Think of it this way: depression has preferences.

It prefers the couch to the gym, staying home to going out, and crafting excuses to cancel plans rather than keeping them. But tomorrow over today? One of its favorites.

Depression can make things that otherwise require very little effort seem staggeringly difficult, while also convincing you that making the effort probably wouldn’t help anyway. It’s a sneaky little bastard of major proportions.

One approach I suggest to people struggling with depression is fairly simple: Notice what the depression is urging you to do, and consider doing some version of the opposite.

Not to ignore or somehow beat depression—good luck with that. Knock yourself out—and not because going for a walk is going to magically solve everything that’s wrong.

But because, being a sneaky bastard, depression can gradually and subtly organize a life around itself. Unfortunately, it could be your life it organizes itself around.

What you’re trying to do is begin decoupling yourself—and your life—from a sneaky, unwanted relationship. Exercise can be one way of interrupting that process.

Depression Doesn’t Stay in Your Head

We sometimes talk about depression as though it were simply a collection of unhappy thoughts. But depression is also something we experience physically and behaviorally.

We sleep differently. Move differently. Our energy changes. Our appetite may change. We may feel restless or slowed down. Concentration becomes harder. Things that once felt interesting require effort. Sex, friends, hobbies and ordinary pleasures may lose some of their pull.

And then our behavior begins changing in response.

If I don’t expect to enjoy seeing anyone, I stay home. If I stay home, I have fewer experiences that might challenge my expectation that nothing feels good. If everything seems exhausting, I do less. Doing less can make my world smaller, which gives the depression considerably more room to talk.

This is one reason exercise can be useful. It changes what you’re doing, even before it changes how you’re feeling.

Sometimes the behavior has to go first.

Start Smaller Than You Think

One of the difficulties with recommending exercise to someone who’s depressed is contained in the recommendation itself.

“You should exercise.”

“Great. I’ll add that to the list of things I’m already failing to do.”

If you’re depressed, exercise doesn’t necessarily have to mean getting into shape, losing weight, joining a gym, buying clothing made out of moisture-wicking material, or becoming a person who discusses protein.

The kind of exercise we’re talking about here might simply be movement.

Walk around the block. Ride a bike for fifteen minutes. Stretch. Lift some weights. Go to the gym and do considerably less than you think qualifies as a workout.

The measure isn’t whether it was impressive.

It’s whether you went.

Being Somewhere Counts

One thing I noticed years ago when working with depressed clients was that the gym sometimes helped for reasons that had relatively little to do with the exercise equipment.

Depression encourages isolation. But full-blown socializing can feel like an enormous undertaking when you’re depressed. Going to dinner with friends may require energy, conversation and enthusiasm you don’t particularly have.

Going to the gym requires much less.

You say hello to the person at the desk. Someone asks if you’re using a bench. You ask somebody if you can work in. Maybe you talk. Maybe you don’t.

But you’re somewhere.

You’re around people without necessarily having to perform socially. You have a place to be and something to do while you’re there.

You can even take a book and sit on a stationary bike for a while.

It isn’t exactly a flourishing social life. But it isn’t isolation either.

Sometimes that distinction matters.

Give the Buckshot Somewhere to Go

Depression and anxiety frequently travel together.

For some people that doesn’t feel like having no energy at all. It feels more like having energy with no useful direction—multiple legs all trying to go somewhere different at the same time. You want to do something, but the something has the accuracy of buckshot.

Exercise can give that restless energy somewhere to go.

That doesn’t mean you’re “releasing stored emotions” from your muscles or sweating sadness out through your pores. We don’t need to make a physiological claim we can’t support.

But experience isn’t purely mental either. What happens to us affects how we inhabit our bodies, and what we do with our bodies can affect our psychological experience.

The old maxim “sound body, sound mind” may be an oversimplification, but depression has a way of thriving on overcomplication.

Sometimes a run, a swim, twenty minutes lifting weights, or a long walk changes the immediate experience of being trapped inside your own thoughts.

The problem may still be waiting when you’re finished.

But you may not be standing in exactly the same place in relation to it.

Pick Something You’ll Actually Do

There isn’t one magical form of exercise for depression.

Walking or jogging, strength training, yoga, dancing and other forms of physical activity can all be useful. The important question isn’t simply which exercise looks best in a study. It’s also which one you will actually do.

If you hate running, becoming a runner may not be your most promising mental-health intervention.

Maybe you like lifting weights. Maybe you like swimming. Maybe yoga gives you exercise along with some useful practice paying attention to breathing and physical sensation. Maybe you need music. Maybe you need to be outside.

Maybe you need to shamelessly crank classic rock while doing curls.

Fine.

The exercise doesn’t have to acquire spiritual significance.

It just has to get you moving.

You Can Give the Movement Some Meaning

In some yoga and Buddhist traditions, meditation incorporates mantras—words or phrases used to focus attention.

There’s no reason you can’t borrow the basic idea elsewhere.

You might notice your breathing while exercising. You might use a phrase that means something to you. You might pay attention to strength, effort, release, or simply the fact that you’re doing something you didn’t particularly feel like doing.

This isn’t about tricking your brain into happiness.

It’s about shifting your attention toward the experience you’re actually having.

And if that experience happens to include power chords, I’m not going to object.

Notice the Difference

One useful experiment is simply to notice yourself before and after exercise.

Don’t ask whether you’re cured.

Ask smaller questions.

How agitated was I before? How agitated am I now?

How stuck?

How tired?

How interested in doing the next thing?

How much do I want to crawl back into isolation?

Sometimes the difference will be substantial. Sometimes it will be small. Sometimes there won’t be much difference at all.

That’s useful information too.

The point isn’t to turn exercise into another obligation you can fail at. It’s to discover whether movement is one of the things that helps you alter your relationship to depression.

Exercise Isn’t a Substitute for Getting Help

Exercise can be genuinely useful in treating depression, and for some people it can be an important part of recovery. But depression varies enormously in severity, cause and circumstance.

Exercise doesn’t resolve grief, repair a relationship, change an unbearable job, or automatically address the experiences contributing to someone’s depression. And someone with significant or persistent depression may need psychotherapy, medication, or other professional treatment.

The idea isn’t:

Exercise instead of getting help.

It’s much simpler.

Depression can make your world smaller. It can make withdrawal feel sensible, inactivity feel necessary, and postponement feel temporary even as the days accumulate.

Sometimes getting better begins before you particularly feel like getting better.

You leave the house.

You move.

You go somewhere.

You do one thing the depression would have preferred you didn’t.

And then you see what happens.