Sometimes, the things that make me smile are the simplest

Today I stumbled across this post, titled simply, “The mind/body connection thing? Believe it.” It’s a brief meditation by an older man who started exercising late in life (at 57) and has found that it has improved his overall happiness profoundly. I’m a little in love with this paragraph:

My old, existential, pessimistic brain probably remains the same, if only by years of habit and association. But connected right to it are something like three trillion body cells, and by virtue of all that exercise, they are happy little campers. And they just bathe my jaundiced mind night and day with positive chemical messages. And my mind, being connected to all that orgiastic somatic bliss, shuts up and gets happy too.

I got into a discussion last night about how energy levels are connected to depression. My friend – a lawyer and terrific rationalist – saw a great correlation between how much energy one perceives oneself to have, and whether one is depressed or not, and thinks that things like caffeine and amphetamine treatments for disorders like AD(H)D have incidentally helped such people with depression issues as well. Exercise is also a big help in getting things moving in the body and bringing energy levels up, and people like this guy are living proof that it can improve your overall sense of well-being, too.

I had a slow start this morning and have been having trouble figuring out what to write about today; I think the solution for this is to leave this simple reminder with you all, and then go work out. Attention to and care for the body translates into mental, emotional, and spiritual health is so many ways.