> Whenever a friend tells me they're depressed, or anxious, or have attention difficulties or whatever, the first thing I ask is "what did you spend most of you

> Whenever a friend tells me they're depressed, or anxious, or have attention difficulties or whatever, the first thing I ask is "what did you spend most of your time doing last week?". If the answer is "Oh, I found this cool new show and binged it", or "Oh not much, I wasn't motivated to do anything so mostly just scrolling the feed haha" - I immediately sit them down and suggest that maybe those things are the cause and not the symptoms. You aren't depressed, therefore you watch TV and observe other people's lives on Instagram. You are depressed because you do those things with the majority of your waking hours. For me personally, having done all these things, even major lifestyle changes, diet, exercise, etc, causing extreme amounts of stress, there was VERY LITTLE benefit. I spend 99.9% of my energy to move my mood 10%, which reverted immediately upon anything knocking me out of the new routine for even a short amount of time. Being a couch potato will make a normative person a little more depressed or anxious. But thats like someone being depressed because of a life event, rather than something they deal with chronically. There's something to people not being harmonious with their environment, and there's also something to environments not being harmonious to people. But most people have responsibilities and must go to work for a living, and don't have fully control over their environment. Western culture may be somewhat to blame, but for people who need help NOW just telling them to go on an information diet and exercise isn't going to help.