn Brahm said when he was in university and beginning his path, that one day he was talking with other students and professors and suddenly realized that he did not want to be like these people and that the same path as them, to be a brain and nothing more. He is now a Theravada Buddhist in Western Australia.

I appreciate your story and at the same time I don't agree with fully identifying with just the body.

In fact in my yogic training, we learned to apply the 'i have' vs 'i am' as much as possible - directly opposite of what you are saying.

As someone growing religiously right now, I like the framework of the body being a vehicle for the soul (or at least, the mind) resonates a lot more.

From a non-spiritual, non-religious perspective, as an atheist I don't believe that souls exist, I don't subscribe to any religious teachings and I don't do any kind of meditative or spiritual stuff.

That said, weight training completely transformed my relationship with my body. You can only lug a big hunk of iron into the air so many times before you start thinking about how much we really have in common with a gorilla. Yeah we grew opposable thumbs and a much more active prefrontal cortex, but 96% of our DNA is the same as theirs after all. By the pound we're mostly monkeys or something like them and it's a bit conceited to imagine otherwise.

If you're a knowledge worker who sits in a chair and thinks all day it's easy to believe you're nothing like a monkey, but strenuous exercise dispels that notion because it recruits all of your body's monkey systems and makes all of the parts of you work together. In retrospect it shouldn't be surprising at all that letting most of your anatomy wither away is unhealthy and puts you out of balance. It's like getting your car serviced but telling the shop that you only want them to look at the electronics.

While the phenomenon you describe is certainly real, I think that you may also have been misperceiving part of it: Having a deep belief/understanding that your self is your whole body does not require having a highly-trained body or a strong kinesthetic sense. There could have been many people at that conference who shared your belief, but had not taken the years of physical training to make that externally apparent.

That sounds like a fascinating journey that I'd love to read; have you written anything about it? I'm a born-and-raised software engineer (read: meat mecha mindset), but I recently became interested in dance when I moved to Brazil as many people there have this unconscious connection with dance and their body that I envy. In my case, I'm dimly aware of that non-verbal channel you mentioned, but I struggle to comminicate on it and - if I'm being honest - doing so makes me feel vulnerable and awkward.

It was tai chi for me, but I started that after Buddhism and zen. I could never get comfortable. Not as in 3 out of 10 pain scale, but 7.5-8.5 out of 10. Having people tell you to ignore the pain is unhelpful when they imaging paper cut and you’re feeling knife wound.

Tai chi has a warmup that’s an easy shift into standing meditation.

One of the most amazing comments I've seen on HN. Thank you for sharing this!

This is a great comment and describes why a lot of people don't like 'tech people' and why SF has changed so much for the worse.

I would like to combine both in a holistic way.

I don't feel I can achieve this in my flat therefore instead of switching my whole career as you did, I'm trying to move to a big peace of land we're I can be / have to be more active.

I do think so that IT is growing more in a less super nerdy (I don't move) area.

Plenty of my friends got more active over the years

I don't know how common is that story... Either I know you, or I know someone with a similar story.

Anyways, as someone who identifies both as a computer scientist and as a dancer, I can definitely relate to your experience:-)

Mostly the kind that involves getting up from your seat and going outside...

After that, the more cardio exercise you get the better...

I wonder about the effect of complex balancing activities (dancing, sports, yoga, even drumming) onto our brain.

Wow! Good for you.

I'm also a hardcore yoga practitioner -- I love the extra awareness of my body and mechanics that I have now after 10 years of practice.

> I'll never be one of those athletes who lets go of conscious control and runs off muscle memory

A lot of people feel this way, but the reality is that we already do almost everything without conscious control, we just don’t tend to notice.

Not to mention the majority of the systems in our body are also beyond conscious control, and for many, beyond awareness completely (e.g. the nervous system).

The book “Flow” is a really interesting read, and describes how one’s approach to daily life can lead to something closer to that athlete’s state.

This is closer than most people realize.

> I'll never be one of those athletes who lets go of conscious control and runs off muscle memory.

Oh but you absolutely must try it! I assume being in the zone mentally is a familiar thing to you, so you really ought to try the physical equivalent!

Have you ever tried psychedelics, or pinball?

Throwing blame on "the prevalence of psychotherapy" into this conversation, writing it all off to "pseudo-science" and emphasizing "lifestyle" (as in "if you exercised more you'd be better off", I guess) reads like a just-so story from a brain in a meat sack that's missing the substance of the conversation.

Just like "meditation" is many different things, and "exercise" is many different things, and "healthcare" is many things, and "thinking" is many different things, "psychotherapy" is many different things.

One of the first things by current therapist asked me was more or less how embodied I was. I suspect of all the relationships with other people in my life, the one with my psychotherapist is the one that's most likely to be help me build out a fuller relationship to my body in the way the grandparent comment is advocating.

The therapist before that focused on behavioral "lifestyle" changes when feelings came up, in a way that I guess superficially follows the "I am a body" model, but really felt like it only added distance and abstraction to my relationship to myself. I guess that approach was grounded in a scientific evidence base that those kinds of interventions are what moves metrics.

Here[0] is a blog post by someone who identified it as playing a part in a severe case of selective mutism that deeply impacted their professional ambitions. The description is interwoven with a narrative of their time at some sort of week-long retreat, but there are sections (mostly in italics, as they're memories) that describe the mutism, their efforts to identify its source, their learning about the vagus nerve interactions, and the takeaways about the vagus nerve and its role in their experience.

[0]: https://fortelabs.com/blog/groundbreakers/

A lot of people feel like “they” are somewhere inside their head. They look out at the world through eyes that are windows. The world is out there, “I” am in here. In this undefined black hole of “me”, mysterious, but definitely separate from the world and what’s “out there” past one’s eyes.

They feel like their bodies are just the mechanical thing that carries them around. They don’t think of the systemic impact of things that affect their body and consequently, their brain and mental states. E.g. gut health plays a major role in mental health, but this is not an intuitive concept for many people.

Some have argued this is an outcome of Judeo-Christian thinking, e.g. my soul is not of this world, this body isn’t my best body, my soul passes on when I die, etc. These ideas are deeply ingrained from an early age, during the time in which one is forming their concept of self.

Not the op but the first quote completely describes my approach.

I am me. The intellect, the mind, the person.

My body is what carries my intellect, not completely distinct from the way a car or bicycle or wheelchair might. I don't identify with my body as "me". I have at best a cordial relationship with my body.

Perhaps there's a typo. I interpreted it as "brain being carried around _in_ a meat sack".

> We are RE-learning.

Fair point. I got accused of the “noble savage” myth recently in another post and I went the wrong way with it. In trying to be better stewards of the natural world we are looking at vestige civilizations that never lost it, but the fact of the matter is that if you watch history shows, one I’m thinking of was a recreation of feudal life in Tudor England, Western Europeans used to “know” many, many of these things too, but they forgot it all in the Industrial Revolution, then encountered civilizations that hadn’t forgotten, and ground them to dust, instead of remembering.

After hundreds of years of trying to solve problems with the same level of thinking that created them, there’s always a set of people who are asking questions about the trip we are on. There’s a fine line between pastoralism and compromise that we haven’t worked it out yet, and we don’t even always see it when it happens.

There’s a circumstantial chain of evidence out there that David Hume injected Eastern Philosophy into The Enlightenment. If that’s even a little true, this big philosophical Step Forward was really a step “back”, or maybe sideways.

And I think we still don’t know where the Stoics got their ideas from. Themselves, or Buddhism?

> we did not evolve to sit all day, inside, at desk, gazing into screens

What I love about Apple Vision Pro is that it has the potential to solve this!

> If we reduce ourselves to a bunch of "computers" there's not much left for the stuff that actually matters, like the actual awesomeness that is having a body, which is highly sensitive and able to experience amazing things.

This does not follow, except for stripping away the religious/spiritual part. Computers are amazing! So is hardware! And so is the dance of software and hardware that makes magic happen.

I've seen nothing so far in this whole thread that would convince me I should stop thinking about my body as the meatsack carrying my brain, as every argument I've read so far triggered my "religious/spiritual mumbo jumbo" detector quite hard.

This is not to say the body isn't an important and tightly integrated part of the experience. But the fact remains that a hand or a heart or a lung can be removed or replaced without loss of self. A brain can't.

Late reply, but I have a friend with panic disorder who has had attacks from her heart fluttering, or even just eating food that makes her gassy. It's a straight shot from the vagus to your adrenal glands. I heard a term for this somewhere but Google is failing me utterly today.

She's in some sort of program now that if I understand what they're actually doing, they're trying to manage the vagus response.

ADHD people who eat stuff they really shouldn't, their vagus nerve "starts acting up" (i'm too lazy to get my notebooks) and their ADHD-symptoms are amplified. same goes for a lot of food-induced conditions. different exercises targeting the vagus nerve help to alleviate (the) stress.

Also breathing with a constant, calm rhythm to switch the brain from panic/anxiety mode into coherent thought.

vagus nerve stimulation for treatment resistant depression.

Not exactly. Try to meditate out diarrhea.

That still implies 20% of their training is moderate-high intensity.

You end up doing both.

This is what mountain biking does for me. It's not hard, and it's pretty safe, but maintaining decent speed while navigating trails... it's a flow state.

Heck, a week ago I did a 100 mile MTB race, with the goal of finishing and being happy. While bits and pieces are there, some chatting with folks and things I saw along the trail, but I honestly do not remember most of the ~9 hours I was riding. It was just a thing I was doing, disconnected from most of the rest of the world, and content doing it.

(Note, I'm talking about XC/cross-country mountain biking, and to some extent trail biking. NOT the big downhill/jump/whatever stuff that comes up most often in media when sees mountain biking. It's still quite exciting, but far safer because it's really just riding bikes on hiking-ish trails.)

I can barely think for a good few minutes even after heavy squats/deads.

I have found my biggest mistakes were all when I had gotten comfortable with a weight and ended up losing mental focus. Thanfully no injuries. It seems I have to be nearing my edge to be forced into focus. I am better at opting in to focus now thanks to lifting I feel. Similar to downhill riding, all my crashes have been on easy stuff as I lost focus.

This is a can of worms for sure, lots of points could be discussed, but my main one is making sure you're somewhere you like doing something you enjoy. If you are on a spin bike in a smelly gym spin room to get your cardio that is definitely an acquired taste.

I also hate cardio but it is much more palatable if I'm on a mountain bike and climbing up for a descent trail.

Strenuous cardio agitates me. It’ll put me in a weird uneasy mood for a few hours at least. Apparently this is the effect it can have on some people.

I’ve found Yoga and cycling to be the right fit, and they allow me to challenge myself without feeling too hyped up later.

Not trying to convince you to chase strenuous cardio. There are many, many activities that can support living a healthy life.

That being said...

I really don't know any serious athletes who enjoy going to practices or going to the gym to workout. In my opinion it's rarely about enjoying the moment. Rather, it's about the way it makes a person feel when they're done. Or, it's about reaching a long-term goal and the joy that comes with accomplishing something currently out of reach.

And, of course, that type of joy can come from a wide variety of activities - exercise, coding, music, arts, etc.

Edit: Removed unnecessary quotes.

It works different for different people. For some simply slowing down can bring amazing results, I am somewhere in both camps. Slowing down most of the time plus also doing cardio has been amazing.

It probably helps that increased appetite never fazed me. I am hungry now, cool, I'm still not eating until dinner regardless of how I feel.

You could probably turn those questions right around on people: have they meditated “enough” recently? Are they getting 8 hours of sleep and going outside regularly? My bet is that they’re not, and yet if they’re not depressed… well maybe there’s something else going on!

The meta analysis linked in the article we're discussing wouldn't really agree with you.

> Physical activity had medium effects on depression (median effect size=−0.43, IQR=−0.66 to –0.27), anxiety (median effect size=−0.42, IQR=−0.66 to –0.26) and psychological distress (effect size=−0.60, 95% CI −0.78 to –0.42), compared with usual care across all population. The largest benefits were seen in people with depression, HIV and kidney disease, in pregnant and postpartum women, and in healthy individuals. Higher intensity physical activity was associated with greater improvements in symptoms

I think comparing exercise to drinking is pretty silly and doesn't suggest a wide berth of knowledge on the topic. I'm glad to hear that therapy was the silver bullet for you, but if there's one thing that's _abundantly_ clear about mental health treatments, it's that there's no one-size-fits-all solution.

> I think the only people who think exercise solves depression are those that have never suffered clinical depression.

What about the studies with clinically depressed people who treat their symptoms as effectively as SSRIs with exercise? I'm thinking specifically of a running therapy study that was done recently, I haven't read the study linked by OP.

It all depends on how you train. WRT CTE/Concussions, I can't speak to that. No one I've trained with has had that issue, maybe that's more of an MMA thing - ie striking. If you go 100% full competition all the time and never want to tap out - then yes I would agree there is significant risk of injury. But that's true with any physical endeavor. If you instead train with the long run in mind, pick and choose your rolling partners, and tap out when you're not in a good situation then you can mitigate those risks quite successfully. Having weight trained, ran track and trained BJJ, I've had far more injuries in weight training + track despite having far more time on the mats than weight training and track by a very large margin. We're taught in my academy - you are accountable for your own safety. Just tap, come back another day. Fully understand and admit not all schools are the same.

Two years into the sport and I’ve never had a close concussion call or seen anything close. Heads could hang into each other on a crowded mat I suppose but that risk is darn low if you are paying attention.

They do say that you learn more and more throughout the belt levels of Jiu Jitsu. But once you reach black belt, it starts all over again. So pretty much exactly what you're saying, just that the master has to find new ways outside of trained pathways to accomplish goals. In the end, its an continuum I figure. I've always viewed it - Jiu Jitsu - as a video game with infinite levels.

I mean that's one of the reasons keto is so popular. For a lot of people they manage to lose weight while being able to enjoy what they eat while they'd have trouble sticking to better diets. There's obviously draw backs and if they eat only bacon a keto diet isn't going to help them but if they do keto "right" it's an improvement for them.

Giving alternatives to marginally improve might be more useful than a tough love aproach of saying "Since you know the best thing to do, if you don't want to do it that's on you".

In that vein some things that may improve the amount of exercise you do:

Joining social sports club, the focus may be more on wining/improving skills/social aspect than exercise and so may help take focus off the unenjoyable part and a commitment to your group/team/opponent may be more motivating than a commitment to themselves for some people.

Walking/cycling desk setup. An initial outlay in cost but if it's there and you're doing it while concentrating on something else it might be a significant improvement.

Setting an alarm/timer to do a set of weights or squats every hour or so, stops your muscles atrophing if nothing else and will mean when you do purposfully exercise your not immediately discouraged by how sore you are 1 minute into it.

Any everyday routine you can more easily force into your day. Maybe a jog around the block/up and down apartment stairs before your morning shower. Or join the gym that is along your commute rather than the cheaper one that you need to purposefully drive/walk to. Maybe you listen to a chapter of audiobook while doing pallates as soon as you get home. Forming a habit has the highest initial cognitive load, quite often it's easier(not easy) to tie it to the begining of or end of another action you do everyday than it is to do something at a specific time.

Don't let best be the enemy of better.

> Changing your tires and doing an oil change also sucks, not doing it will suck way more in the long run.

Even for those people who feel the "meat-mecha" disconnection, the mecha benefits from maintenance.

"For Case, who’d lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. In the bars he’d frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh." -- Neuromancer, 1984 https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/293994/neuromancer-b...

Well, investment in longer happier life, and for the guys the feeling of strength and full control of one's body is pretty significant upgrade too. It changes mental perspective on just about anything in long run too.

Yes, if the worst decisions in life can be ie smoking cigarettes or being lazy couch potato, the best is easily to work out somehow, anyhow.

Wait, the impact is beneficial? I've been worrying about running out of cartilage in my knees throughout my life. I had considered running to be a limited time thing that will just run out at some point.

stronger than diminishing returns - negative returns

Depression Four reviews42 44 57 58 presented analyses by weekly session duration (68 component RCTs, >5016 participants, online supplemental eFigure 12). The median SMD for ≤150 min/week and >150 min/week was –0.58 (IQR=–0.77 to –0.30) and –0.29 (IQR=–0.40 to –0.07), respectively.

Anxiety One review58 provided analyses by weekly session duration (17 component RCTs, online supplemental eFigure 13). The median SMDs for <150 min/week and ≥150 min/week were –1.23 and –0.99, respectively.

that's not how i understand the term "high intensity." jogging makes me pant, but i wouldn't call it high intensity, because i can do it for twenty minutes.

high intensity would be work you can do for only maybe a minute, not twenty, and as a result it won't keep your heart rate elevated very long.

so if they're basically saying 30 minutes 5 days a week, that's low intensity exercise.

I live in the Netherlands, we still call it mountain biking because of the bike but yeah... [0]. Mostly it gets technical on single tracks. Not nearly as dangerous as in real mountains I presume. This is typical: [1]

[0] https://dutchreview.com/culture/history/netherlands-flat/

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0_MNbdrHEA

No Semis, Brodozers or Soccer mom SUVs on mountain bike rides. Road biking is unacceptably risky. Not judging, it’s the other people on the road who I don’t trust.

I do kind of the opposite and focus on 2-3 sets of 500m as hard as possible (with perfect form of course). My average is around 2:04, and the difference between that and even 2:14 is incredible. I could go for 1,000+m easily at a 2:14 pace but feel like I'm about to collapse after a single 2:04 set... It's helped me stay in incredible cardio shape and has built a lot of my leg muscle.

Agreed - with the start of Covid I manage to buy a Concept 2 (which wasn't easy - they were all sold out and you had to pay premium for used ones on Marketplace) but this is the best purchase ever. Since 2020, I managed to lower my hr, improve overall fitness for other sports I do and in general much happier. On my way to sub-20 min 5k, yay

Indoor climbers are all software engineers in some cities. In Seattle and San Francisco in particular, nearly everyone I meet there is also a software engineer. The gyms are so expensive that they are the only ones who can afford it with FAANG subsidies.

Outdoor though you're right, totally different demographic and very few of them are software engineers.

If all my joints worked the way I would like I’d be spending half as much time talking about my hobbies online. It’s what I do in the in between times.

My direct experience with depression was that escaping it required a combination of the right events at the right time to create an upward cycle.

For me it was fixing a shower by myself that started that upward cycle.

For someone else it could be a single exercise session that leads to it.

It's always worth a try to encourage someone to take that first step.

when i've been in that position, it was hopelessness not pride that made it hard to act on good advice

I haven’t been able to get more than four hours of sleep a night for 50 years and it’s fucking agonizing. Whatever you think I haven’t tried, I’ve probably tried it, unfortunately. Sleep schedules, meditation, melatonin, light cardio, heavy cardio, lifting weights, reduce screen time, mask, manual labor, every sleep drug on the market, etc. About once every two or three years I get 6-7 hours and I feel like a god.

Sure have, thanks. Trail mix in the quantities I like just ends up being junk food!

Thrill of the Fight - boxing sim

Beat Saber

Les Mills Body combat - trainer guided workout where you can compete against player recorded avatars

FitXR - trainer guided workout where you can compete against player recorded avatars. Subscription only but has HIIT, boxing, and dance workouts

Ninja Legends - you’re fighting ninjas

Knockout League - Punch Out in VR with lots of variety

synth riders - music rhythm game that has a lot of variety on its own

Holopoint - shooting targets with bow and arrow. Lots of moving and dodging involved

Mothergunship forge - bullet hell shooter. Lots of dodging

Pistol Whip - bullet hell music rhythm game. Lots of dodging like Neo

Path of the Warrior - double dragon in VR

Until You Fall - slashing sword game

GORN - gladiator game

Creed - another boxing game

Punch Fit - minimalist boxing training game

Racket NX - racket ball inside a dome

Rezzil Player - lots of mini workouts like heading soccer balls

Stride - mirrors edge in VR

I tend to rotate these games, but I always try out new games for novelty.

There’s also a lot of games where you can walk or jog in place like Fallout or Skyrim that I didn’t count here. Not to mention a fighting game and soccer game with full body tracking that’s PCVR only

I do, but jogging the same streets and trails gets boring. It’s doesn’t have the variety and novelty that VR AR offers. It’s hard to understand this if you haven’t used it beyond 5 minutes.

In the Bay Area, we’re blessed with multiple nature preserves that are beautiful and stunning, but it takes me 20-40 minutes one way just to drive to one so those hikes tend to be limited to weekends. With AR VR, I can instantly just workout in my living room. It’s a big time saver

It’s also really easy to make excuses not to do it eg it’s raining, it’s too dark, the air isn’t good today etc…

>virtually nobody with an office job in the 1st world manages to do

An hour or more of moderate activity per day? Dunno about that impossibility of one hour. Perhaps you're talking about some hectic Amazon-style working environmen,t or people that just had babies, or commute for 1 hours each way?

According to https://www.who.int/initiatives/behealthy/physical-activity, the recommendation you mentioned is for children and teenagers up to 17 years old.

"Adults aged 18–64 years"

> Should do at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity throughout the week, or do at least 75 minutes of vigorous-intensity physical activity, or an equivalent combination of both.

> For additional health benefits, adults should increase their moderate-intensity physical activity to 300 minutes per week, or equivalent.

> Muscle-strengthening activities should be done involving major muscle groups on 2 or more days a week.

The statement was referring to mental health. The data is clear for things like cardio that more is always better. I’d never heard that less (read 2.5 he/wk) is a sweet spot for mental health.

I force myself to commute to work by bike. That is about 30 minutes one way. But I can not do it under bad weather conditions. Also not in freezing winter or hot summer.

Taking a walk might qualify. Any dog owner can easily meet this requirement.

Just doing your daily commute on bike or walking is enough.

So why do it?

> rather than starting on the ground all the time

BJJ does not start on the ground as standard, let alone "all the time". Matches start standing, and if you are only training from the ground you are missing out. That's not to say that stand-up and takedown training aren't much more in-depth in judo than in jiu-jitsu, though.

An ideal combo is submission wrestling combined with BJJ, you'll find MMA gyms train this way.

As someone who used to train at an MMA gym, going to a pure BJJ gym is weird because yeah, I'll shrimp out, get up to my feet, and my training partner is sitting there on their knees waiting for me to re-engage and my first thought is "this would be a great time for a kick to that completely unprotected noggin right there..."

Of course once on the ground, the BJJ peeps dominate, which is what UFC spent 3 decades demonstrating!

sometimes. And sometimes you just haven't worked that muscle at all.

Maybe not getting enough rest might have offset the positive factors?

They are complementary for me. The way my body recruited my lats when running hills taught me how to knit the top and bottom together when I squat. The mind-muscle that squats woke up in my hip flexors carried over to foot placement in ice skating.