Move to Motivate

 

I was reading this morning (I know -- shocker!) a little book called Habits of Happiness by Wendy Ulrich and she was suggesting that we don't try to get motivated to exercise.  That sounds all wrong since we all know that exercising and drinking more water seems to be half the answer to health woes -- the other half being eat well and get enough sleep.  What she had to say made sense though because she explained that instead of waiting to be motivated to exercise, we should just do the littlest thing we can get ourselves to, which will lead to improvement, which may actually lead to exercise!

I've seen this work in my own life.  I read once that if it sounds like too much to do 30 minutes of exercise, just get yourself to do 10.  Because of that I have 10 minute exercise videos and I almost always found that if I did the 10 minutes, it wasn't so hard to keep going for at least 10 more!  Or if I just stand up and put on an exercise video thinking I'll do just a couple of minutes, it's easier to keep going than I expect.

The author's examples made me smile.  One person couldn't get herself to walk so she just stood on the treadmill and read the paper without moving.  Eventually she decided she could walk really slowly for a minute of her reading time, and eventually that turned into walking for a pretty good amount of time -- all because she did the first thing.

For some reason getting moving can be really, really hard -- especially if we are tired or dreading the task.  Once I start some dreaded task I can often work on it for a long time, but I have to be careful about that too!  I used to dread working in the yard, but really I love working in the yard.  I just used to keep going until everything was done and and put myself in pain and exhaustion and then I didn't ever want to go back out!  I had to limit my time in the yard to more reasonable amounts.  So maybe we can move to get motivated, and then be careful not to start out by trying to do so much more than we are used to that we start to hate the activity we want or need to do.

**Photo by Arek Adeoye on Unsplash