Written by Mira Piirainen

It is said that exercise relieves depression even faster than antidepressants. In fact, exercise is now recommended as a treatment for depression. What are the benefits of exercise for mental health and is exercise a threat or an opportunity for people with depression?

Mira Piirainen is a 42-year-old entrepreneur, coach and group exercise instructor. Before joining the sports sector, Mira worked as a manager in the trade sector, but fortunately the sports sector took her there. The author of this blog has suffered from depression since 1999.

Exercising when depressed, a threat or an opportunity?

For a depressed person, just going to the gym can cause feelings of anxiety. The potential crowds at the gym, the upcoming workout, how to cope, how not to cope, etc. can cause anxiety, feelings of panic, panic attacks, panic fear and crying. It is unimaginable how difficult it is to take your gym bag out of the cupboard and walk to the gym.

For example, if you think about a long break from the gym, and how hard it is to take that first step towards the gym - it's nothing compared to what the mind of a depressed and anxious person goes through in those moments when it's time to leave.

So my recommendation is to make it a routine. Tell your body that there is nothing wrong, you are not harming it. Put some music in your ears at this stage and put on some music that calms you down. Remember to breathe. You can do it.

Positive stress vs. negative stress

I can say from experience that too much training is always too much. In other words, an appropriate amount of exercise is good for a depressed mind. Exercise should be kept light enough, and you should not train your muscles to the point of exhaustion. At the point when you feel fatigue or burning in your muscles, you should stop exercising - or preferably before that.

However, it is easy for a competitive person to overdo it. You pull teeth, you want to improve your results, and the end result is that you train way too hard. Because it feels so good in the moment and you feel like all the misery in the world will go away when you do one more repetition.

It's not the training as such that's the problem, it's the recovery. There can be so much negative stress in the body from depression that positive stress (from exercise) starts to negatively stress the body because the body can't recover.

Remember recovery

Sleep and nutrition are indispensable for recovery. However, people with depression often also have trouble sleeping. If you train hard and sleep poorly, your recovery will be disrupted. You may not be able to do anything about sleep problems, but you can do something about nutrition, so make sure you have good, quality food - always. Don't eat what you like or, in the worst case, don't eat at all. Make meals the highlight of your day. Make good food. And remember to eat. Take care of your post-workout nutrition to allow your body to recover. Take care of your pre-workout nutrition so your body has enough energy to work out.

Take advantage of programming

Move on. Move and exercise. Because exercise releases endorphins (compounds that act like morphine, i.e. they produce a strong feeling of well-being - or euphoria) in the brain. But don't exercise too much. During the worst periods of depression, do exercises that give you a sense of achievement and make you feel good.

Program your workouts in advance or have a professional program them so you don't train too hard at bad times. Note that it is quite normal for a depressed mind to be unable to make decisions about set weights, reps, etc. during a workout. Therefore, programming is even more important than usual. When programming, you need to keep the threshold low so that you get a sense of achievement from your workouts, and not turn positive stress into negative stress. Don't beat yourself up and don't perform. Don't push yourself to the point of exhaustion.

What is it like to exercise when you have depression?

You shouldn't wait for depression to go away, because in some cases it lives with you forever, as it did with me. That's why it's important to learn to listen to yourself and live in the here and now. Take care of yourself, exercise appropriately and take care of your recovery. And remind yourself, if no one else will tell you - that you are amazing! And you'll get through this too!

With my busy entrepreneurial life and my depression, I have learned to calendar my workouts. Otherwise I either overdo it or find no room for training at all or simply can't make the decision "should I train today or not". When you have your own gym workouts calendared and wisely placed between other movements, recovery is also taken into account.

My job requires me to exercise at all times, so I teach group exercise classes, even if I'm going through a depressive period. Of course, in really difficult times when I can't even get out of bed, I have had to cancel classes, but this rarely happens. I find I get my energy from my wonderful clients. There may be a little moment at the beginning of the class when I struggle with myself and my depression, but as the music takes me away, I release the anxiety and after the class I am all smiles.

Due to the heavy load of the instructions, I have learned to take care of my recovery and listen to my body. So I don't always go to the gym, but I take lighter weeks and periods when the depression is at its worst. During these periods, you'll find me out in nature more than usual. I find that being in the woods and in nature restores me, and I often sleep nights in tents, desert huts or camping sites. This is my way of getting through difficult times. You have to listen to your body, find forms of exercise that produce the hormone of pleasure and that restore. For some, it may be gym training, but in that case you need to take it easy and not create more stress on the body from hard training.

After periods of depression, I either miss going to the gym or I don't miss going to the gym at all. This also varies from case to case. If I feel anxious about going to the gym, I just decide in advance when I'm going to go for the first time and put the date in my calendar. It helps a lot if I can get a friend to go with me to the gym for these times, as I'm definitely a "buddy trainer". But if I don't have a friend by then, then I'm usually found working out with music in my ears for the moves I like the most. So I start with the moves that make the most sense to me, and where I feel I can succeed. Little by little from now on I start my own gym program and in a few weeks I'll be back on track.

It's really challenging when there are breaks in training. Of course, they can come with other illnesses etc., but I have learned to accept this. The most important thing is my own well-being, rather than how much I can lift off the ground.

The decision to speak publicly about my own depression was not an easy one. I weighed it up a lot and thought about the horror scenarios of how people might take it in the worst case scenario. However, I am a person who always puts myself out there and I am really happy that I did it this time and spoke publicly about my depression.

I have received only positive feedback on this. I have been approached by people who are going through the same issues and I have had many wonderful people come to my coaching who may have previously been afraid to approach such a strong personality. I feel that by telling people about myself I have automatically created an atmosphere of honesty between myself and the people I coach. It's really wonderful and liberating to be truly me, my flawed day-to-day self.

I have had many wonderful encounters with clients and many encounters are deeply etched in my mind. I wanted to share two of them that tell you how wonderful and heartfelt people are, and how many broken people are here and we don't know their stories.

The first moment I want to share was this Christmas 2022, when a lovely visitor to my group exercise class gave me a Christmas present, hugged me and said: "Thank you Mira, for being here for us even if you don't always share". This brought tears to my eyes.

The second story is from just over a year ago. "Dear Mira, I want to tell you how happy I am that I dared to contact you and start coaching with you. There are many good and beautiful things in life, but also painful things. Your coaching has helped me to find resources for my everyday life and to take my mind off the painful things, at least for a while. So please remember that you are doing important and wonderful work and you are an insanely wonderful person".

Finally, there was a poem by Susanna Jussila that was so wonderful that I could hardly finish it, because I simply could not see the text through my tears:

"Never apologise for the fact that your body feels the gales of the distant seas. That you can't help but see things that many others turn a blind eye to. That your hair is sometimes coated in a pink cotton candy. That you prefer to follow the rhythms of nature rather than people. That your light makes some run away and others seek you out. Never apologise for keeping your heart open and refusing to hide your wounds".