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1,100 Days: A Mental and Physical Health Update

2020-02-11 · letter vlog · John · 4:00 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Personal life (also: Health) · mode: Personal update · tags: heavy topic

Three years after 100 Days, John reports on 1,100 days of regular exercise: some benefits plateau and can start a vicious cycle, others keep improving, his mental health is probably the best it has been, and he no longer imagines his mind as separate from his body.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — 100 Days three years ago; how fit John was then and is now; his weekly routine

  • ★★ Almost exactly three years ago (2017) John finished a 100-day fitness challenge with his best friend Chris, documented on YouTube; now he shares the good and bad of over 1,000 days of exercise. — 00:00:00 · 100 Days
  • ★★ In 2017, after exercising five or six days a week for 100 days, John could run seven or eight miles, slept better, his mental illness had improved dramatically, and he wrote much of Turtles All the Way Down. — 00:00:00 · Turtles All the Way Down, mental disorder, 100 Days
  • ★★ Three years later John is mostly in better shape: he has cut 30 seconds off his mile pace, is stronger, and has good blood pressure. — 00:00:29
  • ★★ John still trains twice a week with Laura, their 100 Days trainer, and bikes or runs most weekends, almost always exceeding the 150 weekly minutes his doctor recommends. — 00:00:29 · 100 Days

00:00:58 — How exercise benefits plateau, the vicious cycle of lost motivation, and benefits that keep improving

  • ★★★ John says exercise first brings a huge improvement, with fewer hours lost to anxious thoughts and much more energy, but then the improvement plateaus. — 00:00:58
  • ★★★ The plateau lowers John's motivation, so he exercises less, his brain gets worse and exercising gets harder: a vicious cycle that explains why he always yo-yoed. — 00:00:58
  • ★★ John says he has had such vicious cycles in the last three years, but recognizing the pattern makes them much easier to break. — 00:01:27
  • ★★★ Over a long period, John says, some benefits plateau but others slowly keep improving: despite being, as he jokes, very, very old, he is the fastest runner he has ever been. — 00:01:27
  • ★★★ John's mental health is probably the best it's ever been: still mentally ill and on daily medication, but his rolling 90-day average is much better than 5, 10 or 15 years ago. (hedged) — 00:01:27 · mental disorder

00:01:56 — Mental health at its best; no longer imagining the mind as separate from the body

  • ★★ John describes a helpful shift in how he imagines himself: he never thought of himself as fit or healthy and defined himself against fitness, a nerd, not a jock; a mind person, not a body person. — 00:01:56

  • ★★★ John is now much less inclined to imagine his mind as separate from his body: his brain is meat like his muscles, and treating the body as a sack carrying the mind was bad for both. — 00:01:56

    “my brain is made out of meat just like my muscles are”

  • ★★ John thinks exercise has been good for his writing: he couldn't write The Anthropocene Reviewed without seeing the body-mind and consciousness-nature duality he had created as total BS. — 00:02:26 · The Anthropocene Reviewed (podcast)

00:02:55 — Vertigo, injuries, not loving exercise but valuing it; off to the treadmill; sign-off

  • ★★ John's three years were not without challenge: bouts of vertigo, at times extremely destabilizing, make exercise hard, and he has had small injuries and aches, from age and from activity. — 00:02:55
  • ★★ John doesn't love exercise: even after 1,100 days he doesn't know what a runner's high is or eagerly anticipate training. — 00:02:55 · 100 Days

  • ★★★ John values exercise because it is engrossing, 'a terrible word for a wonderful experience': it takes, uses and benefits all of him. — 00:03:24

    “Exercise takes all of me, and it uses all of me, and it benefits all of me.”

  • ★★ As a kid John took a comedian's joke, that jogging extends life by exactly the minutes spent jogging, as a reason not to exercise; now, even if it were true, which it isn't, he'd still run. — 00:03:24

  • ★ John is going to run now, on the treadmill, because it is very cold and he wants to watch AFC Wimbledon. — 00:03:24 · AFC Wimbledon

In the description and comments

  • ★ In a comment update, John says he ran 3 miles in 26:52. — creator comment
  • ★ In a comment, John reports AFC Wimbledon drew 0-0 with seventh-place Ipswich Town, largely thanks to new goalkeeper Joe Day, and he'll take the point. — creator comment · AFC Wimbledon
  • ★★ In a comment, John says they just passed 5,000 total donors at pih.org/hankandjohn and thanks them. — creator comment · Partners In Health

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: mental disorder · mind-body dualism · physical exercise

Also: 100 Days · AFC Wimbledon · Chris Waters · Laura (trainer, mentioned from 2017) · The Anthropocene Reviewed (podcast) · Turtles All the Way Down · Vertigo · vicious circle

Only in the description or credits: Ipswich Town F.C. · Joe Day · Partners In Health

Also centred on mind-body dualism: Free Will Fetish · My Body Is a Broken Temple

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