An active lifestyle is perhaps one of the best ways to keep depression at bay. However, if taken to extremes, a fitness program can actually cause depression.
Unfortunately, depression doesn’t just stay in your head, it actually causes changes to your body that can lead to delayed recovery and increased weight gain.
So here is how to tell if exercise is making you depressed:
1. What once was a source of pleasure, no longer interests you: Activities that used to cause pleasure will no longer interest you once depression puts its negative blinders on your mental outlook. So make sure you keep close tabs on this effect.
2. You gain or lose weight at extreme rates: Now too much exercise can cause this as well, so figuring out which is which can be hard. Nonetheless, serious depression can cause very rapid gains or losses in body mass. And negativity in most thought processes is also present.
3. Sleeping irregularities: Similar to eating patterns, any alteration in your fitness program can change the way you sleep. The key indicator here is how much of a change you notice. Extreme changes are usually an indication of depression.
4. Problems concentrating: Unfortunately, depression can cause changes to the hippocampus, the area of the brain responsible for memory. So if you are seriously depressed, mental processing speeds could plummet to the point where making decisions is extremely difficult.
5. Thoughts of death or suicide: Once someone reaches this stage, their depression is extremely serious. At this point, the thought processes and the mental outlook is so poor that death is seen as the only way to experience relief.
Now although exercise is one of the most powerful ways to combat depression, it can also cause it when done in excess. So make sure to take note of the pointers in this article!
Writer Katherine Crawford, an exercise expert and former fat arms sufferer, teaches how to tone flabby arms. Figure out how to get sexy arms by visiting her blog with shake weight reviews right now!