So Much Happier Blog
Navigating Assaults on Your Spirit
“You may write me down in history with your bitter, twisted lines. You may trod me in the very dirt, but still, like dust, I’ll rise.”
Sadly, one of the characteristics of the human condition is suffering. Much as we may work to avoid it and maximize our happiness (and I will never argue against doing this in ethical ways that don’t harm others, as it often yields great rewards to us and the world around us), we can’t escape our share of difficulty in this life. And some people accumulate far more than their share. Thinking, feeling human beings partake not just in their own pain, but in the pain of others, which can be just as difficult. And in this day and age, when so much bad news in in our faces all the time, the visible levels of human suffering can be overwhelming on a daily basis. When there are spikes in sad and senseless world events, which has happened numerous times this year alone, it can be hard to continue functioning at all.
Despair and powerlessness are at the very the bottom curve of human emotions. When we’ve fallen this far, coming back to equanimity is a process. It doesn’t have to take a long time chronologically, but it does take work. What drives us into these states is unique and complex, and the severity of our fall is determined by the timing of many factors and how they interrelate. I think we’ve all had the experience of multiple misfortunes coming in rapid succession at times, and in these cases, it’s far harder to remain emotionally and spiritually buoyant if you’re not an enlightened master, or at least someone who has trained for the most challenging and soul-sucking times. In our darkest hours, our task may be to just hang on as best we can so that we can heal and renew when some light returns.
Let’s get right to it. Some ideas for supporting yourself in your worst of times:
Rest. I personally find sleep to be a huge help when I’m emotionally overwhelmed and drained. It’s never the whole story, but it does offer a certain magic. Sometimes the healthiest thing to do is give your system a reset, and this is a good one if you can leverage it.
Do your best to keep drinking water and eating some nutritious food every day. If you can’t be bothered, this is something you may be able to ask for help on from a family member when you’re at your wit’s end.
Indulge in “distraction techniques.” These can include any number of activities, like watching a movie that completely gets your mind off what’s weighing on you, playing a game, playing with a pet or child, taking a bath and reading a novel, or otherwise directing your attention off of the problem. This can seem frivolous when everything seems wrong, but you’re no good to anyone when you’re having trouble summoning the will to do anything at all.
On the other hand, you might find it more helpful (especially when you’ve regained enough energy to feel angry or frustrated) to express your feelings by joining with others who understand what you’re upset about to vent, or consuming art that describes your experience and your feelings, creating art, journaling, going to cognitive therapy, or Tapping. In some cities there are now “rage rooms” where you can pay a fee to let loose and break and destroy things, which I understand can be pretty satisfying! Finding a support group around a long-term struggle you share with others can also be incredibly helpful.
This can also be a great time to decide where you will invest energy in the future to help others or support a great cause that is aligned with your struggle, or with skills you enjoy sharing. Committing to an effort to make the world a better place and improve someone else’s life can give a lot of meaning to yours.
Remind yourself what your highest values are, the things that make life worth living, even if it all seems questionable at the moment. When you learn to do this often, it can be something that saves you from the deepest plunges even when your greatest challenges emerge.
There’s a lot of great work you can do when things are looking a bit better that will help you deal with the next time you hit a deep trough, but it takes more energy to do these than you probably have when you’re in the depths. Setting up a support system, finding like-minded buddies and groups (virtual and in real life), as well as practitioners who can help if you’re really in need, spiritual gathering places where you feel at home, and cultivating comforting rituals and other supportive practices like meditation, physical exercise, healthy emotional and mental attentiveness and venting, or spending time with friends who uplift you.
There will be times when your life will feel terrible and hopeless. I wish that wasn’t true, but I don’t think it’s possible to escape this reality if you live a human life. Without acting out or taking out your emotions on your friends, it is important to take time to express your emotions and thoughts, and also, at times, to studiously ignore them so you can partake of various kinds of healing. Whatever your year has been like so far, I hope that you can find support from a variety of loving sources when you need it. I hope you can become stronger and more compassionate despite, or even as a result of, challenge. I hope the time you spend in your worst pain is dwarfed by the time you spend experiencing solidarity and meaning. When you are on solid footing, I hope you will take your turn supporting those who are not with whatever you are best at giving. I hope the human race finds ways to become better and more humane so that all people can experience better lives.
Becoming Your Own Ultimate Pit Crew
“Genius is the ability to renew one’s emotions in daily experience.”
The world is filled with a whole lot of stuff that I bet you think is not ideal, to say the least. Things you can’t stand, things that make no sense, things that are unjust, stupid, and hurtful to you. How do I know? Because it’s the same for all of us. We live on a planet of incredible diversity, conflicting forces, and even chaos. The upside is that we have a lot of opportunity to experience an astonishing range of experiences. The downside is that many of those will not be pleasant.
One of the greatest challenges of coping with such variety and unpleasantness is in preserving your energy in the face of all the friction between you and the world around you. Experiencing continual conflict can be, and often is, exhausting for many of the people I work with. Feeling chronically depleted is demoralizing, and life can seem to devolve into nothing but a disappointing slog if we don’t find ways to preserve and rejuvenate our energy. We all want to feel alive, vital, and enthusiastic about life. How do we get there when we’re challenged so often?
Here are a few of my essential tips for preserving your vital life energy for the things and people you care about most:
Address your emotional realities before they snowball into giant, flashing, wailing signs that you need to pay attention. Suppressing emotion uses a ton of energy that is far better used elsewhere. Allow yourself to consider what that emotion is there to tell you, and then take steps to allow yourself to resolve the emotion for the time being (hint: Tap!) Note that this NOT the last time you’ll feel this emotion, because you will inevitable get off balance again! That’s life. But being able to calm yourself, get the message, and heal so you can move on is priceless. Finally, make new plans about changing the situation that gave rise to the emotion, or your reaction to it, in some way. This is how progress happens—through human beings exhibiting the courage to make new decisions and try new things.
Think about your thoughts, the stories you tell yourself, and start noticing the ways in which the ones you think most often aren’t serving you. You can change these. Perhaps not overnight, but more quickly than you might think once you decide to become aware of them and start working to consciously shift them. Our thoughts feed us constant, powerful messages about what’s possible for us. If you allow your stories to be of a negative and limiting variety, it will be difficult to find the energy to make good decisions and take effective action. Tapping can be a tremendous help here too in speeding the process of changing beliefs that have been created by your life experience.
Take care of your physical needs. Sleep, move your body, and keep working toward a more nutritious and less junk-foodie diet. There’s no way around these if you want sustained energy, vitality, and stable moods (which, all together, increase your capacity for achievement and living your greatness). Period.
Get clear on what’s important and most inspiring to you, and remind yourself of these priorities daily. If your life doesn’t feel meaningful, you’ll struggle with energy as surely as if you were sleeping and eating poorly. Humans are designed to express their talents and preferences in constructive ways. If you don’t, you won’t be able to muster enthusiasm for life.
Most of these actions don’t take a lot of time, just some thought and planning. You must carve out time for all of them regularly, though. As soon as you start dropping the ball on these, you’re starting a downward spiral that makes it extremely difficult to meet life’s many challenges with the grace under pressure that helps you preserve choices and create the best results. What we want is to be in a zone in which challenge doesn’t feel like a major assault, just the normal friction (from which you know how to recover) of living life in a world not entirely of your making. With some daily attention to these essentials, this is firmly within your grasp.
When It's All On the Line
“Revelations come when you’re in the thick of it, pitting yourself up against something larger than yourself.”
No matter how well you plan, there will be times of high activity as you drive toward a goal. Sometimes that goal might be continuing to do your darndest to raise your child right as s/he goes through a trying phase. Sometimes it will be coordinating numerous pieces of a business project that will make or break your position in your job or seriously impact your bottom line. It might be moving to a new location. Some goals just require that we power through difficulties to some extent because timing is critical. How can we do this without losing our grip and letting everything fall to pieces, including us? Here are my suggestions:
- When you're truly being stretched to the edges of your capacity, it's time to get serious about the fundamentals. You can't power through anything when you're floundering without proper nutrition, exercise, and sleep. These basics are never optional, but least of all when you need to perform at peak productivity and resourcefulness.
- This is the time to ask for help. This may seem like yet another way in which you're stretching yourself beyond your comfort zone, but if you can challenge yourself to reach over your ego and tap someone else on the shoulder, you'll find a huge source of help and support waiting for you. Maybe you won't find what you were hoping for on the first try, but keep at it. You don't have to do everything alone, and depending on the complexity of your project, sometimes you literally can't. If you want to get more done in life, you need to improve your interpersonal skills and your willingness to partner with others to get where you want to go.
- If you have forewarning, front-load some routine tasks, or set up a way to outsource them whether through cash or trade. With just a little thought and time invested, you can make sure what's absolutely necessary will be covered even if you can't handle it in the midst of everything else.
- Realize in advance that when your life is in a state of high demand, you may need to make some messes that will get cleaned up later. It's very rare that a highly challenging period will come and go entirely smoothly, and that's normal and ok. By all means do the best you can to keep on top of everything, but don't add unnecessary stress to the cacophony by expecting or trying to insist that everything be perfect. When things calm down again, or once you acclimate to the new pace of things, you can address the results of any minor explosions that occurred en route.
- Plan to do something relaxing for yourself on the other side of all this heightened activity so you have something to look forward to, and sneak in relaxing moments throughout this time whenever you can. As a teacher of mine used to say, a muscle that's always tense is not useful. You need to stay flexible in order to get things done, and to do that you need to be able to relax and breathe.
Most of this may seem fairly obvious now, but when we're being challenged in a major way, sometimes we stop thinking because we go into some degree of fight/flight/freeze mode, and it all goes out the window. The more you get used to thinking along these lines, the more this habitual thinking will remain an asset when you find yourself overwhelmed and on auto-pilot. Times when you feel pushed to your limits may be among the most difficult of your life, but if you have a few helpful strategies at the ready, they can also be among the most rewarding.
Weaving Progress
“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”
For most of us, the human experience is complicated; everyone I know has a love/hate relationship with life on this planet, in that we have things that we absolutely love to do, see, and enjoy…but we also have serious issues with some of the mechanics of how things and people here behave. It takes a lot of effort to just go about one’s daily routine and take care of the items necessary to stay alive, and it can be extremely challenging at times (if not all the time) to find the space and energy to work and play the way we’d like to. We’ve all had the experience of having things humming along in some semblance of balance, only to have several difficult things happen at once to break the rhythm and call us into a whole bunch of activity we weren’t expecting and didn’t want. Devices break down. People close to us have urgent needs, disappoint us, or even pass away. World events change the course of our lives in ways that are frustrating at best or catastrophic at worst. It’s a lot to balance, to say the least.
In order to carve out more of what makes all the effort seem worth it to you, there are things you can be doing along the way to make it easier to weather the next bout of challenge. While your attention is being taken up by handling a crisis, the best you’re probably going to be able to do is to practice what you’ve already begun to establish, so these are things to have an eye on when your life is not at its most demanding. They are worth working at as a long game, and let’s face it, if you’re alive, you’re never finished with these. All of the factors that make up your life continually change, and there will always be a new balance to create, but the more skill you can build in each area, the more grace you’ll be able to draw from when you’re called upon to dig deep. Here are the basic areas in which you might choose to focus in order to make progress when you have capacity:
Internal resources. This is the world of factors that are more within your control, and it encompasses the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual:
· The quality of the food you eat, the sleep you allow yourself, the exercise you get regularly
· How well you express and manage your emotions, including through the use of tools such as Tapping/EFT
· How well you manage the thoughts, relationships, and situations that give rise to those emotions
· Your mental habits and discipline, and practices like meditation or journaling in which you grow in your understanding of and ability to manage your mind
· Your general beliefs about yourself and the world
· Your spiritual beliefs and practices
External resources, and your ability to handle interacting with them while maintaining your own equilibrium. These are the factors that are not within your control:
· Basic physics, the intrinsic properties of the world around us
· The beliefs and actions of singular people
· The opportunities available to you at any given time, your positioning in relationship to others and the whole
· World events that are a product of mass movements—these by definition don’t start or end with one person
The areas in which you choose to grow will define your life in many ways. You might choose to focus on an area in which you feel least functional in order to limit the lows you will experience going forward in that area. You also might, as discussed in last week’s blog, focus on putting more energy into an area where you’re already skilled and passionate while finding ways to cooperate with others so that you don’t need to become expert in the areas that are hardest for you. When you read through the bullets above, which areas seem most appropriate for your next round of efforts? If you’ve read this far, you’re most likely someone who likes to keep improving yourself and your life, so giving this some thought will probably open up ideas about progress that would excite you and strengthen your ability to handle future challenge while maintaining better balance and more of a sense of ease.
Particularly if you’re someone who is sensitive to and aware of the people and events around you, I don’t think life as a human ever becomes easy. One of the things that can be counted on is that your life never turns out exactly the way you expected. And yet, this is part of what makes life thrilling—the element of surprise, the constant interweaving of an array of complex factors that promotes endless possibility. That will not change no matter how much we wish it to, so what can you do to appreciate the overall tapestry and the colors you’re weaving into the whole? What can you do to turn up your ability to savor your everyday experience of the process and the beauty it offers?
Leveraging Joy
“Let the beauty of what you love be what you do.”
We all have things we’re really great at and enjoy doing. We also have things we hate doing and struggle at—and yet sometimes doing these things is necessary. It certainly makes sense to work at being functional in numerous important areas of your life, such as finance, organization, planning and time management, social skills, negotiation, communication skills, etc., but some things will always be more fun for you than others. I suggest that you’ll likely be able to be far more productive if you can spend more time working on the fun (for you) tasks. You’ll feel more energized, hopeful, and creative in the course of doing that work and afterward. Conversely, when you spend time slogging through the tasks that are particularly difficult and dreary for you, you’ll feel more tired by the effort, more oppressed by the work, and your self-esteem is likely to take a hit.
The Gallup organization has done some fantastic work on this concept; they’ve conducted thousands of interviews with people in corporate jobs asking about what their greatest strengths are in the workplace. They published a series of books about what they learned, including the current research on the amazing leaps in success people are often able to make when they are allowed to focus on their strengths rather than trying to remediate weaknesses. I found their conclusions to be fascinating and quite common sense, actually, but unfortunately most cultures around the world, as well as businesses, function in just the opposite way from the recommended models. Gallup developed their own unique system of classifying the strengths they uncovered in all of these interviews, and if you’d like to take the talent assessment survey they developed and see the items where you rank highly, you can do that here. I found doing so very useful, and discussing the results with my partner most helpful as well—we each learned about the other’s strengths, priorities and viewpoints in surprising ways. Note that because the interviews were done in corporate office settings, there are plenty of strength areas that you won’t find represented here that might have been uncovered in other settings (such as those requiring more physical or creative work) but the ones enumerated here are still applicable to other kinds of work as well.
One of the greatest secrets to productivity, according to this work, lies in getting help on your most dreaded tasks from others with complementary skills while you intentionally focus on what you’re talented at doing. I find this concept to be very freeing: You mean I DON’T have to become an expert on every technological device in my house? (I loathe the endless minutiae of electronic things, but I hit the jackpot in that my partner is totally comfortable at figuring that stuff out. And it never takes him that long to do it, whereas it’s a demoralizing, time-consuming struggle for me. I can do it. I just hate it.)
Ok, time for an exercise. If you’ve never done this before, I suggest spending some time brainstorming about the tasks in life that you most enjoy doing, or at least find easy to accomplish. Are you at ease with people such that it’s easy-breezy for you to meet and talk to new people or make phone calls for various purposes? Are you a whiz with numbers? Maybe you’re great at estimating distances and other tasks that require skill in spatial relations. Are you handy? Unusually strong physically? Are you good at organizing social get-togethers? Do you enjoy writing? Reading? Are you musical? Like doing dishes? Try to think of every little kind of task that you look forward to in some way, even if only a little. It’s a good idea to think back over different times in your life to mine these abilities fully. Keep a list of items that you can keep adding to when you think of them and let it grow over time. This will become useful later.
Then, make a list of the things you don’t like doing. This should be pretty easy, since pain points are hard to miss. Most of us can rattle off our pet peeves at the drop of a hat. On the other hand, there may be some minor things you’ve never thought to add to the list because it seems self-indulgent to think about farming those out. Start allowing yourself to notice any little thing that is a downer in the course of your week. While you may not be able to completely solve all of these, you never know! Might as well make a wish list and see where it takes you.
Next, no matter what you do for a living, spend some time thinking about how you could do more of these tasks you like and cooperate with others to get some of the ones you hate doing done for you in return. This is such a simple thing, and yet most of us were encouraged to be “adult,” self-sufficient, and force ourselves to do everything alone—or sweep under the rug in shame the fact that we can’t or won’t do certain things. Turn out, that’s inefficient and unnecessary, not to mention demoralizing. I guarantee that someone you know would love to trade efforts with you on something you’d be happy to offer, and this is a fast and often free way to boost your satisfaction and results in life. You’ll feel good about helping someone else, and great about being able to skip the tasks you’d prefer never to do again! Humans evolved to live in groups and cooperate. If you’re not leveraging the power of cooperation, you’re leaving a lot of joy and progress languishing on the table.
I encourage you to actually do this exercise and actually talk to others about what you discovered. It doesn’t take a lot of effort to start thinking in this way and taking small actions to find solutions, and the potential rewards are endless…especially in this age of technology, where it’s easy to connect with others on a variety of platforms almost no matter what you’re looking for. You may decide that it works best to hire someone to do some of your least favorite tasks, or you might find trade- or gift-oriented solutions. However you choose to proceed, I hope you find that you start to feel a greater sense of energy and space in your life through these small, thoughtful actions.
Where the Rubber Meets the Road
“Endure and persist; this pain will turn to good by and by.”
There are many personal qualities that are important contributors to long-term success, but I’ve been writing about some of the most powerful ones over the last few weeks. Along with focus and creativity, persistence is absolutely necessary if you’re to keep yourself moving ever forward in life toward greater mastery of your chosen subject matter. Life has a way of surprising us with all manner of challenges no matter how well we plan. It’s easy to become discouraged by the constant disruptions and the necessary adjustments those challenges call upon us to make. In order to hang in there long enough to get where you want to go, you’ll need to be able to fire up your persistence day in and day out, almost no matter what may be happening around you. Yes, I know, that’s a tall order! I can hear some of you groaning already—this is starting to sound very un-fun.
And yet, what if you could find ways to maintain a calm sense of balance in the midst of chaos? What if you knew how to feed your confidence throughout challenge so that persistence didn’t seem like such a Herculean effort? These are just skills that can be learned, like any other. While some people will be more naturally gifted than others in any area, almost everyone can become at least functional in most skill sets. If you’re someone whose motivation gets knocked off course often, such that you’re often starting and stopping your efforts on things that really matter to you, here are some things to try on the road to becoming unstoppable.
· Remember the importance of focus? You’ll need to apply it to keep reminding yourself that persistence is a skill, not some magical quality that you weren’t born with, so why bother? Some people were taught the skills that feed persistence early, and some need to learn them later, but you have to acknowledge that it’s possible to learn them before you can effectively build them.
· You’ll also need to focus on what’s important to you consistently. Every day. Find ways to do this that appeal to you. It’s good to make this fun, so indulge yourself! If you like, write reminders to yourself on bright sticky notes and scatter them around where you’ll see them throughout the day, or make a recording of yourself repeating your top priorities and play it back in the car, or take a few minutes before you get out of bed and before you go to sleep at night to go over them in your mind and enjoy how they express the truth of you. There can be great joy in just repeating your most important values to yourself often. You might be surprised how enjoyable and inspiring this becomes.
· Practice reviewing your priorities before making decisions throughout your day. When you get into the habit of making sure that what’s most important to you is at least considered in your smallest decisions, you reinforce your ability to strategize with them always in mind. When the larger, more pivotal decisions come up, it will be easier to do the same, and you’ll become brilliant at making decisions that serve your values and goals.
· Keep a journal on decisions you made and how well they support your goals. This is an excellent way to give yourself credit for and celebrate good decisions, as well as notice decisions that you made in a hurry, forgetting to think through what would really be best for you and everyone else before charging ahead. If you don’t take time to frequently review what’s happening in your life, it’s easy to fall back into old patterns and find that you’re getting nowhere. If you keep an eye on things, you have opportunities to do better every day, and you’ll progress much more quickly.
· Sometimes, you will have a bad day. You will need the love and support of at least a few people who you can count on to care about you no matter what. Practice reaching out to them when things aren’t terrible just to talk through a choice or share a win or a concern. This will make it more natural and easy for you to ask for attention when you really need it. Everyone needs support sometimes, and being reminded that someone else cares about you and believes in you helps restore your courage and keep you in the game.
· Manage your mind and your emotions. This cannot be said enough. Your mind will have a tendency to judge you, and others, and spiral into negativity. If you want to build persistence, you must gain the ability to arrest this cycle and bring your mind back to a neutral state at least, and practice more resourceful thinking. You don’t have to pretend that everything is always rosy, but if you’re always indulging in negativity, there’s no way you’re going to reach your goals—and if you did by some stroke of luck, you wouldn’t be able to enjoy them. Your emotions, in the moment at least, proceed from your thinking. There are also probably a bunch stuck in your system from previous events and thinking. For clearing those, the best technique I’ve ever found is EFT/Tapping, and it’s easy and free to do, so if you haven’t taken the time yet, learn the basics and try it! It’s so much easier to make good decisions when you’re not being overwhelmed with outdated mental and emotional habits left over from the past.
· Be stubborn. Every two-year-old knows how to do this like a champ. If you’ve forgotten how, channel your inner two-year-old and stamp your feet and yell, “No! No, no NO! I want _______!” at the top of your lungs every once in a while. Jump up and down for added effect. In addition to being hilarious and getting your blood pumping, this can reconnect you with your most basic desires and your conviction that you deserve to get them. Small children don’t spend time worrying about whether it’s prudent to want a pet unicorn, they just go ahead and want it. When you really connect with your desires, a lot of energy becomes available to you that you can use to take action. Your zest for life resurfaces. You can’t achieve goals if you’re always exhausted and don’t remember what all the effort is for. You have to let yourself want things in order to feel fully alive. Even if they seem impossible, your desires have important messages for you, and help you to keep finding your direction in the face of adversity.
A few caveats:
· Sometimes persistence is not the right tool for the job. If you’re persisting but continually missing the mark, it may be time for a new strategy and some course correction. Mindless persistence can end up looking a lot like reckless stupidity. You want to stay open to learning new things, and benefiting from outside perspectives.
· There will always be moments in any life when it’s time to take a break, either just for vacation, to rest and recharge, or because you’re going through a major transition of some sort—but when you can decide when to take time rather than always struggling to recover enough to get back on the horse, that’s a better place to be.
· Each of us has things we’re just really, really not suited for, in addition to things we’re great at. If you’ve applied yourself enough to gain some ability, but still loathe and get bogged down by a certain activity, it’s wise to partner with someone who is good at it, or find other ways to work around doing it.
· If you’re someone who is motivated by joining with others in some way, then by all means find a buddy who can help you keep at it on a daily basis, or pay a coach to help you stay focused on your goals and the actions you need to take to keep growing. Most people enjoy effort more if they can share accomplishments with others who cheer them on and appreciate their progress. Relationships make life, and our successes, more meaningful and more fun. Look, we brought it back around to fun! And we should. Why be so serious when we can build fun into all of our days with just the intention to do so? Balance means playing as well as we work, because play helps us to relax, de-stress, and regain creativity.
Maintaining persistence is a lifelong pursuit, like maintaining good health. We’re never done. But if you don’t ever get around to investing time and effort into creating basic habits that will keep you going, you can’t expect to live the kind of life you want. Start small if persistence is hard for you, but start! You can do this.
Ready, Set, Groan!
“Physical fitness is not only one of the most important keys to a healthy body, it is the basis of dynamic and creative intellectual activity.”
“Number one, like yourself. Number two, you have to eat healthy. And number three, you’ve got to squeeze your buns. That’s my formula.”
There's something that I don't think people talk about nearly enough about the first two weeks to a month of starting a new exercise regime: It's going to suck.
How 'bout them apples? I bet you didn't expect me to write a statement like that! But I find that this uncomfortable early period derails a lot of people who get started on renewing fitness goals with the best of intentions, and even great feelings of commitment. We're told that exercise boosts endorphins, which produce euphoria, and can reduce stress and even clinical depression. And yet I know from personal experience as well as from the experiences of my friends and clients that those first few weeks are a challenge like no other. You'll be tired, you'll be grumpy, you'll resent the loss of time you're used to having for other things, you'll have sore muscles, and you may come up against a whole host of body-related beliefs and issues that have the potential to derail you until you've built up some momentum.
Several important things can go wrong during this period:
1. If you don't know your body really well, it's very likely that in your initial enthusiasm, you will overestimate what you can and should do to get started. You have probably taken on, on some level, the "no pain, no gain" mentality, and the belief that you need to buckle down and "just do it." You have been made to feel that your lack of fitness is the result of your being too soft and wussing out on a disciplined approach throughout your life. You think that forcing yourself to power through pain and discomfort through sheer will power is the answer, so you ignore your body's signals and plough ahead with a plan that is perhaps overambitious. You then spend days or weeks hobbling around in agony until you decide that this exercise thing is for the birds.
· In the first few weeks of activity, you are likely to have some muscle soreness or stiffness. Starting slowly helps keep this manageable, but many of us shy away from anything that feels like pain, and will start finding reasons to discontinue the effort. Epsom salt baths can be helpful here, and it’s also important to make sure you’re stretching appropriately for your chosen exercise. Keep in mind that your body will get used to moving if you stick with it. A life that includes a rewarding level of fitness need not include a lot of pain, but you may need to move through some in the beginning. Give yourself credit for being willing to go through this adjustment phase for your long-term good.
· Seriously addressing your nutritional needs is a great idea, particularly when you’re about to make greater demands on your body’s energy output and general functioning. There’s a lot of great information available out there for free from your local library and online, and I encourage you to use it to educate yourself. Sorting through it can be overwhelming, though, so don’t be afraid to consult an expert. A nutritionist can help you figure out what your body needs in order to function at high levels.
2. If you do know your body well and make (or work with a professional to make) a plan that is more realistic and sustainable/scaleable, you're still going to be dealing with the ups and downs that accompany the process for building and solidifying a new habit.
· For some of us, the problem is going to be that it's hard to stay inspired when we're at the beginning of a new road, and all we can see is a daunting upward climb ahead. The ability to keep putting one foot in front of the other when the goal seems so far away can be a huge challenge. Planning ahead by putting some support structures in place to help you get through this time is an excellent. You might want to find an exercise buddy to at least check in with on a daily basis so you know someone else is by your side having a similar experience. You could also tell a few positive people what you're doing so that they will be rooting for you, and can offer you encouragement and pep talks when you need them. It might be helpful to make sure you have something fun to look forward to every week that will help buoy your mood if things feel difficult, something that you really enjoy. In short, plan to support yourself now in any way that you know works for you. You’re taking on a worthy challenge. When you succeed in establishing a habit of healthy movement, it supports your entire life in ways that are more than the sum of the apparent parts.
· For others, the opinions of others may be a danger zone. If you have naysayers around you, you're going to have to find ways to escort the voice of their negativity out of the building, whether figuratively or literally, in order to stay focused. You may also need to do your own internal work to replace that voice with a more positive one, and to create a strong vision of the new self you're becoming to whom this new fitness habit is natural. You may find yourself asking, who will I be if I create a habit of fitness? Here you may encounter some beliefs about who you are that need to change. There are many gentle modalities that can assist you here, from journaling and affirmations to hypnosis and EFT.
· If exercise has never been fun for you, you’ll need to find ways to choose activities that you’ll will dread doing the least, and add elements that boost your enjoyment of time spent moving. Maybe working out in a group will change your dynamic for the better. Groups also offer an immediate support network that can offer encouragement and solidarity, and for many, this is a game changer. Maybe listening to upbeat music you love will really get you going, or watching a T.V. program that really engages you (only do this if you're doing activities that don't demand your focus to avoid injury, though). And make sure the program is positive—you don't want to start associating your active time with sad, frightening, or otherwise upsetting experiences, even if they're imaginative. This will likely sabotage your enthusiasm over time, which is the last thing you want. I will acknowledge that we’re all different, though, and it's important to know what works for you; for instance, I do have one friend who, along with her family, thinks that horror movies are hilarious, and they get together and laugh themselves silly watching them. For most people, that probably isn't the case, so watching horror while exercising is probably not a winning strategy for the rest of us! For some, the idea of doing something repetitive like walking or stair climbing seems way too boring. It's important to start with something gentle like walking or swimming if your current fitness level is low, but as you gain experience with exercise, you can try new things and see if there are other activities you enjoy more, or as part of a rotation of several choices that keeps things interesting for you over time.
Next week we’ll look at another, more subtle category of challenge you may need to address. For now, keep in mind that despite the difficulties inherent in starting something new, exercise is an essential ingredient in the recipe for creating a balanced, happy, healthy life. Celebrate the ways in which you’ve already built it into your life, and remember that it’s supposed to be fun to move your body. Physical activity is a pathway to a great deal of the joy of being alive. If you’re currently working on creating this habit, hang in there! I’ve been where you are, and I know that your work will pay off for you if you stick with it and remain responsive to your body’s changing needs.