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If we use our energy and break down our muscles during the day, our body will want to sleep and recover... this is GENIUS. Im starting a startup.

by epa 13y ago

chime 13y ago
I know you were trying to be sarcastic but being physically tired is not the same as being mentally tired. During different periods of my life, I've had difficulty sleeping before midnight regardless of the physical activities I engaged in during the day. I've run marathons, trained for ultras, swam mile+, kayaked for 8 hours and yet I've had problems sleeping the very same night. In fact, sometimes you can be too tired to sleep. Other times, I can be relaxed, barely walk a thousand feet during the day and still need to fall asleep within 12-14 hours of waking up.
- mtdewcmu 13y ago
  I don't think there is actually a causal link between exercise and anxiety reduction. All of the self reports can be explained by the placebo effect. And there is a strong bias toward believing in a causal link that is all-pervasive. When regular people experience anxiety reduction in conjunction with exercise, the belief in exercise as the cause is unquestioned, and researchers like these in the article need never fear that their interpretation will be scrutinized. Nobody has a vested interest in opposing exercise. Everyone knows it's just plain good for you. What did this study prove? The assertion is that mice that are locked in cages so they forcibly can't do what they would normally be doing make good representatives for people that are not exercising, for any reason, including personal preference. Do the researchers actually find that convincing? No, apparently not: >> Of course, as we all know, mice are not men or women. But, Dr. Gould says, other studies “show that physical exercise reduces anxiety in humans,” suggesting that similar remodeling takes place in the brains of people who work out. In other words, this study didn't really need to prove anything, anyway, because it's already known from "other studies." If you were going to design the definitive study to answer the question of whether exercise relieves anxiety, how would you control for the placebo effect? You can make sugar pills that are, plausibly, convincing enough to separate drug effect from placebo. But how do you make a placebo for exercise? Exercise itself would seem like the perfect placebo. If a research study was able to motivate a group of sedentary, depressed subjects to start regular exercise, it would seem to make it very hard to argue that those subjects didn't believe they were genuinely doing something. A rigorous, double-blind, controlled study of exercise sounds all but fundamentally impossible to do. What about an observational study? How do you take two people, one who exercises regularly, and one who is sedentary, and claim that they are otherwise perfectly matched? Why are scientists so sure it's been proven? Nature abhors a vacuum. It seems like the less testable something is, the more certain people are of it.
  - einsteinx2 13y ago
    Do you ever exercise? Or maybe more pertinently, do you have any anxiety problems? I do on both counts, and what you're saying is laughable. It would be like telling me that all the self reports that alcohol causes drunkenness are just placebo. It's such an obvious effect, both immediately following a workout, as well as over time (months that I work out vs. months that I don't) that it could never be confused with a placebo effect. Hence studies like this that attempt to determine /why/ it happens, vs /that/ it happens.
    - mtdewcmu 13y ago
      How would you tell the difference whether exercise reduced your anxiety, or the fact that you were exercising was a sign that your mental health was better? I definitely feel more like exercising when I'm not anxious or depressed. Almost nobody is going to bother with exercise if they feel hopeless. Besides, anxiety is not like cancer, where the tumor is either there or not. There are probably biological inputs, but psychology is obviously important. If you can get someone to believe they are not anxious, then they're not anxious. So, arguably, a placebo effect is the only known cure.
  - mtdewcmu 13y ago
    Replying to myself-- What bugs me about the subject of exercise is that it's plainly a moral issue masquerading as a scientific issue. There is the Romantic strain to which exercise is natural and pure, and the Puritanical strain that equates exercise with virtuous labor and discipline. People would love to find scientific evidence of its curative powers, as if having evidence mattered.

If we use our energy and break down our muscles during the day, our body will want to sleep and recover... this is GENIUS. Im starting a startup.

by epa 13y ago

If we use our energy and break down our muscles during the day, our body will want to sleep and recover... this is GENIUS. Im starting a startup.

chime 13y ago

I know you were trying to be sarcastic but being physically tired is not the same as being mentally tired. During different periods of my life, I've had difficulty sleeping before midnight regardless of the physical activities I engaged in during the day. I've run marathons, trained for ultras, swam mile+, kayaked for 8 hours and yet I've had problems sleeping the very same night. In fact, sometimes you can be too tired to sleep. Other times, I can be relaxed, barely walk a thousand feet during the day and still need to fall asleep within 12-14 hours of waking up.

mtdewcmu 13y ago
I don't think there is actually a causal link between exercise and anxiety reduction. All of the self reports can be explained by the placebo effect. And there is a strong bias toward believing in a causal link that is all-pervasive. When regular people experience anxiety reduction in conjunction with exercise, the belief in exercise as the cause is unquestioned, and researchers like these in the article need never fear that their interpretation will be scrutinized. Nobody has a vested interest in opposing exercise. Everyone knows it's just plain good for you. What did this study prove? The assertion is that mice that are locked in cages so they forcibly can't do what they would normally be doing make good representatives for people that are not exercising, for any reason, including personal preference. Do the researchers actually find that convincing? No, apparently not: >> Of course, as we all know, mice are not men or women. But, Dr. Gould says, other studies “show that physical exercise reduces anxiety in humans,” suggesting that similar remodeling takes place in the brains of people who work out. In other words, this study didn't really need to prove anything, anyway, because it's already known from "other studies." If you were going to design the definitive study to answer the question of whether exercise relieves anxiety, how would you control for the placebo effect? You can make sugar pills that are, plausibly, convincing enough to separate drug effect from placebo. But how do you make a placebo for exercise? Exercise itself would seem like the perfect placebo. If a research study was able to motivate a group of sedentary, depressed subjects to start regular exercise, it would seem to make it very hard to argue that those subjects didn't believe they were genuinely doing something. A rigorous, double-blind, controlled study of exercise sounds all but fundamentally impossible to do. What about an observational study? How do you take two people, one who exercises regularly, and one who is sedentary, and claim that they are otherwise perfectly matched? Why are scientists so sure it's been proven? Nature abhors a vacuum. It seems like the less testable something is, the more certain people are of it.
- einsteinx2 13y ago
  Do you ever exercise? Or maybe more pertinently, do you have any anxiety problems? I do on both counts, and what you're saying is laughable. It would be like telling me that all the self reports that alcohol causes drunkenness are just placebo. It's such an obvious effect, both immediately following a workout, as well as over time (months that I work out vs. months that I don't) that it could never be confused with a placebo effect. Hence studies like this that attempt to determine /why/ it happens, vs /that/ it happens.
  - mtdewcmu 13y ago
    How would you tell the difference whether exercise reduced your anxiety, or the fact that you were exercising was a sign that your mental health was better? I definitely feel more like exercising when I'm not anxious or depressed. Almost nobody is going to bother with exercise if they feel hopeless. Besides, anxiety is not like cancer, where the tumor is either there or not. There are probably biological inputs, but psychology is obviously important. If you can get someone to believe they are not anxious, then they're not anxious. So, arguably, a placebo effect is the only known cure.
- mtdewcmu 13y ago
  Replying to myself-- What bugs me about the subject of exercise is that it's plainly a moral issue masquerading as a scientific issue. There is the Romantic strain to which exercise is natural and pure, and the Puritanical strain that equates exercise with virtuous labor and discipline. People would love to find scientific evidence of its curative powers, as if having evidence mattered.