Optimize With Brian Johnson | More Wisdom In Less Time

We’ve talked about how exercise is kinda like taking a little bit of Ritalin and a little bit of Prozac, but somehow we’ve gotten this far into our +1 series without talking about the fact that exercise is as effective as Zoloft in reducing depression.   Get this.   In The How of Happiness, Sonja Lyubomirksy walks us through a little experiment.    Bring clinically depressed individuals into a lab. Split them into three groups. The first group is assigned to four months of aerobic exercise while the second group gets an antidepressant medication (in this case Zoloft) and the third group gets both.    The exercise group does three, forty-five minute sessions per week of cycling or walking/jogging at a moderate to high intensity.   Fast-forward four months.   As Sonja says: "Remarkably, by the end of the four-month intervention period, all three groups had experienced their depressions lift and reported fewer dysfunctional attitudes and increased happiness and self-esteem. Aerobic exercise was just