Once upon a time, my husband was a world class shot at target rifle. He never shot for England, but did shoot for Surrey, which some people would argue is just as good, if not better. Once upon a time, he was an excellent kayaker and climber. Then the children came along and somehow there was never enough time to spend on these sports as he put fatherhood first and concentrated on being a Daddy.

Now, for the first time in 22 years, we are child-free. Our oldest is at university, finishing her degree and our youngest is off to Costa Rica for a month, working as a volunteer in an animal sanctuary. In September, she too goes off to university.

We talked, yesterday about him taking up his shooting again, and his kayaking, but it seems that boat has sailed. These days there is a lot more of him than there was twenty years ago, and he wouldn’t fit into his wetsuit. Besides, he’s lost those skills. He could shoot at club level, but he will never again have a shot at the Queen’s Prize, the most prestigious competition in the world.

I am encouraging him to take up these sports again, but it seems, for him, you can never go back, and he must find something else to do. We do go walking, but that’s not such a full body exercise as kayaking.

I read, last week, an article about an experiment carried out at, I think, Exeter university. During lockdown, the students had become depressed, and after lockdown was over, the depression had remained. The experiment was set up to see if various activities could reduce this depression and make the students happier. The activities were those you would expect: spend time with friends, take exercise, eat healthier foods. When they monitored the results they found, sure enough, that the students who had done all these things reported higher levels of happiness than the students who had not. 

This year, they revisited all these students and their levels of depression or happiness. They found some of them had remained happy and some had sunk back into their previous levels of depression. Upon enquiry, they found there was a strong correlation between those students who had continued to see friends, take exercise and eat healthily and those who reported sustained levels of happiness.

Happiness, like fitness relies on sustained activity. Levels of fitness and sporting ability need constant practise.

Not all forms of depression respond to such discipline, of course. When at the bottom of my bipolar cycle, I am capable of nothing but lying, shaking, on the sofa under a blanket. I simply don’t have the ability to see friends or walk further than to the bottom of my drive, wobbling as I do. Eating healthily is a joke as all I can manage are carbohydrate rich, comfort foods. 

But some forms of depression do respond to these activities – if we keep them up.

Mary

A Moodscope member