Call for volunteers who want to want to exercise.

Looking for: Volunteers who would like to treat their anxiety or mood disorder with exercise, who have been inhibited by their anxiety or mood disorder. Second choice: volunteers without those things who have been looking to start exercising but have been inhibited by the fact that exercise is hard, or would otherwise like to change their relationship with exercise. You would be volunteering to read a fairly short book and follow its prescriptions for a predetermined length of time

“Eat right, sleep, and exercise” is a common prescription for depression and anxiety, which would be great if constant fear, hopelessness, and fatigue didn’t make exercise so hard.  I’m spot checking/reviewing Exercise for Mood and Anxiety, whose thesis is using mindfulness and CBT to make exercise immediately rewarding so you can start a virtuous cycle. I’ve checked their work and all the theory that went in to designing this program is very solid, it’s my high watermark for pop-psych-self-help, but the actual prescriptions have no testing. They seem like natural outgrowths of the principle and other parts of psychology, but humans are complicated and before I recommend this book I’d like to test it. I can’t test it on myself because I already exercise and experience immediately mood benefits from it (which is pretty great, and I heartily recommend).

If you are interested, please fill out the pre-survey and commence reading. I can loan my kindle edition to an unknown number of people, and if demand is high and price is prohibitive for you can buy a certain number of paperbacks. If you don’t want to participate in the trial but are very interested in the results, I would be very grateful for subsidies of book purchases, my patreon money won’t cover a single copy.