Dance! Exercise is as good (if not better) in may cases than SSRIs, & dancing is the top modality. In most psychiatric disorders there's an energetic imbalance, which saps our will to exercise. However, moving increases the flux & reduces energy imbalance. In addition to increasing the flux at the cellular level, dancing increases the flux at the psychological level, too Nick Jikomes, PhD: "From this [Energy Resistance Principle] perspective, how would you guys start to think about something like a psychiatric illness, like depression, or something else that you think is illustrative?" Martin Picard, PhD: "Yeah, there's new evidence in depression. If you look at what proteins are upregulated, like what's happening physiologically, energetically, GDF15 is elevated in major depressive disorder, in other psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia and bipolar anorexia. So it seems increasingly clear that there's an energetic imbalance, dysregulation, in most psychiatric disorders. "There's a really nice work from a group at McLean Hospital in Boston where they've been imaging in the brain NADH / NAD ratio. Right? Like the first symptom or the first indication of reductive stress, and therefore energy resistance in the brain is that ratio, NADH and NAD, and energy resistance is elevated in the brains of people with severe mental illness. "And I suspect that's why some of the interventions, metabolic interventions like ketogenic diet, which seems to relieve symptoms and help the management of disease in many patients, not all, but many patients, that might be how it works. "And why exercise? […] If you have high energy resistance in your body, like the discomfort you have if you squat for too long your muscles start to burn, like imagine there's like 20% of that discomfort, but it's all the time in your body. And you feel terrible, right? It's like this ill-being, right? This like dis-ease, right? You're not at ease, ever. Like everything feels so painful. You don't want to exercise. You don't want to interact with other human beings. And so probably that energy resistance that we talked about diffuses through GDF15, maybe through other things, reaches the brain and makes you feel like shit. Exercising then is the last thing that you want to do. Despite this, there's really good evidence that moving, right, and maybe you moving is increasing flux in the equation, therefore reducing energy resistance. That improves symptoms across diagnostic categories. "And there's this cool meta analysis that was done recently showing that exercise, of course, is like at least as good (if not better) in many cases than SSRIs and other pharmacological treatments. And dancing, there's like one or two studies on like dancing was like the top anti-depressant modality in this meta analysis, and we can speculate as to why this would be the case, but for sure, dancing involves more flowing, more kind of increasing the flux, maybe not just at the cellular level, but psychologically, and there's like coordination, and other." Martin Picard, PhD & Nirosha Murugan, PhD with Nick Jikomes, PhD @ 01:46:03–01:48:54 (posted 2025-10-29) https://youtu.be/GiwDfsIgziA&t=6363