Today’s topic is one of the less discussed in the sport and exercise psychology field, and that is the need to leave behind old goals, motives and approaches for physical activity that no longer work for your current situation. This is a transition familiar to people across the spectrum - from those who exercise for their health to elite athletes.

Life has its chapters - leaving home and starting work, becoming a parent, moving house or country, relationship endings, chronic illnesses, injuries, changing jobs or career, retiring from sport, moving up a level in sport, existential crises, rapid-onset psychological change following adverse events, age-related milestones…. Such new chapters often mean different opportunities, schedules, priorities, responsibilities, physical and mental capacities, interests and resources, all of which means we are required to adapt or to completely change things like physical activity.

So when life demands different things of us in these times, we try to change what we do accordingly… but we don’t necessarily move on psychologically. We may leave behind our previous goals or activities practically speaking, sometimes out of absolute necessity, but we can still find ourselves yearning for what we had, constantly mulling over whether we can find a way back.

For example, athletes moving up to higher levels may wish they could feel the same enjoyment and liberation that they used to, or keep their status as the big fish in a small pond. Others wish they could still pursue their competitive goals unhindered, having had to make new choices about how they spend their time and energy. Exercisers long to spend every weekday evening at the gym again, go for a run whenever they want or do things they can no longer physically do.

Some people don’t ponder their past activities so explicitly, but instead unwittingly carry forward old attitudes and expectations that were suited to another time or activity, hampering their experience of the present activity. Alternatively, others may wander about in the metaphorical wilderness, wanting but lacking a new direction and feeling rudderless and stagnant. Nothing really motivates them anymore, but they crave something to get motivated for.

Like many people, I’ve sat on this merry-go-round repeatedly. Most recently this has been a consequence of pregnancy (which I will cover in another post as it’s a topic in and of itself), but in the past it revolved around temptations to return to competitive running. I wanted to see if I could overcome the mental barriers I faced back then and deliver the performances I’m actually capable of. I also missed the buzz of track sessions and races, the adventure of seeing how fast I could go, and the community at my athletics club. This is still something that plays on my mind.

But of course returning to that situation isn’t simple - I have prioritised other activities like strength training, Muay Thai and sprinting for years now, which was a deliberate decision I made given where I had arrived physically and psychologically with competitive running. Some of that would definitely have to give if I returned to my running goals, and all the running would likely hinder my progress in those other activities, creating a conflict. My day-to-day life and responsibilities also look very different now, so fitting in the amount of training I used to do would be a stretch. Here I’m bumping up against a reality we often don’t want to face: we can’t have it all, and everything we say “yes” to requires a “no” (to use the wise words of a dream group friend).

So then I tend to return to the place of “what I’m doing now is right”, but part of me still can’t quite let the running stuff go and the merry-go-round continues.

How do we end up here?

There are several potential scenarios in which we may struggle to move on from the past. Some will be unique to the individual, but I’ll discuss a few common ones here.

The first is the confrontation with developmental shifts which can be naturally challenging. Consider the goals of optimal aesthetics or peak objective performance - these are often in the forefront of young people’s minds, and more readily available for them to pursue for a number of reasons. Come middle age though, these goals become more tenuous and things like longevity, energy and functionality become more prominent. Nonetheless, many people who are approaching the age of “no longer a young adult”, whenever you believe that to be, find themselves struggling to let go of a sole and intense focus on their physique and objective performance, or ways of approaching physical activity that don’t do any good for where they are wanting to go in life. It can be tricky to simply magic up a new focus, and if you’ve been “performance-at-all-costs” you might struggle to be motivated to do anything at all in the absence of those same performance goals. Equally, people approaching older age struggle with the reality that there are some things they can pretty much be 100% certain they will never do, at all or again, which is a hard pill to swallow.

A second scenario is where you chose or were forced to actively withdraw from previous activities or circumstances in an unsatisfactory manner. Maybe you picked up an injury that finished your chances of shooting for international level; you burnt out and lost the love or confidence for your activity; you faced mental barriers you just couldn’t overcome and decided to quit. The decision to stop was inevitable, yet somehow unsatisfactory because you felt you had more to give - you’ve got unfinished business and find it difficult to put that time of your life to bed.

A third scenario is when our activities come to an end because of significant life events that change our circumstances (in either positive or negative ways). The activity itself doesn’t come to any kind of unsatisfactory end, yet it’s common to have unfinished business here too and you may have struggled to reorient yourself after the change. Maybe you now lack time for your previous activity schedule given your work hours or parenthood, or something major happens to you that has you questioning what you really care about and how you want to spend your time. Perhaps you relocate and what you previously did doesn’t fit so seamlessly into your routine right now because your environment, support network and resources have changed. Or one more - maybe you are happy with your decision to switch activities, but you find yourself approaching them with attitudes or expectations that are only fit for the old ones.

Not everyone struggles to navigate such scenarios - some people are able to let go of the past and move on, adapting to their new reality and shifting their mindset accordingly. However where people do struggle to move on, there is often at least one (or sometimes several) of 3 psychological patterns underpinning the struggle.

1) Existential angst

I’ll start with the most universal pattern, something almost all of us will experience more generally during our lives, and that is the experience of existential angst.

Existential angst is a term to describe all of the psychological discomfort activated by confrontations with our nature and reality as human beings. For example, transitions like the above bring us face-to-face with the unavoidable limitations we face in our lives, the fact that there are tensions between different things we care about that are hard to balance, and irreconcilable conflicts we experience about what to do with our time.

Our lives, available time and resources are all finite, which leaves us with endless decisions to make about what to prioritise and how to approach what we do. Choosing one thing means sacrificing another, and sometimes the choice you make may seem obvious (e.g. choosing to earn a living instead of spending all of your time running) because it’s driven by a direct survival need, but survival isn’t all there is to it. According to thinkers from the existentialist school of thought, we have an innate need to create meaning and purpose in our lives to combat the chaos of reality - a cornerstone of psychological stability. We want to feel as if we are doing something that is important and worthwhile, and just because we need to earn money to survive, that doesn’t mean our yearning for a higher purpose goes away. Likewise, just because 2 things can’t co-exist or be done together doesn’t mean we want either thing any less! We carry on wanting. In fact, because of this urge to make our lives count, there is an underlying sense of anxiety about not making the right decision about how to spend our time, whether we are aware of it or not. There’s also a sense of loss when we feel that we can’t live out our potential. “Will I regret all this later?”

This explains why we struggle to manage conflicts over mutually exclusive activities, ways of living or goals, and to balance tensions between competing priorities. Even more straightforwardly, life transitions (whether natural or forced, positive or negative) are inherently disorganising, psychologically speaking. Adapting to a life change requires significant psychological change that is costly in terms of both energy and clarity moving forward. For example, maybe you still technically have time to exercise having landed a full-time job, but you might find it difficult to feel connected to your exercise motives in the face of this new routine and everything that comes with it. Your brain is busy trying to figure out where you’re going, what your priorities should be and how to solve the problems in front of you. And maybe you’re changing and you don’t realise it.

Finally, coming face to face with our mortality via ageing can be confronting, depending on our previous exposure to such topics and our life outlook. Most of us don’t give much thought to the time-limited nature of everything we do in our lives, so when we are faced directly with the reality that some things will cease to be it can be jarring. It isn’t just the much-loved activity or experiences that we lose - it’s also psychological stability, because how we regularly spend our time feeds into our understanding of ourselves and the world. All of that needs updating when we move to a new chapter.

2) The puer aeternus and puella aeterna archetypes

A specific but surprisingly common pattern responsible for the struggle with such scenarios is that of the puer aeternus or puella aeterna archetype.

The term “archetype” describes a psychological pattern that is universally observed across cultures, for which we all have the potential. Just like reflexes are built into our DNA, so are archetypes - they are like blueprints for universally recognised patterns of behaviour, attitudes and perceptions. Their names usually reflect prototypical characters who embody the relevant behaviours - think the hero, sage, everyman, wise woman, lover, trickster, warrior, etcetera. We all know roughly what it means to be heroic, wise, or loving, for example - they are modes of operating that organise our behaviour and that we can take up. The details will shift according to context, but there is a basic pattern underlying the actions and ways of being of each archetype.

The puer aeternus translates to “the eternal boy” (or eternal girl, in the puella’s case). I won’t dive into full details here for efficiency purposes, but if you want to learn more check out this post from my other Substack. Some relevant aspects of the puer/puella are the wish to remain young forever (literally and metaphorically) - a reluctance to contend with the world as it is, ground oneself in reality, and accept the setting aside of some potentials so others can be lived out. We see the negative side of the puer/puella in the tendency to look back on the past with rose-tinted glasses and yearn for a more hedonic and exciting existence than we perceive to have in the humdrum of our current everyday life. The puer/puella is very good at recognising when something they are already doing is engaging and meaningful, throwing all of their energy into it, but not so good at recognising the potential for meaning in committing to more sophisticated or reality-based pursuits in the future.

How is this relevant? We all have to drop things from earlier stages of life, be those attitudes, behaviours, activities, goals or priorities. This is part of the flow of life - as we age and our circumstances change, life demands different things of us and what is available to us changes. This means we have to change, which requires us to sacrifice the old for the new - many things we used to do or value will have run their course at some point. But like with existential tensions, this doesn’t mean we stop wanting those things. The puer/puella aspect of us naturally wants to remain in that almost paradisal state of being full of youthful potential, having adventures chasing performance goals and spending our time exactly as we please.

I often daydream about the idea of going back to the training situation I had with my athletics group - training twice a day, meeting up and going on training trips, immersing myself in the fascinating world of endurance science and nutrition, and spending a lot of time fantasising about the times I could achieve. It’s all very exciting and enticing to think about - it makes a lot of what I’m doing now feel utterly boring. But it’s not real life anymore, and if I were to allow that perspective to consume me I would be missing everything meaningful and fruitful about the present and future, no matter how different or “limited” it is.

This is even more potent if our physical activities once served the purpose of temporarily compensating for perceived flaws or feelings of inadequacy. Sport and exercise can really seem to hold the promise of one day making us feel accepted or finally “good enough”. If this is the case, such activities will continue to feel somehow addictive - again, they provide a sense of psychological stability and positive potential the puer/puella yearns for.

3) Identity

The role of our sense of identity - who we think we are - in psychological stability and well-being should not be underestimated. For a lot of people, physical activities feed strongly into their sense of who they are, and when this goes by the wayside for whatever reason they can find themselves feeling lost and somewhat disconnected from life. “If I’m not doing that/performing like that anymore, who am I?” This is particularly potent if we have a whole community or social group based on our activities that we then feel we can’t connect with in the same way.

There is a bit of a theme running throughout these 3 patterns, which is stability. Having a clear sense of who we are and what we are doing in life gives us clarity and reduces uncertainty, meaning life seems less stressful and more coherent. We feel satisfied with what we’ve done each day, at least relatively speaking. And if this identity links us to a community, even better - there are few things we find more meaningful than connecting to like-minded others. However, this can get undermined when our circumstances change, leaving us with the task of reorienting ourselves and reshaping our purpose.

What are the consequences?

It’s no wonder then that we struggle to let go of our past goals, motives and activities. Whatever the reason for your taking up a seat on this merry-go-round, the “unlived life” keeps knocking at the door, and we wish we could slow down time, but we can’t.

However, if we’re not careful we can stay stuck in a sort of limbo, hanging onto something that is no longer working or realistic. We may end up trying to bring the old goal or activity back to life, and sometimes that’s workable if we can pursue it in a way that aligns with our current rhythms…. But often it doesn’t so it turns out to be futile, or we constantly ruminate about going back to it but never act on it because we know it isn’t realistic. We may try to move forward with a new goal, but find ourselves caught up in past attitudes that don’t fit the new goal (e.g. perfectionism or competitiveness).

The cost to holding onto past goals, motives or identities like this is that it always poses some resistance to what we’re trying to do now which can stop us committing to and finding our real enjoyment and meaning in that. In other words, we allow the past to take life out of the present.

Mythologically speaking this is a classic case of the death of the king or queen - the “ruling principle” has perished and needs replacement. In one of my favourite books, Maps of Meaning, Peterson describes this kind of scenario as “worshipping a dead god” - hanging onto an obsolete belief system in the hope that it will provide us with what we want, but there is no life - potential - left in it.

Now, there’s no reason we can’t reflect on what was so meaningful about our past endeavours or situations and consider how to reshape those to better suit the present, holding onto some of the important elements. But it’s important to be aware of when we’re yearning to go back to the exact same situations which won’t work with what we’re now doing. And the reality is it can be difficult to recreate some of those things - for example, I found my past running situation to be uniquely transcendent because of a specific combination of factors that I’m unlikely to be able to replicate again. Or more accurately, I am unwilling to replicate them again given other priorities. So if we are to bring forward elements of the past, we must do so judiciously and pragmatically and be honest with ourselves about what we really want given our limited choices.

What do we do?

If you find yourself stuck in this cycle of wanting to go back to something you can’t go back to or no longer fits your current life, or maybe you feel directionless, there is an antidote but it’s a bit of a journey that proceeds in overlapping stages.

Firstly, it’s important to acknowledge that you’re experiencing a loss. It’s natural to yearn for good things that we no longer have - if it was an important part of your life, you’ll miss it, and it isn’t as simple as logically deciding “oh well, that’s done” and manually gaining a sense of closure. If only our brains worked in such a simple manner. Instead there’s the need to mourn - truly moving on means allowing the feelings that exist about no longer being in your previous situation, no matter how uncomfortable they are. And you can use these uncomfortable feelings to establish some important things about yourself:

• What was so compelling and important to you about your previous activity, approach or goals (or however you want to describe the thing you are missing)? Try to dig beneath the superficial or practical details - for example, if you found chasing times really exciting, what about that was so exciting? What processes lay underneath that and gave it its magic?

• What do you feel you are missing out on now that your circumstances have changed? This is a broad question so write down anything that comes to mind - relaxation, mood boosts, body image improvements, social connection, energy, strength….

• If your activity/approach felt integral to who you are, what about it did that for you? Why is that something that makes you you?

• Is there anything you feel will never be, because of your change in circumstances? What is that, and why is it important?

• What unfinished business do you feel you have, if any? What still nags at you about it?

The task from here is to consider what might allow you to bring any positive elements of your previous circumstances forward into what you do now, where realistic. You can also consider whether there other avenues through which you can channel the psychological forces that made your previous situation so engaging and meaningful. Having a positive future direction is just as important as coming to terms with the past. There are so many different reflective activities you can do to achieve this that go beyond the scope of this post - if you are interested, consider becoming a paid subscriber (for whom I take requests for extra posts) or getting in touch if you want help working actively on this.

Secondly, it’s worth backtracking and asking yourself why you took a different path. As I mentioned above, sometimes our new direction really is forced, but if it wasn’t entirely involuntary it’s worth reflecting on what happened.

• What took me forward to something else?

• What happened to the previous version of me? Did I outgrow it or did it get buried under the challenges or just life?

• Did the activity lose its energy or pull for some reason?

• Did I really have to let my approach/activity/goals go, or did I struggle to adapt to my new circumstances? Was it that it wasn’t going to fit anyway, or did I just struggle with the transition?

• Am I yearning for something genuinely real from the past, or am I just unhappy with what I am doing in the present?

Thirdly, moving forward means seeing the positive and potential in the present and future. The quote I believe is attributed to John Rockefeller comes to mind: “Don’t be afraid to give up the good to go for the great.” Now you might be wondering “how on earth is my current situation supposed to be better than my past situation if I am unhappy with it?” It certainly might feel like you are downgrading, regressing, giving things up or “stepping back”, particularly if you are bumping up against the limitations of life such as ageing or having to quit an activity due to injury. But that’s in the context of your previous situation. There are genuine physical regressions or declines that we go through, but a lot of the way we experience that is subjective. For example, there is so much negativity around ageing in the West that we entirely miss out on the potential there is in gaining life experience and moving on. Every new chapter can be an upgrade if you choose to make it so, but that’s the challenge (and not an easy one to navigate). I recommend James Hollis’ books about meaning and the second half of life if you are struggling with age-related challenges - they are very good at encouraging you to reflect on the big question of “what is there for me here, now and in the future?”

With all of this, bear in mind that there is no way of manually figuring out and forcing an answer – you have to sit with it for a bit and let it simmer over time. I hope this has been thought-provoking, and feel free to get in touch with feedback or questions.

Chloe
Psychology of Movement

When it comes to being physically active, the requirement to endure the sensations and experience around physical effort can be a significant barrier. This post is going to break down why more intense effort is naturally uncomfortable, but why it only becomes all-out aversive when we react to it in unhelpful ways. First I’ll go into detail about why effort is inherently uncomfortable, and then I’ll explain why we often inadvertently magnify that discomfort through our reactions and turn it into something downright aversive. Finally, I’ll finish with some reflective questions to help you explore how you may be magnifying discomfort around effort.

Physical effort is naturally uncomfortable

Throughout our body we have sensory receptors that detect physiological and physical changes that are happening in our tissues. As the amount of work we are doing (and therefore effort) increases, specific types of receptors will start to send increasingly frequent signals to our brains about the nature of these changes. We have mechanoreceptors which detect changes to pressure and force in our muscles and tissues, chemoreceptors which detect chemical changes such as reduced oxygen supply or increased lactate, and nociceptors which trigger pain signals, communicating a potential disturbance or damage to our tissues.

All of these signals contribute to the experience of fatigue, discomfort and potentially pain, depending on the intensity of effort. These are all vital for informing us of the status of our body.

However, that’s not all there is to it. Once those signals are received, areas of the brain that deal with emotion are also activated, which contribute to the effort being experienced as unpleasant. If pain exceeds a certain threshold, brain structures dealing with threat detection and hence emotions like anxiety or even fear can also emerge. These feelings tend to increase our vigilance towards the unpleasant sensations and potentially urge us to withdraw from the activity in question. And whilst the brain also partially suppresses pain signals during some kinds of exercise via endorphin release, this is insufficient to significantly reduce the discomfort, aside from in unusual circumstances.

So you may see already how the experience of significant amounts of effort in the physical activity space are inherently uncomfortable - your brain is reacting as it should.

But that’s only the beginning. We are also constantly assessing the anticipated costs versus benefits of every movement we do at an automatic, unconscious level. The more the costs are deemed to exceed the benefits, the greater the perceived effort will be. Thus we have automatic anticipatory processes also potentially working to make what we are doing feel even more arduous.

Furthermore, prolonged effort can also make us feel weak in some instances. If you are doing high-intensity cardio to the point of exhaustion or surpassing your anaerobic threshold, you will inevitably experience a reduced ability to control your movements to the same extent, reduced power output and possibly some disturbance to your proprioception (sense of balance and awareness of where your limbs are in space). This requires you to put more effort in to continue which then increases the weakness further, so there is a double-layered experience of feelings of powerlessness or weakness that comes with this. The same can happen when strength training if you are trying to max out or alternatively working at extreme ranges of motion whereby you are far weaker in the stretch position of a muscle than the normal range. Unless this situation is associated with positive or meaningful experiences for you, it serves as another form of implicit threat because it signals a decreasing ability to have your intended effect on the world.

Finally, to add to all that, we might have negative associations with certain levels of effort that have emerged from our experience with it. Perhaps intense effort evokes feelings of being weak more generally, being vulnerable or inadequate, or memories of shame-provoking experiences in PE class. Where we have repeated negative experiences that go beyond the fundamental discomfort of effort, we will learn to experience effort as more aversive.

All of these things happen automatically, making effort not only uncomfortable but also potentially emotionally negative. But for a lot of people effort is not just uncomfortable or unpleasant but explicitly aversive. For some people the word “aversive” is synonymous with “uncomfortable”, but I am using “aversive” in the psychological context whereby it typically means that the activity is experienced as explicitly negative, is accompanied by a strong avoidance tendency (i.e. to hold back, stop or avoid the activity altogether) and elicits anticipatory dread. With physical activity this is also usually accompanied by the sense that the effort and its sensations are unmanageable.

The good news is this is in your control, particularly in the long-term. And that is because effort only becomes truly aversive because of how you react to the experience of effort and its accompanying thoughts and feelings. Some common examples of the ways in which we turn this discomfort into aversion are: catastrophising about the sensations and what they might mean for the rest of the activity, being fundamentally unwilling to have them, relentless self-criticism, buying into negative thoughts and talking ourselves into a more negative state, and allowing all of the above to totally dominate our focus.

This means there is work to do on looking at how you may be magnifying negative experiences via unhelpful reactions and then creating more positive associations with it. That way you can work towards an experience of effort that is more mixed, as it naturally should be - not something you’d wish to engage in constantly and perhaps accompanied by some negative thoughts and feelings, but nonetheless feels worthwhile, manageable and contained.

Below are some questions to help you start exploring.

How am I transforming discomfort into aversion?

When you start to “hurt” in a workout and the sense of exertion really builds up...

• What is it about the effort that you find most difficult to deal with?

• What are you thinking about?

• What are you saying to yourself, internally or otherwise?

• How do you interpret the sensations of effort?

• What emotions come up and what’s your response to them?

• How is your behaviour affected?

• What are the consequences of all of the above?

• How do you think all of that contributes to the experience of effort in the future?

Transforming the psychological functions of effort

Here are some questions/prompts to help you reflect on how you might build positive associations with effort:

• Why do you want to be able to deal with effort better?

• What is important to you about the activities that involve effort?

• If you have identified any patterns in the questions above that you feel are making the experience of effort worse, what could you do instead?

• What is the best way to encourage yourself in these situations?

• What do you want your focus to be when it really starts to hurt?

• The uncomfortable or aversive nature of effort is an excellent opportunity to practise dealing with adversity. Some people find it helpful to brainstorm some values that they might like to guide their behaviour in the face of such discomfort, giving it a new meaning and providing them a new focus. My favourites in these scenarios are humour, courage, humility, being patient with myself, dignity, doing hard things and being in my own corner, but there are no right answers so think about the qualities you would like to embrace when faced with this challenge.

Chloe
Psychology of Movement

When it comes to making health-related behaviour changes (e.g. diet, exercise, well-being), sometimes we need a certain level of challenge or a minimum rate of progress to keep motivated and make our actions feel worthwhile. If the tasks we are attempting on a regular basis are sufficiently (but not overwhelmingly) challenging, they feel somewhat promising and they also create reasonably swift progress. This is a rewarding experience which further fuels motivation and hence more of the desired behaviours.

But what about when literally everything feels too challenging?

The way you should approach a change to your health behaviours depends on your current situation. If you’re in a serious rut, or even at what feels like rock bottom in life, trying to make big changes is not always sustainable.

Let’s say you’ve been out of any kind of exercise routine for months or longer and you feel utterly hopeless; your diet is all over the place and “healthy eating” feels impossible right now; you’re overwhelmed with life’s demands and despite desperately wanting to, the idea of mustering time and energy you don’t have to improve your well-being is just too much. In those cases, not only are actions with rapid and visible impacts not an option, but failed attempts to take those actions may only strengthen your despair.

An alternative

Fortunately there’s another option that doesn’t involve much time or effort, and that is a method I call micro goals. Micro goals are small, specific actions in service of your goals that you are AT LEAST 8/10 confident that you can do every day (i.e. 8/10 if you’re feeling rubbish, 10/10 if you’re feeling OK). The idea behind this approach is that you start with deceptively simple or easy actions and slowly build over time.

I want to emphasise that I really do mean a minimum of 8/10, and here I will warn you – picking a suitable micro goal can be humbling, because it can mean reducing the action down to something that feels really quite trivial (note I said feels, not is) and hence accepting that you’re not where you want to be. But it should seem almost trivial - the idea is to make it so straightforward and doable that you have NO EXCUSES not to do it (apart from perhaps forgetting occasionally - you’re only human).

And it really can feel discouraging to face the reality that you’re having to reduce your efforts down to something so minimal, but this is where some self-compassion is in order. You may not like where you are, and you may even blame yourself for that, but you are just a human being like the rest of us. We all get ourselves into messy situations sometimes, and that’s not deliberate (or very rarely, anyway). Equally, we do the best we can to manage given the resources we have so far had access to. So try to hold off with excessive self-criticism - in the words of Dr Jordan Peterson, "don’t beat yourself up until you can’t get back up again.” Accepting where you are can paradoxically be liberating, because it means dropping unrealistic or tyrannical expectations and meeting yourself where you’re at. I’ll address this in more depth in a future post which I will link here when written.

So, if you’re looking to eat healthier or lose weight, an example of a micro goal could be something like replacing one specific type of biscuit you often eat with something else that’s just a tiny bit more nutritious (doesn’t have to be perfect – forget the “ideal” and focus on the 8/10 confidence metric). Or if you want to reduce your stress levels maybe you decide to commit to 2 minutes of mindfulness at the start of each lunchbreak. If your goal is an exercise habit or routine, perhaps you decide on a 5-minute walk before breakfast every morning. It doesn’t matter – just pick something super specific in line with your ultimate goals that feels doable.

Once you’ve settled on your micro goal, aim to do it daily. The more regularly you do it, the easier it will become. And keep a record - this is important because it’s concrete evidence that you have made a change and stuck with it. Just a tally on your phone or mark in your calendar is sufficient. Don’t worry about doing anything else for now. If you feel you can then great, that’s up to you, but I would recommend starting with just the one tiny thing. And yes it feels trivial - that’s fine, we’re deliberately starting small. We’re interested in building a proper, solid foundation, not a rushed and shaky one.

Once that feels relatively automatic, i.e. you barely have to think about it, then you progress. EITHER: build on that habit (e.g. 5 becomes 10 minutes of walking) or add in another micro goal (e.g. 5 minutes of walking at lunchtime, swap a bag of crisps for something a bit healthier, etc.). Repeat - do this progression or 2nd micro goal until it’s automatic and then progress again, etcetera. If you keep going with this the effects build like compound interest, physically and psychologically.

Why?

This strategy is actually something I intuitively came up with in my teens when battling to make diet and exercise changes, but unbeknownst to me at the time it is based on the psychological principle of self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is one of the most consistent predictors of long-term behaviour change, defined as your belief in your ability to do a task effectively. Decades of research now show that higher self-efficacy leads to more effort and persistence with a task. It is embedded in this approach in a couple of key ways:

• In reducing your efforts down to things that feel at least 8/10 manageable, you reduce the mental load, perceived effort and perceived costs involved, and hence increase self-efficacy. Considering emotional overwhelm, fatigue and stress make doing activities that involve lots of “will-power” (self-regulation) harder, this is particularly important if you’re in a real rut.

• By making even tiny changes, you generate concrete evidence that you can make a change and inch towards your goal. The resulting feelings of can-do and competence, even if small, are intrinsically motivating. We have evolved to seek out situations or tasks in which we demonstrate competence, so in creating these conditions you increase the chance of feeling more motivated over time. Some people then experience a real snowball effect where they then feel energised to do more and more.

Using this micro goal method I made dramatic changes to the way I ate and exercised that stuck. It literally started with swapping Mr Kipling’s Angel Slices (which I was kind of addicted to) for something like a cereal bar - that was it. And then I progressed onto other things bit by bit. I had ups and downs, but none of those changes have yet been reversed nearly 20 years later. I then shaped it as a strategy with various clients who used it for things like stopping binge-eating, getting more active, changing their diet, developing home workout habits or reducing workout dropout rates. You could theoretically use it for any behaviour you want to change.

I don’t mean this to sound like I’m tooting my own horn - it’s more a reflection of the reality that often the best approach is one that you, as the individual, intuitively come up with or feel like trying based on a careful analysis of your own situation. There was nothing special about me that allowed me to do this - it was just an honest appraisal of where I was at and the ineffectiveness of previous strategies, and then a trial and error process. We all have an innate capacity to learn how to introspect and creatively generate solutions, and this is something you can work to develop. So in reading about this, I invite you to try it out and shape it for yourself, given where you are at and what you struggle with.

The caveat

The caveat (and there always is one) is that you have to be patient and stay focused. By that I mean you simply need a way of reminding yourself to complete the micro goals every day (or get back on it if you forget), and also to acknowledge that long-term change isn’t necessarily quick change. Or just because it’s slower than you’d like doesn’t mean it’s not happening.

This is a challenge because it’s very easy for self-defeating gremlins to creep in here - “told you nothing would change, you’re not capable of it, there’s no point.” That’s expected, because the “mental maps” we have of ourselves and the world (i.e. our current understandings) can be relatively resistant to new behaviours - new behaviours might demand a restructuring of those maps and hence exposure to the unknown. So in a way, it would be odd not to experience these self-doubting narratives. Part of this is learning how to notice those voices and keep plodding along anyway.

Despite these requirements, this approach doesn’t demand lots of will-power or mental energy from you like attempting bigger changes does, and this matters if you are overwhelmed or in a very negative place. All you have to do is keep focused on this one small thing and trust in the process. You’ll have to wait longer for visible progress, but a solution to that is to reconsider your metrics of progress. Yes you might be after a particular level of fitness, a dietary pattern or a regular practice of something which all constitute clear benchmarks of progress, but what about the progress you make every day relating to things like persistence and self-regulation?

My solution to this is something I call small victories. Small victories are exactly what they sound like - tiny things that might not make much difference on their own, but they do contribute to the long-term picture and you’re still slightly better off than if you didn’t do them. For example it might be that you were in the middle of polishing off a sharing bag of crisps but you stopped yourself 2/3 of the way through. It’s easy to write that off as pointless in the grand scheme of things - it’s unlikely to make any difference to your health or calorie intake by itself. But actually stopping yourself midway through reflects a values-based decision taken against prevailing instinctual and emotional forces… so what kind of developments could you make over time with repeated practice of that? Not so trivial, in my opinion.

Or maybe you didn’t feel like doing your lunchtime mindfulness at all and had to really wrestle with yourself to manage just 15 seconds - small victory. This isn’t about rewarding everything and anything, it’s about recognising the effort and success where there is success. Yes, you didn’t manage the whole 2 minutes but you did successfully get yourself in a position to attempt it and do it for 15 seconds - you succeeded at something when it would have been easy not to try at all. Like the previous example it is of note, even if the micro goal wasn’t completed. In this sense small victories are often most relevant when things are challenging, because when things are challenging the context is different and therefore more effort is required than when things are not so challenging.

Furthermore, there is a valuable opportunity in all of this to hone your patience and work on your consistency. What could you achieve for yourself if you did cultivate just 10% more patience and show up 10% more of the time? Where else might you benefit from that in your life?

As always I welcome any feedback or questions and hope this post helps you make positive changes.

Chloe
Psychology of Movement

Lacking motivation is the most commonly cited barrier when it comes to being consistent with physical activity, alongside lack of time. This might show up as a total lack of desire for the activity, or it might be that conflicted “I want to logically but I just don’t feel like doing it”. Either way, it seems that sense of energy towards being active is just absent.

So we cite this lack of motivation as the reason for or root cause of our participation struggles. We ask “how can I feel more motivated?” and try to manually increase the feeling of motivation itself by perhaps focusing our minds on the benefits of the activity.

But there are a couple of problems with this: a) motivation isn’t just a logical conclusion we come to through analysing the benefits of an activity, and b) how motivated we feel isn’t the core reason for our participation or lack thereof in physical activity - it is in fact an end symptom.

If we want to influence our motivation, and hence how energised we feel towards participating, we need to understand what results in that feeling of lacking motivation. Otherwise we’re not targeting the root cause, just the consequence of the cause.

What is underneath lack of motivation?

Motivation - the desire or impetus to pursue something - emerges from the activation of what my favourite neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp aptly named the seeking system. The seeking system is a brain network that drives us to pursue things, underpinned predominantly by dopaminergic activity. When active, it creates the sense of wanting something, energising us to explore and seek it out. It contributes to feelings of positive anticipation, curiosity and determination that we might experience when we are going after something we want.

The seeking system is activated by things that signal the potential for a reward or opportunity - in other words, things that might be beneficial to us. These might be physical things we need, social interactions, opportunities for learning and development or things that we perceive to be pleasurable in some way. These signals can come from within, such as cues for hunger (and hence the resulting drive to seek out food), or from without, such as receiving a text from your friend asking you to join them at the pub or coming across an advert for an interesting-looking obstacle race.

But the active pursuit and exploration of things requires energy, so evolution has shaped us to be a little judicious about what is “worth” pursuing. This means if something doesn’t appear to hold significant potential benefits, or there are plenty of anticipated down-sides around pursuing it, then the seeking system won’t come online in the same way.

So lacking motivation signals that at the current time, the activity in question is deemed insufficiently rewarding to be worth pursuing. In other words, the benefits aren’t considered to exceed the costs, meaning the seeking system is not currently supporting participation in the activity.

Let’s break this down a bit more because it’s helpful to understand. This state of lacking motivation can be a consequence of a few scenarios:

• The anticipated effort involved in the activity is deemed excessive of resources (physical or mental)

• The perceived threats or down-sides in participating eclipse or outweigh the benefits (e.g. embarrassment, judgment from others, self-criticism, discomfort)

• There is an absence of perceived benefits in participating, regardless of down-sides

• The perceived benefits in abstaining (e.g. by staying home in the warm) or the down-sides of necessarily sacrificing other activities (e.g. getting work done instead) are greater than the benefits of participating in the activity.

So, to understand why we lack motivation we need to understand how the activity and its alternative (i.e. what you would have to sacrifice for it) are perceived and valued. That is the real cause of why we end up participating, struggling to participate or not participating.

In the following section I will explore a few areas of enquiry that we can pursue to understand what feeds into our motivation. It may seem like we’re risking getting too deep into the details here, but it pays to bear in mind that motivation is more complex than it seems - if we leave that complexity out we set ourselves up for failure because we think it’s simpler than it is and overlook key factors impacting our motivation.

Understanding costs and benefits

Following on from the point I just made, it is also useful to acknowledge that the perceived costs and benefits of participating or abstaining in physical activity exist at different levels of awareness. To add to that, sometimes the true impact of a cost or benefit is on a different level of awareness to the cost or benefit itself. For example, we may explicitly recognise that we dread XYZ, but perhaps we underestimate how much it really deters us. In reality we aren’t party to most of what goes on in our brains - our conscious mind has an extremely limited view, and accepting this is important for cultivating the patience to persist with exploring your own motivation.

Some of the perceived costs and benefits of your activities will be explicitly conscious, staring you in the face as soon as you think about your activity, and I would always recommend starting with these. Thinking of examples of costs or deterrents, you might be able to easily identify that you…

• Get self-critical whenever you feel you’re not doing too well

• Feel unpleasantly competitive with certain classmates

• Feel self-conscious

• Dread the discomfort or fatigue involved in something

• Think constantly about what else you “should” be doing at home or work while you’re in the gym

• Feel under time pressure

• Don’t feel you’re making the progress you want to make

Even just one of these can be enough to dwarf the benefits and deter you from participating if they’re potent enough. Some useful questions to start with are:

• What makes my activity seem unappealing, overly effortful or costly? It is likely not the entire activity in itself but just aspects of it, so try to get specific.

• What puts me off, what don’t I like about it, what triggers any negative feelings?

• Bear in mind too that these answers will likely change depending on your circumstances: emotions, fatigue, distraction, priorities, health status, etcetera. Look at your patterns - when am I more likely to be deterred OR to feel like doing it, are there commonalities?

• We often forget that everything we do means sacrificing doing something else too. What are the costs of stopping what I’m doing to do the activity? What are the benefits of abstaining, of doing what I would do instead?

Likewise you can reflect on the perceived benefits of your activities in the same way. But bear in mind the most motivating benefits are not just logical (i.e. “I know this is good for my health so I should do it”) but benefits you actually experience at a deeper level than the intellectual. You need to feel good in some way doing the activity. This doesn’t necessarily mean it’s all fun and games (which many activities definitely aren’t!) - feeling good doesn’t just refer to pleasure but also things like a sense of meaning, focus, engagement, curiosity, pride, adventure, satisfaction or determination, to name a few. And the good news is we needn’t experience an absence of difficulty or negative emotions to experience these positive feelings, they are available alongside the challenging experiences.

So I would encourage you to really reflect on whether those benefits you can consciously recognise actually deliver an experiential sense of promise when you think about pursuing them - that’s the kind of benefit that activates the seeking system.

Sometimes though our experiences are a bit more nebulous and semi-conscious. For example, you might find that you just feel a bit out of place when you go to do your activity, or you feel the urge to give up quite quickly for no real reason and you’re not sure what it’s about. This might be for example because you have a negative view of yourself that gets activated by the situation, leaving you with a general, free-floating sense of inadequacy that is hard to articulate yet makes the experience less enjoyable. These need more exploration - often with a third party - and this is something that will be included in our upcoming short course which is about understanding your motivation (subscribe or keep an eye on future posts to be notified of its release).

This haziness or semi-consciousness is just as commonly the case for perceived benefits, because as implied above there is often a disparity between intellectually recognised benefits and the actual experienced benefits - the benefits we claim we experience may not be felt as strongly as we think they are when reflecting outside of the activity. For instance you might really love the idea of a workout, but the reality is different or the positive aspect is actually dwarfed by other less pleasant ones when you do it. Or maybe the activity doesn’t play out like that at all - the mental idea is not the same as reality, and in fact reflects more of a fantasy or ideal. You can also reflect on whether you are taking into account how those benefits are experienced when experienced WITH any inevitable down-sides.

A few questions to ponder, because if you struggle consistently with motivation it may be that your benefits are less potent than you realise and a reshaping of your goals and approach is necessary:

• Are there really lots of benefits, or potent ones? Is that my direct experience of the activity?

• Are they consistently experienced?

• Are there situations or emotional states I get into that make these benefits seem weaker?

• If these are just anticipated benefits rather than actually experienced benefits, where do those ideas come from? What am I basing those anticipations on?

Finally, there can be aspects to your experience that are totally out of awareness. At the deepest and most automatic level our brains are constantly assessing the anticipated costs of literally everything we do and comparing them to our assessed resources (a whole host of factors, most we aren’t aware of). If the costs are deemed high given perceived resources and the anticipated benefits of doing the activity, you’ll be left with an almost visceral sense that the activity feels like too much effort. A lot of this is based on physiological factors as well as psychological.

But of course there are also more purely psychological dynamics going on deep beneath the surface. For example, consciously you may love the idea of getting into a regular strength training routine but every time you consider doing it you somehow get distracted, procrastinate and find yourself automatically thinking “I’ll deal with that later.” It’s as if something invisible gently guides your attention away, creating a haze and disconnecting you from the idea. So you may feel that spark of motivation but it never turns into action and you push it down the road every time, all the while convincing yourself you’ll get round to it. In this instance you can tell something is going on, but you’ve absolutely no idea what, and that’s why you continue to repeat the pattern. Perhaps it’s that the reality of organising and doing this routine is too overwhelming, and the idea of it not being realistic is too disappointing to acknowledge. It could be that at a deeper level your brain is assessing the energy and effort costs to be too high, or maybe you’re carrying around a hidden idea based on past experiences that you’re simply not the type of person who could achieve something like that.

In these circumstances you really have to dig into the weeds and keep reflecting over time to figure out what’s going on, I’m afraid (again, this is where an external party such as a psychologist is helpful). And this might test your patience, but if you really want to get motivated and consistent it’s necessary to understand these things because without addressing them they’ll continue.

For instance the aspects of your activities that serve as deterrents aren’t going to change unless you actively work to change them, or unless by sheer fluke something environmental happens that does. The good news though is that in really getting to know our deterrents we can actually do something about them or make them more manageable. And that initiative in itself often provides extra motivation for people to engage in the activity because it’s another goal, another target to hit. That promise of personal development adds an extra layer of meaning to physical activities beyond their physical outcomes.

Finally, I want to highlight that there can be other factors totally unrelated to physical activity that impact your ongoing motivation. For example, not only can physical health and even things like diet have an impact on brain function and moods, but they also contribute to those crude cost-benefit analyses that are constantly going on and hence to how hard things feel or how hard they actually are. So health status is an important one to consider.

Equally, our life experiences and psychological responses to them can contribute to muted seeking system activity over time, as seen in conditions like depression (which is literally experienced as the pressing down, de-pression, of drive and energy). That’s a discussion for a future post, but what it means is the seeking system is chronically underactive, in which case you’d benefit from more general psychological support. Furthermore, personality comes into it too - the trait of conscientiousness for example means you’re naturally more interested in pursuing challenges and goals. If you aren’t conscientious it’s a little harder, although that’s not to say you can’t become more conscientious in that area. Often people low in conscientiousness benefit from activities that are more play- or socially oriented, even better if organised by someone else to take that aspect out. So there are also practical things you can do to reduce resistance and amp up motivation.

If you are interesting in understanding your motivation at a deeper level, we will be releasing a short course in the coming months that is all about just that. It will guide you in exploring the factors that have an impact on your motivation in more detail, and support you in identifying how to amp up the benefits and reduce the costs in meaningful ways.

In the meantime drop us a comment or e-mail if you have any questions or feedback, we’d love to hear from you.

Chloe
Psychology of Movement

Those of you who know me may recall that I have a passion for depth psychology and dream analysis, not only in the sport and exercise space but also more generally. On that note, I’m excited to announce that I will be running a 90-minute introductory dream workshop at 10:30am 4th July at Place Eight, Swanbourne.

The workshop will cover the basics of why we dream from a Jungian perspective, informed by scientific insights and my professional experience. I’ll then share practical tools for getting started with exploring your own dreams. No prior knowledge needed - just a curiosity about these weird and wonderful nocturnal adventures!

If you’re curious to know more, drop me a message at hello@psychologyofmovement.com or check out the event page: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-psychology-of-dreams-an-introductory-workshop-tickets-1989032215901?aff=oddtdtcreator

Feel free to share with anyone you know may be interested - only 12 spaces though so if you’re keen I’d recommend booking a ticket early (£16.96).

This is for those of you who consistently dread your workouts. If you find yourself in this position, I would always suggesting first considering if it’s worth switching to something different that you don’t dread and therefore participate in and enjoy more. After all, enjoyment is one of the strongest predictors of long-term adherence to exercise and if you’re not getting anything meaningful out of the struggle (e.g. it isn’t part of a bigger endeavour to practise doing things that make you uncomfortable), your efforts may be better directed elsewhere.

But if it’s important to you to do this particular activity because it is personally meaningful in light of your bigger goals and you want to keep doing it then read on.

By “dread” I mean that sense of uncomfortable apprehension about an upcoming event that creates a pit in your stomach and has you bracing yourself for something aversive. This is not to be confused with anxiety - anxiety is more about “what ifs” and worrying about potential outcomes, whereas dread is the anticipation of something that you feel is inevitable - “this is going to hurt/suck.”

Dread has an evolutionary function - it conferred survival advantages to our ancestors, which is why it has remained a part of the spectrum of human emotional experiences. It evolved as a signal to let us know that we are approaching a situation that has similarities with previous situations in which something aversive happened. The benefit, despite the discomfort, is that we then brace for or attempt to avoid the situation. However, I’m sure you can see how this can be unhelpful when it comes to something that isn’t actually threatening, like exercise.

Let’s imagine you have repeated experiences of a particular hill running session where you end up with a lot of uncomfortable feelings: your quads burn like crazy, you feel annoyed about how quickly you get puffed out, and you feel demoralised about your pace compared to others’. These negative emotions and experiences of pain can “tag” the memories you store of those hill sessions with negative emotional qualities, meaning you develop negative gut feelings such as dread about them.

To make things worse, our ability to imagine external situations, i.e. represent them internally in our minds, means we can bring some of the anticipated aversive qualities of those external situations into our experience right now. That means we already feel some of the emotional impact of what we dread is going to happen before it even happens, prolonging and magnifying the negative experience. We remember and imagine the intense physical discomfort, the demoralisation and the frustration, and even begin to feel a bit of it - not appealing. Furthermore, our perception of that upcoming session can then be dominated by the negative side of the experience, instead of incorporating the neutral and positive sides. This makes the workout harder to initiate and it can create a pattern whereby we start to dread it more each time.

So in this hill running scenario, dread is letting you know that you’re about to do something that has involved pain, annoyance and demoralisation in the past. It’s a warning to preferably avoid the situation, and if you can’t then to brace yourself for it.

However that’s not where it has to end - reflecting on the causes of dread can help us to understand where it is coming from and also where we might benefit from changing our approach to the activity. There will always some aspects of exercise that are inherently uncomfortable because they involve significant effort - that is certainly the case for hill running sessions. Some negative emotions are also quite natural in this scenario. But a lot of the time these aspects become dread-inducing in part because of the way we handle them.

Here are some questions to reflect on if you want to try creating some less dread-full experiences with your workouts.

• What is it that you dread specifically, and why?

• What kinds of thoughts do you have when you arrive at that dreaded point in the workout? These could be thoughts about yourself, the aspect of the workout that creates dread or something else.

• Do any feelings come up? About what?

• What are the impact of those thoughts and feelings on your attention, actions and subsequent train of thinking? Do the feelings get magnified, or do others then come up?

• How do you attempt to deal with the dreaded aspects of the workout when they come up?

• What is the typical result of those attempts?

• How do you react if these dreaded aspects impact your workout in some undesirable way (e.g. performance, participation)?

I’m encouraging you to reflect on these questions because often when we have negative experiences during exercise we can magnify their aversive effects via the ways in which we react, without realising. A personal example to illustrate - I used to absolutely dread middle distance track races such as 1500m (when I mustered the guts to do them), to the point where the whole thing would be a psychological mess and I’d never once get close to the times I was running in training. So here’s how I would have answered those questions above:

• I dreaded the building pain and fatigue, resulting slowing pace and the potentially disappointing performance. That was largely because I hated the physical sensations, I felt embarrassed and self-critical, I lacked confidence in managing fatigue and I reacted badly to underperforming.

• When my legs started to burn or I felt the urge to slow down building up I would think things like “I can’t do this, why do I even bother, this is embarrassing, I’m not cut out for this, I’ll never be quick at this distance, I hate this feeling.”

• I would feel totally demoralised, angry and ashamed about both my performance and my inability to tolerate discomfort.

• All of those thoughts and feelings would consume my attention, I’d feel less motivated to keep pushing through, lose hope in my goals, focus intensely on the discomfort instead of my form, slow down and potentially drop out if my performance was “bad” enough.

• There was no educated attempt to deal with the dreaded aspects apart from to try to keep going, but that was rather difficult given what my mind was doing - the intellectual intention to “just keep going” was simply not potent enough to overcome the effects of my thoughts and emotions, not to mention I hadn’t got any idea of how I could focus differently and had made no attempt to address the underlying reasons for my negative reactions.

• Unsurprisingly I’d be very cross and disappointed about my performance every single time and my confidence decreased with each race, not only in terms of my performance but my ability to cope with discomfort!

I hope that gives a clear example of how natural discomfort plus rigid performance standards quickly ballooned into a much worse experience because of my immediate reactions to them (although the philosophy underlying my idea of performance was a key contributor here to my reactions!). All of that then paves the way for a whole load of dread. So how we react in the moment to things we find aversive can magnify it tenfold. However there’s no need to get self-critical about this - we all do it, these automatic reactions are simply learned behaviours that we likely didn’t choose and originally developed to respond to some kind of challenge.

You might be wondering why we develop habitual reactions like this that can seem so unhelpful on the surface, but the answer is all psychological responses are there for a reason - something reinforced them or created the conditions for those to be the most effective responses given the original situation. That can be hard to get your head around - why would getting down on yourself about a performance be effective, for example? Well, for all sorts of reasons - defensive pessimism, familiarity, lack of awareness of alternative perspectives, past experience of negative consequences triggered by underperforming, avoiding the risk of fully committing to something and then truly failing… it could be all sorts of things, but it’s worth reminding yourself that the response somehow worked - it had some kind of purpose, otherwise it wouldn’t have persisted. You just don’t know what that purpose is yet.

Returning to my example, you will see that it’s important to reflect on those immediate reactions - why did I react so negatively to the physical sensations and slowing down? Those are harder questions to answer on the spot and often benefit from deeper reflection, possibly with an external party - I’ll address that in a future post. However what you can do in the meantime is to consider how you could respond differently to change the impact of the dreaded aspects of the workout.

• In which ways do your responses inadvertently magnify these dreaded aspects? Remember these are unintended consequences - try to be reflective rather than critical.

• Of those responses, what could you do differently to change the impact of the dreaded things slightly? For instance, taking my example - how could I respond differently to that onslaught of negative thoughts that came with the burning legs? How could I shift my focus to make things feel more manageable? What else could I aim for within the race that might make engaging with all that distress more meaningful or worthwhile? Could I broaden out my attention so it contained not only the pain and negativity but other things too? Could I talk to myself and provide an alternative voice to the negative one - not to block it out or shout it down, but to provide balance, understanding and an alternative path forward?

In future I will cover various strategies one might try in that kind of situation, but examples may also be found in previous posts such as here, here and here. I’m also open to requests if there is a type of strategy you as readers are particularly interested to learn about - if so, drop a comment down below.

I hope this has been helpful - the bottom line is that if the activity is important to you, dread need not be a barrier that ruins your experience and stops you from going. It’s something that can be worked through and attenuated over time, it just requires some reflection and patience, and for you to tap into your own creativity for creating some different solutions.

Chloe
Psychology of Movement

*Audio with a little more explanation here!

Do you ever decide you want to exercise but simultaneously DON’T want to?

Being in two minds about exercise is often the tipping point at which we decide to bail out of a workout. Maybe it’s a 50-50 conflict - you really want to keep consistent and pursue your goals, but in equal amounts you feel fed up and tired and can’t stand the idea of yet more effort today. Or perhaps 10% of you wants to do it on some intellectual level, knowing you’ll be glad you did, but 90% of you doesn’t - the overwhelming feeling is “I’m just not doing that.”

If you experience this and the “I don’t want to” side often wins out, or maybe you manage to initiate your activity but it’s a miserable experience involving a lot of hard work, this post is for you. I’ll begin by going into depth about why we experience these conflicts, and then provide a practical exercise for how you might deal with it.

Why do we have these conflicts?

The answer lies in our very nature - being human means being naturally conflicted, because we have many different motives, feeling states, needs, values and desires, all relating to different survival needs and developing from different life experiences. Each of these psychological forces has its own telos too - they are aiming at something, and this may or may not align with the idea of exercising.

So we may consciously decide that we want to exercise regularly, but that does not mean that conflicting feelings, motives or attitudes will simply vanish or quieten down. In reality these psychological forces all compete, their current potency depending on a number of situational factors. And whilst some of these dynamics are conscious, others are beneath our awareness or at least elude our understanding, which adds an extra layer of complication.

Furthermore, most activities are naturally ambivalent to us - we have positive, neutral and negative experiences with them, which combine over time to either create a “net” gut feeling or an explicitly felt conflict. And the nature of that gut feeling or conflict ALSO depends on the psychological state we are in when we consider doing the exercise, which is why sometimes we feel up for an activity and others times we don’t.

This psychological reality is often referred to as multiplicity or polypsychism, meaning the mind has multiple components that operate relatively autonomously. Whilst each of us is a single individual with a continuous sense of overall identity, these different psychological components almost act like different programmes that change our experience and behaviour significantly - let me explain.

Psychological forces such as emotions, attitudes, motives, desires and instincts all have the potential to hijack our experience in various ways, by virtue of the way they coordinate brain activity. They don’t just introduce a feeling state or idea into our minds, but they have organising effects on our attention, thinking styles, perceptions, priorities, available memories and physiology, amongst other things.

To give you a random example, negative emotions such as anger tend to facilitate local processing - a narrower span of attention focusing on details - whereas positive emotions like joy tend to facilitate global processing, a broader span of attention that contributes to creativity and wider perspectives. That’s just one specific example, and even that single attentional effect can have a big impact on how we experience and operate in the world at any given time.

What this means is that we can end up thinking, feeling and acting very differently from one situation to the next - imagine what someone might be like when they are involved in road rage versus when they are at home playing blissfully with their children. Different motives and emotions are activated, and hence subjective experience and behaviour are coordinated differently too.

It can even feel as if we are a different person sometimes - have you ever been in a situation where you had an outburst and shortly afterwards thought to yourself: “what came over me?!” Or maybe you bail on a workout, only to think half an hour later “why on earth did I do that? I’ve just let myself down and I knew I would feel like that.” So it can be helpful to understand these states as different programmes, self-states or even versions of yourself if you are so inclined. Carl Jung famously used the terms subpersonalities or splinter personalities, referring to the reality that while these states are part of a bigger whole, they also operate with some degree of autonomy.

To provide a real example, if I’m in certain moods I can feel as if I really just do not care one jot or even feel utter contempt for an activity, and there’s nothing I can do to shift that sentiment, it’s all-consuming. Yet it always vanishes in a few hours or less. That’s what I mean by autonomy - this sentiment isn’t something I choose, it has a life of its own.

Furthermore, we don’t naturally oversee this inner community of ours from a position of calm consciousness (although this is a practice I will be encouraging you to do). We tend to get “blended” with different self-states to different degrees so they dominate our consciousness, or perhaps several of them have a push-pull effect on our thinking, attention, priorities and desires. We tend to shift from one state to the other, and this mechanism is actually essential for healthy functioning - we need to be able to operate differently depending on our current situation and role. But the trade-off to this means we can end up in states that don’t support our valued goals, or torn between two conflicting priorities.

The bottom line is that it’s natural and normal to find yourself conflicted or overwhelmed by psychological states that make pursuing your goals harder. But that’s not where it ends…

What’s the solution?

Fortunately, we need not try to overwrite our nature but instead we can work with it. An intuitive approach is to use brute willpower or positive thinking (I’ll do a whole post on why positive thinking is frequently ineffective) - try to counter or block out the unhelpful stuff with more “logical” or values-oriented stuff. Unfortunately though this is based on the faulty premise that our conscious mind has complete power over the rest of our minds. Whilst in some circumstances we can override our emotional impulses or unhelpful attitudes, in others we can’t, thus making it an unreliable mechanism. This is because conscious thinking is inevitably coloured by whatever else is going on beneath the surface. Furthermore, our fundamental emotions and drives have a more powerful grasp on our motivation than our conscious thinking - we can modulate our drives and emotions, but we can’t entirely regulate, get rid of them or completely silence them at will.

So using this brute psychological force can be a waste of energy. And we know that depleting our mental energy also makes doing things like exercise harder - various studies have demonstrated that depleting cognitive reserves increases perception of physical effort and makes subsequent self-control efforts harder. So if you’re already having to work hard to get yourself to the workout anyway, it will be even harder to regulate yourself once you’re there in whatever way you need to.

An alternative then is to try to mediate, instead of totally control our different psychological states. Imagine that you were having a meeting with fellow residents of your community about a problem in the village. If you were to run the meeting democratically, you’d hear everyone out - firstly because there may be valid perspectives to be gained, secondly out of respect, and thirdly for pragmatic reasons - people like to be heard and when they are they’re more likely to be reasonable. It’s the same with our own emotions, drives, attitudes, and so on. The idea is not to resist initially, just hear them all out.

Paying attention to unhelpful thoughts and sentiments doesn’t automatically increase the likelihood that you’ll act accordingly - in fact it more likely reduces it, because you’re looking at these thoughts and sentiments from a more reflective position. I like to think of this as taking a “lighthouse” perspective - observing the whole shore as opposed to being stuck on the beach surrounded by tonnes of people.

So there’s no need to avoid or attempt to erase the “I don’t want to” sentiments - they’re legitimate psychological states, and by that I mean they are communicating something. They won’t just go away because you don’t want them. Additionally, their presence is not what determines whether you run with them or not, it’s how you respond to them - allow them to dominate experience, buy into them, organise your attention and priorities, and so on.

If you imagine someone was trying to share some frustration or upsetting experience with you, their strong feelings would probably defuse a little if you listened, rather than if you ignored them or told them to shut up. It’s the same with our own emotions - they evolved to be expressed and acknowledged, as signals. Physiological states should also be considered feedback. Both of these evolved to be detected and oriented towards, so they often paradoxically grow in potency if ignored or suppressed. BUT attending to them doesn’t mean you have to follow their directives.

Additionally, they might be communicating things that are worth bearing in mind. For example, if you’re really frustrated about work, that might influence how you approach frustrating or challenging aspects to the workout, so it’s better to get out in front of it rather than be blindsided by a wave of frustration and annoyance about something in the middle of the workout. You’re bringing those things into the light to look at them rather than let them metaphorically run round in the shadows where they have more power.

What we can do here then is treating these conflicting feelings and attitudes as an inner community with the view to understanding what’s there and creating a bit more harmony.

The first step is to identify the different points of view that are conflicting. Perhaps there are just two - for example “I really want to get in the gym and push for that PB” alongside “I just don’t feel I have it in me to focus on that, I’m fed up of grafting all day.”

If that’s the case, try this activity.

1. Grab a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle (see the image below for an example of this exercise).

2. Name each column after one of the perspectives that are conflicting.

3. Bring your attention to each of those perspectives, one at a time, and write down the first thing that comes to mind - a thought, feeling, image, urge, etcetera - in their respective columns (see the first statements in the example table).

4. Then go back and forth between each perspective – write down any thoughts, feelings, ideas, urges that are in line with each one and then see what the other has to “say” in response. We are aiming for a sort of internal dialogue with this exercise – think of it like an attempt to mediate between two different parts of you.

5. Once you have explored each perspective, ask yourself if there is a way of moving forward in a way that is acceptable to both sides. You’ll see in the example below that I came up with a solution regarding how to proceed with my workout, and the fatigue-reluctance perspective then quietened down. This won’t necessarily come that easily, and sometimes a solution doesn’t emerge at all. But it’s still a good practice to deliberately hold both perspectives in mind – trying to “get rid of” experiences you don’t want can magnify them and direct your attention in unhelpful ways, and exploring different conflicting positions means you’ll gain useful insight about yourself, even if it takes you a while to figure out how to act on it.

This is clunky at first, but if you practise you’ll find you get pretty efficient at bargaining with yourself on the spot, without having to go to pen and paper. And remember this isn’t an argument but a dialogue - each perspective is simply responding to what the other proposes or expresses.

If there are more than two conflicting perspectives, you can follow a similar process without the table as above. Having more than two perspectives going on at once can be overwhelming so it can be helpful to first centre yourself a bit - sit quietly, take a few breaths and spend a few minutes just watching what is going on in your mind and body, again as if you were in a lighthouse observing the goings-on by the shore down below.

Then follow this process:

1. Note down the first sentiment or thought that comes to mind.

2. Notice what else comes up in response to that sentiment/thought.

Keep going, writing each statement down. Don’t try to direct it at all, just let thoughts come, as if you are letting that inner community speak free-for-all. Some people like to draw circles to represent all the different perspectives and add numbered statements next to them each time they “pipe up”, so they end up with multiple spider diagrams. Whatever works for you.

A side benefit to watching your experience like this is that you give yourself time and space to think things through and listen from an observer perspective, sitting with the idea of acting on your values or not, which can put the brakes on that automatic feeling-behaviour link. So often when we experience these “I want to/don’t want to” conflicts we can get rail-roaded pretty quickly by the negative sentiment, but taking a step back like this cuts that automatic reaction.

Sometimes though a particular “I don’t want to” sentiment will be too compelling and win out - totally normal. But if you practise (and it does need practice) over time you should find that you can start coming to a compromise, as I said above. A key principle to go by here is congruence, which means things align. For example, let’s say I’m going into a workout with the following going on:

• “I feel knackered”

• A self-critical element that doesn’t want to do it if I don’t perform at my best

• Anxiety about not doing well for fear of the self-critical response

• A feeling of aversion to effort

• “But I really want to be consistent and keep doing this for myself”

An ideal outcome would be for me to come to an agreement on a focus that can satisfy all those to some extent - something at least somewhat congruent with each aspect. It won’t be immediate - you have to go back and forth, particularly where there are so many perspectives involved, but often a solution for moving forward does emerge. The point is you aren’t allowing the negative perspectives to immediately dominate - you’re providing space for all of them, including the helpful/positive ones.

This relies on a process that Carl Jung called the tension of opposites. Instead of forcing a compromise purely from the desired or positive perspective (which is the same as brute force willpower), a new and third solution can be created by bringing two (or more!) conflicting psychological forces into contact, facilitating what is known as integration. It’s a little like the old saying “two heads are better than one” - new insight or solutions are generated by holding conflicting sentiments in the same space.

Over time there can be a secondary benefit to this practice, which is learning that you need not eliminate uncomfortable or unhelpful thoughts or feelings to go ahead and do what you value doing anyway - what is known as psychological flexibility.

This might seem like it involves some work, and it does, but that’s the reality folks - making psychological changes that stick involves effort, like making any kind of change. It’s just a practice. You don’t have to do this immediately before a workout by the way - you can do it more in advance, and even if you don’t end up exercising there is still value in this exercise.

Chloe
Psychology of Movement

When you pick up a sport or activity that involves a lot of physical discomfort, you need to find a way of dealing with it that works for you - sounds obvious, but it’s a step that is often skipped. This is particularly relevant for endurance sports and activities involving high-intensity sustained efforts such as CrossFit, Hyrox, high-intensity exercise classes, speed endurance events and conditioning for other sports - basically anything where you need to sustain effort despite serious physical discomfort and fatigue.

When I talk about physical discomfort, I am referring to the shortness of breath, burning muscles and feelings of stiffness, weakness and heaviness that can come over you when you’re putting in intense or sustained effort. Some people take to this discomfort like a duck to water and have no problem with it. That’s not to say they find it pleasant, but they feel confident tolerating it and can focus in a way that is helpful regardless. For others though it is a different story - many people still struggle with that discomfort despite choosing such activities, and this happens at all levels, ranging from complete beginner to elite (yes many elites also struggle with this, despite their composed appearances).

Today I will share a bit of my own experience of using psychological principles to improve my engagement with discomfort throughout my fitness journey. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to handling discomfort, so while this post will explain one particular strategy, it is more an attempt to illustrate the process of experimentation and noting what works/doesn’t work to find the best strategy.

The activity I’ll be discussing is running, although I apply these principles to other activities too. I started running because the idea of learning to persist at something physically uncomfortable appealed to me, and as I became increasingly competitive my desire to see how fast I could go while feeling uncomfortable also grew. However, ironically, the way in which I dealt with the discomfort did not grow with my fitness.…

I always found the experience of physical discomfort that comes with high-intensity training and racing aversive. Unhelpful thoughts and feelings came fast and freely, and I had to work hard not to drop out (which did not pay off half the time - I used to be a habitual dropper-outer). If I didn’t drop out, I’d get down on myself about my performance and struggle to push as hard as I could. This led to a vicious cycle in which I would dread future sessions and races, go in braced and expecting unmanageable pain, and surprise surprise the experience was terrible every time.

In an attempt to combat this, I tried doggedly for years to force positive thoughts into my head and motivate myself through those periods of discomfort. I tried distracting myself, positive affirmations, reframing the thoughts and sensations and focusing on my motives for running. I thought if I just practised, I would eventually develop the ability to control the contents of my mind.

It did not work. The problem was that the “positive” thoughts I introduced had absolutely zero impact because they were so incongruent with the negative thoughts and feelings I was experiencing, and they had nowhere near the compelling nature. At the time, I wasn’t aware that the power of our neocortex - the “rational”, thinking parts of our brain - pales in comparison to that of emotions.

I was at a loss, however I had a lightbulb moment when I stumbled across an approach called Acceptance and Commitment Training (ACT) as a trainee psychologist. ACT is all about developing a different relationship to your thoughts and feelings - not seeking to control them, but to change the way you react to them so you can do what you want to more freely. I was drawn to this approach after reading about how actively trying to suppress, change or ignore unwanted thoughts and feelings often magnifies their intensity and frequency (the “ironic process effect”), because in attempting to control them we inevitably have to focus on them. When these attempts fail, the thoughts and feelings become even more of a bug-bear, frustration increases and performance suffers as focus is drawn away from the factors that support it. I realised this was exactly what was happening to me.

As a part of this exploration, I engaged with a process that ACT called creative hopelessness - a simple exercise in which you reflect honestly on what your current strategies are costing you in terms of time, effort and focus. And sure enough, I realised that the energy I was putting into attempting to counter unhelpful thoughts and feelings was not only wasted but in fact made things worse as I consistently failed to have the impact I wanted on my mindset and performance. Over time this created an ever-growing sense of demoralisation. So I arrived at the conclusion that I had nothing to lose in trying something radically different.

So I experimented with the opposite of attempting to control my thoughts and feelings, by taking the principle of willingness (otherwise known as “acceptance”) from ACT. Willingness describes the state of deliberately being open to experiencing everything that is going on in the present moment. This includes things that you experience internally (e.g. thoughts, sensations and emotions) as well as external aspects of the situation around you. Willingness DOES NOT mean that you like or want whatever is going on - it simply means you are ceasing your attempts to avoid or suppress it, and therefore not only refraining from engaging in futile psychological battles but also changing the impact of whatever it is on you.

This sounds totally counterintuitive - indeed, my first reaction was “why would I choose to focus on the stuff I don’t want, surely that will make it worse?” But the reality is what you don’t want is already there, it pops up of its own accord, so you can either choose to magnify it or choose to change its impact. There are ways of influencing (to some degree) what typically comes up over time through deeper self-enquiry, but that’s for another post.

In the ACT space there is often discussion of 3 levels of suffering:

1. Primary suffering: the raw and spontaneous (and natural) experience of discomfort (e.g. pain, unhelpful thoughts and feelings, uncomfortable situations) that comes up without your choosing

2. Secondary suffering: the added discomfort created by attempts to ignore, suppress or fight with those unwanted experiences

3. Tertiary suffering: the final layer of angst created by our lamenting of our inability to control our experience (e.g. “there’s something wrong with me, why am I like this, I shouldn’t struggle with this”)

Willingness aims to keep the suffering at the primary level - the discomfort is still there, but we don’t engage with it in a way that magnifies it and dominates our entire attention and behaviour to the detriment of other things of value (e.g. performance or enjoyable participation).

I played around with this concept and developed a version I named the “embrace”. I would actively acknowledge the presence of uncomfortable thoughts/feelings/situations, accepting that they weren’t under my control, and then deliberately scan my consciousness for more of them, seeking them out with the aim of exposing myself to them. I would also open my palms out slightly to signal to myself that I was allowing whatever was there and embracing the entire experience. It might sound odd but that physical cue seemed to reinforce it for me.

The effect of this might seem completely paradoxical. It didn’t magic any thoughts or feelings away, of course, and I definitely still didn’t want them. But it made the experience strangely peaceful. I would even go as far as to say I felt serene, despite having thoughts about wanting to stop, my legs burning up the hill and my pace being disappointing. They were just there, and that was it. I was no longer engaging with them and no longer acting according to them by slowing down, catastrophising, dropping out or wasting mental energy trying to change them. Instead, I just got on with my run and even enjoyed the fact I was persisting despite discomfort, which was my original aim with running.

I took this further when it came to middle-distance track sessions, which I always hated due to the lactate build-up. When I reached the point in sessions where everything felt very hard and painful, I used the “embrace” idea but added the aspect of daring my brain and body to throw more at me - a “do your worst” or “bring it” imperative. Sometimes I’d mutter out loud “come on then!” This came with the realisation that I am not in fact on the back foot when it comes to unwanted thoughts and feelings - I may not want them but I contain THEM, rather than the other way round. They are a part of the experience, rather than the whole experience. I have since developed on this, which I’ll address in a future post.

This is also a clear example of how our actions can feed back into how we feel about ourselves; if I act as if my thoughts and feelings are an obstacle or a threat to me, I am simply reinforcing the belief that they are bigger than me and must be avoided, which means taking actions to avoid them. So if we’re not careful, we end up acting purely out of avoidance rather than pursuing what we care about, which is what I used to do when I dropped out of sessions. So there is an interesting question to reflect on here: “what are the implicit messages I communicate to myself via my actions and responses to my internal experience?”

The real message behind this post

So that this is what I did, and how I still often deal with discomfort, and it works well for me. Do I always deal well with discomfort? No, but on the whole a lot better than I did. It also works well for some other people, as discovered through client work and my research studies which I will discuss in future posts. But I can guarantee that it won’t work for everyone. The relevance or efficacy of any psychological strategy depends on you as a person and what your challenges are. While there are without a doubt some universal principles that apply across all humans, there are also individual idiosyncrasies that mean the best strategy for you is the one that you can resonate with, personalise and shape with experience. That is something a good psychologist will help you to to - identify what mechanisms are at play and what your experience of those is, to inform how you deal with the challenge.

So if nothing seems to be working for you, my advice would be to do something completely different, particularly if you notice you’re reluctant to do that. Then regardless of how well that new strategy works, you are still breaking a pattern that has become obsolete and creating new experiences and insight, even if what you do needs developing from there.

I have run two research studies evaluating ACT strategies in endurance performance now, and the findings told me that not only do these strategies land differently on people, but people use the same technique/principle in different ways, and that personalisation is key to the strategies working. But this requires patience - something like willingness demands a new perspective and a somewhat counterintuitive approach which makes it a tricky skill to train, and the same can be said for all sorts of other psychological strategies. Therein is the challenge - having the patience to maintain openness to new things, whilst learning to use your own creativity to shape them to optimise your own experience.

Chloe
Psychology of Movement

The most potent way to enhance your motivation and consistency with physical activity is to make it personally meaningful to you at as deep a level as possible. Whether that is through an important goal or a love of a particular process, if physical activity gives you a sense of meaning and purpose you’re more likely to do it.

It’s not always easy to immediately put your finger on what would give you a deep sense of meaning, so a good place to start can be to look at your needs. Of course, the first place we often go when it comes to addressing needs through exercise is our physical health - the most obvious choice given all of the physical benefits. However, this important motive still isn’t potent enough in the here-and-now to motivate all of us. The benefits take a while to come through, and hence they can remain abstract.

Another need we can look at that can add extra meaning to the process of exercising is that of enhancing our psychological well-being (i.e. mental health). Now you might well say “but surely that takes a while to improve in the same way as physical health does?” That is true, but the difference is that you can more explicitly observe the process of improvement in the here-and-now because you have access to your mind, whereas you can’t directly observe the health-related changes going on in your body. Furthermore, it is possible to have experiences where you make significant and rapid break-throughs when it comes to psychological development, meaning it can be a focus that lends you more motivation in the short-term.

Many people are already into exercise not only for the physical benefits but also the psychological benefits. Straight off the bat, exercise has a whole plethora of physiological effects that directly support mental well-being or at least provide temporary psychological boosts, such as:

• Endorphin release (the famous “runner’s high”, although not limited to running)

• The pumping of blood and hence oxygen round the body which contributes to feelings of energy

• Beneficial health effects

• Better physical capacities which improve ease of daily living and access to different activities

• Growth of new neurons in areas of the brain relating to cognitive function (also helping to buffer against cognitive decline)

But there is more to be gained from exercise than these already profound benefits. Exercise also provides opportunities for new experiences and behaviours as well as self-examination, some of which are inherently reparative whilst others serve as windows into psychological transformation if actively pursued. You need not look far to find people who have developed skills and perspectives through physical activity that have transferred into other areas of life, e.g. becoming more resilient in times of crisis, cultivating courage to try new things or growing in confidence,.

Many people experience these benefits inadvertently, but what I will demonstrate in this post is that you can ACTIVELY pursue psychological development through exercise, which will in turn give it more meaning.

All of the activities you engage in in your life serve as arenas in which you can watch your patterns play out. You can observe how you respond when things don’t go your way, what intimidates you, the stories you tell yourself, how your self-perception changes, what activates particularly overwhelming emotions, themes to your interpretations, what helps you endure discomfort, the assumptions that drive your repeated behaviours, any conflicts you experience, and much more.

And whilst the psychological experiences and behavioural patterns you observe might seem specific to particular activities or domains, they are in fact just particular manifestations of the complexes that make up the structure of your broader personality. In other words, these patterns are likely to be playing out elsewhere under different guises. So an activity like exercise can become a vessel, metaphorically speaking, in which you can study your psychological dynamics in real time, consider where else these processes are holding you back in life and forge new patterns. This relates to what I have discussed on my other Substack about deliberately engaging with and overcoming psychological barriers - that is meaningful in itself, independent of physical outcome.

Here’s one of my own examples. The photo below is the view from the top of the Big Dipper, a massive sand dune in Merthyr Mawr, Wales. My track group and I used to go there every autumn for crash training weekends, and the reps up and down this dune were my most dreaded session. Originally, I had a pretty unhelpful attitude towards it - I was averse to the combination of particularly intense physical sensations and slow pace of running hard uphill on sand repeatedly, I would get super self-critical and pessimistic about it and then withdraw effort. It was essentially an “I can’t run the way I want to so I’m not playing.” This is a pattern that played out across other track sessions I didn’t like, but also in other areas of life when things didn’t go my way, all culminating in a habitual “learned helplessness”. So there was plenty of reason to address it.

At one point I had a bit of an epiphany, recognising that my attitude wasn’t working and I’d like to approach it in a more constructive manner. So I practised trying to push on as hard as I physically could in the presence of my bad attitude, but instead of wallowing in said attitude I would focus on how important it is to try to keep going when you feel that terrible about something, as well as the fact that I didn’t want those feelings to be the sole determinant of my actions. In a weird way then, the bad attitude that served as such as barrier became something that made my efforts a lot more meaningful. It didn’t make them easier, but it certainly gave me a more constructive focus and thus a tangible strategy. The spill-over effect to other areas of life was probably more significant than the effect on track workouts though, because it became increasingly evident how my lack of willingness to tolerate situations I didn’t like was cutting off opportunities for very different outcomes.

So what does this look like?

Getting started is simple - identify a psychological barrier to participating in or enjoying physical activity. Maybe you:

1. Find excuses not to exercise that don’t hold a lot of water

2. Feel anxious or self-conscious whilst being active in public

3. Rapidly descend into hostile self-criticism when things don’t go your way

4. Are easily intimidated by intense effort or challenging exercises

5. Give up quickly when you hit a plateau or miss a few sessions

6. Feel pressure to perform that taints the entire experience

7. Experience that “can’t be bothered” apathy quite frequently

8. Struggle to motivate yourself to push yourself as hard as you could

9. Get distracted by things going on outside of the physical activity space (e.g. life stress and obligations)

Those are just some examples. Once you have identified a barrier to work on, the next step is to look more closely into the nature of it. It’s difficult to develop effective solutions without a granular picture of the problem at hand, so this next bit is about defining the experience in a more specific way - in other words, describing what is actually happening in those moments. It can help to do it in a layered fashion in which you get more and more specific. Let’s come back to the barriers I just listed and clarify what might be going on:

1. You anticipate an unidentified or vague effortful or negative experience surrounding the activity and deceive yourself in order to justify avoiding it

2. Your thoughts and attention are dominated by the idea of appearing in some negative light in other people’s eyes (often in fact mirroring your own judgments of yourself)

3. The experience of “underperforming” has a meaning that is deemed catastrophic or your standards are too high or rigid

4. You focus narrowly on the challenging or aversive aspects of the activities in question and undermine your ability to attempt them

5. Your motivation is overly reliant on immediate improvement or the conclusions you drawn about plateaus/inconsistency are overly pessimistic

6. You focus too much on things you can’t control and the negative consequences of “failure” and not enough on the opportunities provided by the process of taking on the challenge

7. Perceived effort is high and anticipated benefits are low

8. Your reactions to intense effort magnify their already uncomfortable nature, or you have insufficient valued reasons to tolerate that kind of discomfort

9. High levels of perceived uncertainty or threat dominate your attention and outweigh physical activity in terms of priority

Then continue to embellish the barrier out, describing specifically what you notice yourself doing in terms of the thoughts you engage in, where your attention is, and what information and feelings you are using to base your actions on (best done while you are experiencing it). For example:

1. I think about what going for a run will be like, specifically the feelings of effort and being cold and exposed, and I imagine it will feel like a real strain. I’m comfortable where I am right now and I feel reluctant to leave that state. I know I will regret not going for a run but I feel more compelled to protect this state of being comfortable than to pursue my goals. But I feel conflicted about it and I don’t want to think about what I am missing out on so I rationalise it with XYZ excuses…

2. When I am in the gym I feel like everyone is looking at me, even though I can see they are mostly not. I imagine or feel like I look fat/weak/inexperienced/embarrassing and I don’t want people to look at me and think that. I feel anxiety and I want to get my lifts over as quickly as possible. I feel embarrassed about what I am lifting versus some other people. I can’t get my attention off my surroundings or what others are thinking when I’m lifting.

…. etcetera. Once you’ve done that, then ask yourself where else in your life you engage in variations of these patterns. It shouldn’t take long for you to identify some kind of related experience. Then consider what the benefits might be not just in the exercise space but to your broader life of addressing those unhelpful patterns.

The next step is to consider how to start working on whatever your barrier is. You won’t come up with an immediate solution, and the likelihood is even once you have thought of something you’ll have to try it out and shape it over time. The key here though is to consider the processes that are going on in the moment to keep the barrier in question going (see the 2nd list of bullet points). What about those processes is unhelpful? What is driving them? What would be a better alternative? What would you want instead?

Before trying out any of your solutions though you can work to start really observing the challenging experiences in motion. Practise observing your own thoughts and feelings as it all happens. The reason I suggest this as a step is that a) it facilitates greater awareness and b) you practise being able to experience all of that from an observer position.

That is important because contrary to popular advice, I’m not going to suggest that you STOP doing any of what you are doing to maintain the barrier. That can lead to what is called an ironic process in which you simply magnify the experiences that are causing you problems. Instead, the task is to simply observe and allow them to be there, and then introduce something more helpful into your attentional field AT THE SAME TIME. You don’t need to get rid of unhelpful patterns directly to transform them.

So that could be noticing the anxiety and intimidation about a particular workout, AND deciding to experiment with approaching it with courage. Or perhaps it’s recognising the deleterious effects of vicious self-criticism and considering what other perspective you could bring to your performance to balance that out. Maybe it’s acknowledging the thoughts and feelings of shame in others’ presence, whilst asking what you want the focus to be for yourself and what you would say to someone else in your position.

But just to be clear - while some people find this sort of self-enquiry comes naturally to them, especially if they are well-practised, others do not at all. Some people would benefit from working on it with a third party (i.e. a psychologist). But that doesn’t mean you can’t get curious about your experience and seek to make just slightly better decisions, or explore different ways of responding to those experiences in the moment.

If you want to learn more about using psychological challenges as sources of meaning or to read about more specific examples, I’ve talked in depth on my other Substack about making physical activity about something that transcends the physical outcomes.

Chloe
Psychology of Movement

A common barrier to enjoying or participating in physical activity is self-consciousness - a heightened awareness of oneself and one’s exposure to the environment. This is more than just plain old self-awareness; when people say “self-conscious” they usually mean there is some degree of anxiety around the fact of their exposure.

For some people self-consciousness involves being entirely caught up in their own judgments of how they look and perform, however for others there are explicit self-conscious anxieties around their exposure to other people, which adds an extra psychological layer to the experience of being active in public.

This can take various forms - perhaps you suffer from the spotlight effect, feeling as if people are watching what you are doing, even if you can see that this isn’t the case. Or maybe you experience social physique anxiety - concerns about people viewing your body negatively. Then there is self-presentation anxiety - a broader set of concerns about being unable to present yourself in a desired way in front of others. This most commonly involves worrying about how experienced, competent or attractive you appear. All of these concerns can also be about failing to present the image you want, or alternatively presenting a negative image - two different things.

When these self-conscious concerns occupy our minds they tend to lead to more restricted behaviour, negative emotion and distraction from our goals and motives. They can also have a significant impact on participation. Whilst for some people such concerns can motivate more physical activity to address whatever the felt inadequacy is, participation is often consequently unenjoyable and approached in a dysfunctional way, and for others these self-conscious concerns act as barriers to participating at all.

So what’s going on here?

There are many root causes of self-conscious concerns, some being relatively easy to establish and others less so. If this is something that really holds you back and tarnishes your daily experience, it is worth working with a qualified therapist/analyst/psychologist to get to the bottom of it, especially if it relates to other psychological difficulties. This post, like every post, is not intended to replace professional one-to-one support, so if you feel this is a persistent issue for you feel free to get in touch. However, you need not get to the root cause to understand a bit more about what is going on in the moment for this experience to be maintained, and make some helpful tweaks to improve the physical activity experience.

When we have concerns over how others view us, we are necessarily making some assumptions - we can’t possibly know for sure what someone else is thinking, especially if we are not directly interacting with them. Therefore we are necessarily engaging in what is known in the psychodynamic field of psychology as projection.

In order to make sense of every new moment, we are constantly overlaying our past understanding onto it. That’s why each new moment doesn’t feel new - we are experiencing it through the lens of pre-existing knowledge. This set of automatic processes is what enables us to experience a sense of continuity, recognise familiar situations and establish how to act. Without these processes, making sense of each new second in our lives would be enormously slow and inefficient. However, efficiency necessarily comes at the cost of accuracy, and I will come back to the question of when this matters shortly.

Projection is an unavoidable part of this natural sense-making function. It describes the process of “seeing” things in other people or situations that actually reside within ourselves. These might be character traits, emotions, intentions, beliefs or behaviours, to name a few. If you consider how a projector projects images onto a screen, that’s a pretty effective metaphor for psychological projection. Something within us gets beamed onto a person or situation - a quality or mood of our own that we haven’t acknowledged, something we wish we could develop or manage better in ourselves, or perhaps the spectre of an influential figure from our past.

Now, it’s important to acknowledge that people and situations do have their own objective qualities that we can perceive - the fact of projection does not erase the fact of these qualities’ existence. So sometimes our interpretations of a person or situation can be at least partially accurate - Marie-Louise Von Franz, a Jungian analyst with various publications on projection, would say there is usually a “hook” on which projections are hung. In other words, there is something about the person or situation that invites the projection - they exhibit a glimmer of something similar to what is being projected. However, we often see these qualities as magnified, descriptive of the entire person, or as indicative of other “likely” qualities, as opposed to just a specific aspect to them.

For example, we might feel that someone is judging us in the gym or carrying themselves in a prideful way, when actually we are rather judgmental of ourselves or we feel resentful that we were discouraged from feeling pride in the past.

Or maybe we put our training partner on a pedestal and see them as this invincible character who is fazed by nothing, but this is in reality reflective of something we feel is important yet impossible for us to develop, so it is “seen” in others as a source of inspiration.

Furthermore, many people see someone with a physique they admire and assume that person is therefore happy and confident in themselves, but this is nothing more than a reflection of an ideal the observer has: “I’d feel better about myself if I looked like that.”

Another variation of projection occurs when we come across people in the present who bear some resemblance, no matter how small or unacknowledged, to people from our past. In that case we may unwittingly project those past figures onto the people in the present, subsequently responding to them in similar ways (known as “transference” in the psychotherapy field). Consider the archetypal pattern of some young people trying extremely hard to impress authoritarian coaches who bear echoes of perfectionistic parents. Equally, something about a present situation can activate memories of past situations - I’m sure some readers will resonate with the experience of dreading going to public pools having had a bad time with school swimming lessons!

You could even argue that when people are objectively displaying a certain quality there is still necessarily some projection on our part as observers, because recognising and understanding that quality requires a degree of pre-existing experience of it. We think we “know” what someone else is doing, thinking or feeling because we are already familiar with that pattern in some way. Otherwise it would seem totally alien and incomprehensible to us.

For example, where the observer experiences emotions in response to an objectively displayed behaviour, that may also indicate projection. Let’s say someone in your running group often complains about the interval sessions set by the coach and you find that particularly irksome. Complaining consistently is something most people would agree is a negative thing to do and probably unhelpful if no action is taken, but if it bothers you enough to really rile you up each time, then it’s pressing on something that already exists within you. That might be an unacknowledged tendency of your own to complain or shared sentiment, or perhaps past situations involving negative people in which you haven’t felt able to remove yourself or address the behaviour. Things stand out that are relevant to us given our history - so we might be more aware of X about someone whilst someone else is more aware of Y.

For the psychologically minded, these might seem like simply associative experiences - external stimuli triggering psychological content in our minds. But if we think we “see” this content out there, then we are necessarily projecting.

What’s the use?

So, why does this matter for understanding self-conscious barriers? Because it turns out the mirrors in gyms are not the only things showing us our reflections.

Often when we worry about how we appear in front of others, it is because they either serve as implicit reminders of people or situations from the past that we have not come to terms with, or they act as mirrors who reflect back at us what we really think of ourselves. What we “see” in others’ judgments are often our own ideals, or those of significant others in our lives.

So in trying to deal with excessive self-consciousness, an important skill to develop is discernment - sifting out what is ours from what is theirs, which over time with practise leads to the withdrawal of the projections. This is no easy task, and as I implied earlier it is most effectively done with a suitable professional.

However there are questions you can hold in mind as a part of ongoing reflection. Any thoughts or feelings you are assuming on others’ parts can be checked out as potential indicators of what you might actually think or feel about yourself.

Then you might consider if you want whatever ideas and criteria you have identified to be the sole determinants of how you feel about and evaluate yourself and your workouts. The pragmatic question of “is this helping me here or not?” can come in handy. Or “what do I really want this activity to be about?” This is an opportunity to rework some of the ideas you bring into this space, and ultimately your relationship with yourself.

Also pay close attention to anyone you tend to see in an overly positive light in the midst of these self-conscious concerns - what qualities might they hold that are in fact qualities you would benefit from working on, or even have lying dormant already, waiting to be acknowledged or actively put into practice? This relates to Carl Jung’s idea of the “golden shadow” - positive potential within ourselves that for whatever reason we have not integrated into our conscious personality.

Furthermore, in a book called “Swamplands of the Soul” Jungian analyst James Hollis discusses how difficult psychological experiences such as this can be considered uniquely meaningful in that their existence and your proactive engagement with them can lead to transformation that wouldn’t occur otherwise. Feeling self-conscious whilst exercising is a brilliant reason to keep participating, in honour of yourself and the spirit of overcoming. A counterintuitive idea and a task that demands energy to take on, but worthwhile doing if you have the space for it.

If you enjoy deeper dives and discussion of these topics from these alternative perspectives, check out my Substack which is all about exercise psychology through a depth psychology lens.

Chloe
Psychology of Movement

So following a question from a good friend about how to make time for physical activity, I have decided to share some ideas for making different activities super-efficient. These are tried and tested variations informed by scientific evidence and my experience working as a personal trainer (for those who might be wondering what on earth I’m doing providing suggestions about physical training instead of just the psychological stuff!).

A quick disclaimer: this isn’t to say these ideas will all be perfectly suitable for you - they are intended as examples only. Whatever you choose to do needs to be appropriate given your current levels of strength, your health status and any pre-existing injuries or physical vulnerabilities you have. In other words, seek appropriate advice before trying things you haven’t tried before!

Before you start…

First things first, decide what specifically you are trying to achieve with physical activity. I’m going to leave the psychological benefits/targets aside here, and focus on physical targets. For instance, you might be targeting aerobic or anaerobic fitness, speed, power, strength, muscle mass, skill, core stability…. Either way it’s important to clarify what you are trying to improve on because that will help you to prioritise what you do, which is essential for being more efficient.

Improvement occurs on a spectrum

Once you’ve clarified what kind of physical changes you want to pursue, remember that there is spectrum between the minimum and maximum thresholds for an effective stimulus. Making strength, skill or fitness gains requires that you provide your body with a stimulus - generally in the form of a physical challenge or repetition of skilled movement. This stimulus, if sufficient, triggers adaptations in the form of cardiovascular changes, muscle protein synthesis, and neuromuscular coordination and recruitment, to name just a few examples.

Now, it’s easy to look at the “optimum” workout or longer workouts that other people are doing and assume that you have to engage in that same volume or intensity to achieve sufficient stimulus for progress. But that’s not true, because progress isn’t all-or-nothing - you don’t have to maximally or optimally stimulate your target area in order to still achieve decent results. You just need to know what kind of stimulus is necessary for your desired results and then to provide your body with a sufficient stimulus to trigger adaptations. Some is ALWAYS better than none - shorter versions are still worth doing.

Being realistic about your goals

It should be noted though that some physical adaptations do require more time than others. For instance, if you want to train to run a half-marathon, you need to put in a certain amount of time on your feet. If you want to maximise muscle growth (i.e. hypertrophy), a relatively higher volume is required. If you have these kinds of goals, you may benefit from first pursuing a different kind of goal (e.g. 5k fitness, basic strength and muscle mass) that would serve as a useful foundation for pursuing those more time-heavy goals later on. Once you achieve a consistent routine that then requires less effort from you, you can look to see where you can add to it over time.

Strength training options

Strength training is all about increasing the amount of force your muscles can produce, and compared to hypertrophy (increase of muscle mass) improving strength requires far less volume - rather, it depends on quality technique and intensity. (Although, strength training also triggers hypertrophy to some degree, so this isn’t a strict one-or-the-other situation).

The first effective option is the micro workout - super-short workouts that focus on one or 2 (maybe 3 depending on format) exercises as opposed to the 5+ you might find in a “full” strength workout. You can split these micro workouts across the day (e.g. one in the morning, one in the afternoon) or across multiple days. Sometimes you can actually get close to achieving the same amount of time or volume across the week as you would doing “full” workouts, but the option to do it in short bursts allows you to be more flexible around a busy routine.

For example, you could do 3 sets of single-leg squats alternating with 3 sets of push-ups. You could even add a back exercise in there and do the 3 of them circuit-style. This done a couple of times a week would be good enough for a beginner to see improvements. To be super time-efficient, do them after you’ve been doing some light physical activity beforehand (e.g. hoovering, walking the dog) so your muscles are already warm, that way you only need to do a little extra warming up on top (i.e. regressed versions of the exercises you are about to do). Check out Red Delta Project’s channel for some great information on this. The Bioneer’s channel also has plenty of creative ideas for working on different types of fitness efficiently.

NB: beginners should perform exercises that they can do for higher numbers of reps (12+) - this is because exercises that are intense enough for you to only be able to perform <8 reps involve a lot more joint stability and muscle tension, and if you are untrained you are far more likely to get injured doing these higher loads. Work at a lighter load (whether that be weight or an easier exercise variation) first and then progress over time towards “heavier” loads. Always start on the easier side - you can always progress and then nothing is lost.

If you’re more advanced and you require a higher intensity, you can experiment with different rep schemes such as:

• AMRAP - performing as many reps as possible in a given time period, e.g. maximum number of pull-ups in 15 minutes, resting as needed.

• Drop sets - performing a set of an exercise to near-failure, then regressing it (lowering weight or performing an easier version) for more reps, then regressing it again to perform more reps. Repeat 2 or 3 times.

• Myo-reps - performing an exercise for say 10-15 reps near failure, rest 15-20 seconds, then try a few more, rest 15-20 seconds, then try a few more. Repeat 2 or 3 times.

Another of my personal favourites is the “grease the groove” method. I used this method to improve my pull-ups/chin-ups and it worked like a charm. It essentially involves scattering sets of one specific exercise across multiple times and days. You just perform sets or even just a few reps here and there whenever, throughout the day, several days a week. The idea is to stay away from failure, i.e. you’re not maxing out - you’re essentially practising the movement. Or you can take a more structured approach - this is the specific programme I used, as an example (although you needn’t be so structured about it or even do this amount of volume).

“Grease the groove” works on the basis of improving neuromuscular efficiency. Firstly, you’re practising the skill of the movement (resistance exercises are in fact skills, although we often don’t think of them that way), which contributes to more efficient motor patterns, coordination and dexterity of movement. Secondly, you’re improving neuromuscular recruitment - the ability of your motor cortex to recruit higher percentages of the motor units within a muscle. Thirdly, this method tends to improve mind-muscle connection in my experience, i.e. the ability to focus on and activate the correct muscles for a movement. All of this is directly relevant to strength because a significant part of it is the ability of your motor cortex to recruit as many muscle fibres as possible as forcefully as possible. Clearly strength also depends on your physical architecture too (i.e. muscle cross-section, number and proportion of fibres) but the neural signals are a key aspect.

If your activity of choice is something like powerlifting or more general weighted compound lifting, there are training protocols that are relatively time-efficient. My personal favourite is Jim Wendler’s “5-3-1” method. There are variations on this that add more sets, but I have followed the programme as set out on T-Nation several times and seen surprisingly consistent improvement, despite the low volume. I spend about half the time on this protocol that I do a more traditional 5 x 5 format. There is a dual benefit to the first couple of sets being lower load relative to 1-rep-max - they don’t take as much out of you, and you can use the lighter load to really practise dialling in technique and being explosive, which has significant neuromuscular benefits. You can then really hammer out the last set. I also find this protocol less cognitively demanding and I need to rest less, meaning time is saved in multiple ways.

It’s important to note though that these are just variations I personally have found worked - people respond differently to different stimuli, so it’s the classic thing of what works for one person not working as well for another. For instance, I’ve always worked best on low volume, whereas others find they need a higher volume or can tolerate a higher volume than me. The reality is you have to experiment to find out.

Can’t get in the gym?

A lot of people feel they don’t have time to go in the gym - it probably involves travelling and inevitably extra minutes moving around the gym and maybe waiting for equipment, etcetera. This can pose some limitations - if you are a powerlifter, for instance, you’re going to struggle to replicate compound barbell lifts outside the gym unless you have an Olympic set at home. However, if you’re not into heavy lifting and you just want to improve your overall strength you can opt for calisthenics, i.e. bodyweight training.

There are all sorts of bodyweight exercises that can be progressed and made essentially infinitely challenging. Single-leg squat variations (e.g. deep step-ups, shrimp squats, pistol squats), pull-up variations, push-up variations, etcetera. You can also make use of plyometrics (explosive movements such as squat jumps) if you have built up a certain level of strength and experience already. You can do these literally anywhere.

I particularly like Matt Schifferle’s (again the Red Delta Project) idea of grind-style calisthenics - he has a very effective system for effectively targeting muscles in an efficient way.

There are also some (relatively) cheap bits of home equipment you can buy if you want to advance some of these moves further. Here are some of the low-cost calisthenics options I have gotten the most use out of that don’t require attaching to a squat rack, beam or door frame, rough prices I paid included:

• 30cm Stackable box (for plyometrics, decline or deep push-ups, single-leg squat variations) - £30

• Parallettes (for dips, core/gymnastics exercises and inverted rows) - £35

• Mini parallettes (allow for deeper range of motion on push-ups) - £8

• A 36x30x20-inch wooden plyometric box built by my husband (useful for all sorts - plyometrics, deep step-ups, decline push-ups, single-leg squat variations) - £50 for the wood (versus about £300 for a read-made plyometric box at that size!)

Cardiovascular training options

I’ll start by mentioning the cardio version of micro workouts which is the exercise snack - short, sharp bursts of high-intensity exercise that last only a few minutes. Again, you can do these several times a day or a few times a week even. These are well-suited to things like on-the-spot aerobic exercises such as burpees and jumping jacks, as well as higher-intensity moves like squat jumps and things like hill sprints. Make sure you are warm before doing these, as I suggested with the micro workouts. If you’re interested, check out Rhonda Patrick’s videos on this - she shares plenty of research on why these short, sharp bursts have a surprisingly beneficial effects on fitness and health.

Speaking of high-intensity, high-intensity interval sessions can be more time efficient than traditional steady-state cardio sessions. For instance, the classic 8 x 30 seconds hard, 90 seconds very easy on the bike is a workout you can get done within 20 minutes including a warm-up. You can also try a “Tabata”-style workout, which is essentially 20 seconds of work, 10 seconds of rest repeated 8 times. Bodyweight exercises like burpees, shuttles and high knees work well again here, as well as some bodyweight strength exercises.

If you like to run you can combine aerobic and anaerobic stimuli with a “Fartlek” session - the Swedish word for “speed play.” With Fartlek, you dedicate say 30-40 minutes for a run, and you alternate short high-intensity bursts with slow jogging, walking and longer moderate-intensity bursts. One of my old favourite was: 5 minutes moderate pace, 1 minute hard, 2 minutes walking, and repeat (thanks to friend, personal trainer, Ironwoman and long-time inspiration Kathryn Hanson!). The duration of these sessions is longer than an exercise snack but you’re essentially targeting two adaptations at once. There’s nothing to stop you doing this on a bike or rower too.

An alternative if you’re a runner is to focus on faster, shorter runs. Years ago when I worked in an office with a long commute I had less time to get in longer runs, so I’d do a 5k tempo at lunchtime to improve on my VO2 max and aerobic threshold - not quite flat-out but getting there. I could warm up and have the run done within 20 minutes, plus 5 minutes of stretching. So perhaps set yourself a time limit - 15 or 20 minutes, and see how far you can run in that time.

However the suitability of these clearly depends on your goals - as I said, if you want to train for long distances then really you need to be doing steady-state, longer efforts. But high-intensity efforts still improve your cardiovascular fitness to some degree, and of course the added benefit of anaerobic fitness will also contribute to more endurance-focused activities in a different way. Whilst your steady-state aerobic capacity is the “engine” of endurance events, your endurance performance is also limited by your anaerobic fitness. Put it this way - your fastest mile time is going to limit the speed at which you can run 6, etcetera.

Combine different activities

If you want to incorporate different types of activities into your schedule you can look to combine them into single workouts. For instance, I often tack steady-state indoor bike rides onto the back of Muay Thai heavy bag work. That doesn’t necessarily reduce the time taken for each activity, but it removes the need for a warm-up for one of them and means I get it all done in one go.

Another combination I like to do is “contrast training”, which means performing heavy lifts and then within 30 seconds of the lift performing a plyometric exercise targeting the same muscles. The heavy lift primes your nervous system so you produce more force and power when you then attempt the plyometric exercise. So it’s a double whammy - save time by adding a quick plyometric into what is essentially your rest period, and get more out of the plyometric exercise.

Yet another alternative is to combine your “workouts” with other active activities - this way you’re already warmed up and you don’t have to carve out extra time for exercise. Do some calisthenics when you take your kids to the park, do some sprints or running while you walk your dog, play tag with your dog… anything with a dog included is automatically better :) in the absence of a photo of me running with our dog, here’s one paddleboarding with my husband’s extended family’s old dog Fudge.

In terms of combinations and hitting multiple physical targets at once though, I must say CrossFit has got to be a contender for first place. Cross-Fit combines strength, aerobic and anaerobic fitness and other skills movements, meaning you can get an awful lot of bang for your buck. You can essentially make it as hard or easy as you need to as well, so it is suitable for most levels of strength and fitness. If you’re in the Buckingham area check out CrossFit Vastus - a highly welcoming, inclusive and professional set-up with a fantastic sense of community.

On a related note, classes can be a great option more generally if you’re tight on time - the fact that someone else has planned the session and all you need to do is turn up and follow instructions takes a lot of cognitive load out of it, which can add to the sense of time taken or time pressure. Just a thought.

I hope this provides you with some ideas for squeezing exercise in where you may not have thought to otherwise. The most important point is not to be all-or-nothing about it - perhaps in the long-run your aim is to free up more time or you’d rather pursue goals that require more time than you currently have, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make optimum use of the time you do have right now.

Chloe
Psychology of Movement

Week 4 Skills For Long Term Persistence

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Keep chipping away - it’s the intention to keep coming back that will maintain you.

Chloe
Psychology of Movement

We hope you are finding our workbook insightful so far. Below is the PDF for week 3, focused on understanding barriers to motivation, followed by the 2 audio clips for specific days and exercises:

Week 3 Barriers To Motivation

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Thanks for subscribing, feel free to leave any comments or questions below and we’ll get back to you ASAP. Alternatively, drop us an e-mail on hello@psychologyofmovement.com

Chloe
Psychology of Movement

It is well known by now that regular physical activity is one of the most impactful things you can do to optimise your health and longevity, not to mention the plethora of psychological benefits. However, a majority of people in the West struggle to be consistently active, or active at all. And this isn’t for lack of desire; while some have no interest, it seems the majority of sedentary individuals would in fact like to become more active to varying degrees, yet they face numerous barriers to doing so.

Of course there are some genuine logistical or physical barriers, but more often than not the barriers that really stop most people being (more) active are psychological in nature. This is something I increasingly came to realise over years of working as a personal trainer and then a sport and exercise psychologist, not to mention through my own physical activities. And even the barriers people declare as logistical or physical often have a psychological component, raising the question of whether any barrier is not psychological to at least some degree.

For example, one of the most commonly cited barriers to exercise is “lack of time”, but if you look closely at how that barrier plays out for most people you’ll notice it’s rarely the case that anyone has zero minutes available in the week to exercise. It’s that they can’t fit in the type of activity they would prefer, they choose to prioritise other activities, or emotions, stress and fatigue are at play. How we engage with logistical and practical challenges is what really matters.

So there is my first argument for turning our attention inwards towards our psychology, as opposed to relying solely on personal trainers, workout programmes, behaviour change apps and nutrition plans. This isn’t to say these practical sources of support aren’t important, and indeed they may be sufficient for some people. But for many they aren’t enough by themselves to create sustainable change, because the biggest barrier is not a lack of information about diet and exercise. There are clearly psychological barriers for people to making effective use of these practical resources. However it is often unclear what these barriers are, because many involve processes and contents that are unconscious - we aren’t aware of them, or perhaps we are but we don’t understand them.

The limitations of the conscious mind

Take a classic phenomenon like the head-heart (cognition-emotion) mismatch, where our emotions and behaviour seem impervious to our logical thinking. We think or understand something intellectually (e.g. “I care about doing this form of exercise”), but we feel and act on something totally different (e.g. we really don’t want to do it and feel prepared to let it slide).

Here we understand and know about one side of our psychological experience, but not the other. This is often what is behind the famous intention-behaviour gap, wherein we don’t follow through on our conscious intentions, even if we think we really want to. I went through many phases of dropping out of track sessions when I used to train competitively - I was dead-set on completing them, yet my emotions would overcome me every time and I would feel “unable” to will myself on anymore. Or consider the classic getting home from work and feeling “unable” to muster the mental energy to get out to the gym. In such scenarios, the solutions of our conscious minds are exhausted, as evidenced by the fact that we can’t simply will ourselves to act through logic.

From my perspective, we need to understand more about what’s really going on so we can better target our solutions, which is a key role of psychology. Things are usually more complex than we think, and in not allowing for that complexity we set ourselves up with simplistic and unrealistic expectations and then despair when our attempts at problem-solving fail. This in itself is often the main barrier for people - expecting to be able to resolve a psychological conflict over physical activity in a more simple way than reality will allow.

Furthermore, it isn’t just frustration and defeat that ensue from not listening to the deeper layers of our minds. When relevant yet unconscious experience (i.e. attitudes, feelings, urges, desires, habits that we don’t understand or conflict with our conscious intentions) remains unexplored, we can experience increasingly intense compensatory activity. In other words things get worse or the consequences add up, because ignoring these experiences means affording them autonomy, and they do not go away simply because we do not want or attend to them. They keep repeating and hence start to form patterns, for which we develop narratives that become a part of “who we are” or “what I’m like in this domain.” Unmet needs and their accompanying emotions grow, ultimately eclipsing and exhausting our conscious will. Negative experiences build and endow an activity like exercise with increasing amounts of unpleasant feeling, making it harder and harder to want to persist.

All of this relates to the rather profound quote from Carl Jung himself up the top of this post - not attending to what goes on internally can lead to an increased alienation from what we really think and feel, so that we find ourselves increasingly in situations where our brains and bodies just seem to resist what we consciously want to do - pesky gremlins become full-on dragons. In these cases the antidote is to look inwards to understand what we’re missing and what’s really going on under the thin veneer of our conscious understanding.

Your approach to physical activity

Another argument for looking inwards relates to the potential role physical activity can have in your life. Everyone has their own motives and attitudes that drive their physical activity behaviours, but from my perspective physical activity is not just a way of improving your physical health (although, this is by no means a trivial thing - your body is, after all, literally the physical vessel that takes you through life and has the potential to open up or limit the experiences you can access).

Physical activity can also be psychologically transformative - a vehicle for infinite self-development. If physical activity is approached in this way, not only are you supporting both physical and psychological development at the same time, but the two enhance each other. For instance, making physical activity about psychological development as well as physical can lend more motivation and importance to it, and likewise physical activity can be an arena in which you can observe your psychological experiences and reactions, revealing patterns and hence informing your self-understanding.

Connecting with your mind at a deeper level can also serve as a rich source of meaning, if that is something that interests you. Of course this depends on personality and outlook - there is variation in the degree to which people are interested by psychology or the process of self-enquiry. But for those who are keen to know themselves better there are endless opportunities for exploring the mysteries of the mind and using exercise as a vehicle for overcoming psychological challenges. All of this together can make physical activity a more meaningful and satisfying experience.

These are just some of the reasons for taking a psychological approach to physical activity. In looking at our psychology we can develop more accurate understandings of our feelings and behaviours and hence target our problem-solving efforts more effectively. It’s the equivalent of moving from trying to walk a path in total darkness to walking the path with a lantern to hand. This way we can work towards aligning our behaviour with our true values and creating a more positive and meaningful experience around physical activity.

Chloe
Psychology of Movement

We hope you have had a chance to get into Week 1 of our workbook and discovered lots of useful insights through it. Here is Week 2 of our workbook, which focuses on enhancing positive experience and reducing resistance (creating ease).

Week 2 Positive Experience & Reducing Resistance

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Please drop us a note in the comments or via our e-mail at hello@psychologyofmovement.com - we’d love any feedback and to hear how you are getting on.

Week 1 Aims & Meaning

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Audio 1: Noticing

Audio 2: Values

Audio 3: Day 7 Goal Hierarchy

Thank you for subscribing, we hope our workbook helps you to make some positive changes and that you enjoy using it. We also hope it gives you a better feel for some of what is involved in exercise psychology, if you aren’t familiar.

Please comment if you have questions or feedback, or alternatively drop us a note on hello@psychologyofmovement.com :)

Keep an eye on your inbox for part 2 next Saturday!

Chloe
Psychology of Movement

An important factor in making exercise feel both more appealing and manageable, and hence sustainable long-term, is confidence. But there are different ideas of what confidence is and each has more layers to it than there may appear on the surface. So in this post I will break down a specific version of confidence that research suggests is particularly impactful on motivation and long-term sustenance.

The problem with outcome confidence

I’ll start off by highlighting what I don’t mean. When I say “confidence”, I’m not necessarily talking about being confident in achieving a specific outcome or result as a consequence of your exercise efforts on one particular occasion (e.g. a time taken to run 5k, lifting a certain amount of weight for a certain number of reps). This is because if you are engaging in exercise that is physically very challenging, particularly if you are approaching the limits of your current capacities, these outcomes are not entirely under your control. Your ultimate performance here does not just depend on the stimulus you are giving your body by putting in effort, but also on a whole host of other factors you won’t be aware of.

The only things (mostly) under your control when it comes to making strength and fitness gains are the actual stimuli you provide your body with through your exercise efforts and the actions you take to maximise recovery (e.g. good sleep, nutrition and stress management). The rest is down to your body to adapt, and as I said there are many different factors that influence that adaptation that are neither in our control or even our awareness.

An important caveat - if you are doing exercise that you do not intend on being highly challenging though, for example you are performing exercise to relieve stress or get healthier, then it makes more sense to consider confidence in outcomes (e.g. “I know I can walk for 30 minutes so I will plan a 30-minute walk”).

But if you are doing the kind of exercise that is challenging you to a high degree OR you’re doing something unfamiliar, it’s impossible to be certain of exactly what result you can achieve on a single occasion. What this means is that if we focus solely on the kind of “outcome” confidence I described above, it’s necessarily going to be fragile - we can’t rely on having that feeling because our chances of achieving the specific outcome are uncertain, and no matter how much we consciously want to feel confident, the rest of our brain knows it’s uncertain. Essentially we can end up wasting energy chasing a feeling that we don’t actually need, and then frustration and self-doubt ensues because we can’t generate that feeling.

To highlight the exceptions (of which there are always some), there are a minority of people who manage to convince themselves they are capable of XYZ, and this can have a beneficial effect if you can swing it. When you truly believe you can achieve something, you’re more likely to act in ways that give you the best chance of achieving it - that’s what confidence does. So if you truly are capable of XYZ on that day you will likely pull it off.

However, most of the time you can’t just believe in your desired outcome simply because you want to - as I said, it’s fragile. Even if we do manage to blindly believe in our ability to achieve XYZ, there will come a point at which it will be actively unhelpful, because when we inevitably don’t achieve XYZ it’s then harder to make sense of and learn from because the whole premise of our efforts lacks nuance.

So for all of these reasons I would actually go as far as to say that total outcome confidence is often unjustified. This might sound negative or pessimistic but it’s not - it is reality-based, and in fact it can be liberating. It means giving up the fantasy that you “should” perform as you expect to perform, and this can be a big relief for the rigid perfectionists out there who put enormous amounts of pressure on themselves. It also frees you up to be more open to other factors affecting your performance that you weren’t aware of before, meaning you’re more in touch with reality, your approach will be better informed and ultimately your performance will be better over time.

Of course, sometimes you will achieve the result you wanted, one that makes you extremely proud or even surprises you. But on other occasions things will be inexplicably hard and your body won’t seem to perform. That’s a NORMAL part of being a human being, and it renders “outcome confidence” far too blurry a tool for navigating the fluctuations inherent to life.

Self-efficacy as an alternative

Instead, a better concept to work with is self-efficacy - the perception that you can perform the tasks and processes necessary within a workout that bring about desired progress over time. Below I will explain what this looks like, and you can use these criteria to assess your own self-efficacy.

First, you need to know what improvements you are trying to make over time by engaging in your chosen physical activities. If we don’t really know what we are aiming at long-term, it is naturally harder to trust that our efforts will bring about something meaningful to us, or to even know what we should be doing. Thus having a relatively clear long-term goal OR ongoing focus of improvement is a helpful place to start.

Secondly, you need to understand what kind of activities will help you to make those improvements. By “activities” I mean not just types of workout but particular exercises within a workout and potentially technical things like rest periods, form, tempo, etc.

Thirdly, you need to know how to meaningfully attempt these activities in a way that will trigger adaptations or progress in line with your goals, which means having the resources to help you do this (e.g. an instructor or personal trainer, knowledge about how to effectively perform an exercise, understanding of bodily cues so you can pace yourself, etc.).

Finally, you need to feel ABLE to meaningfully attempt these activities (i.e. “it is within my physical and logistical capacities to do this”). It’s no good knowing how to but feeling unable to!

Of course you could argue, as with outcome confidence, that you can never be totally sure that your estimations of all of these factors is 100% accurate, so it always helps to be open to the possibility that there are things you have missed or have yet to find out. But these things are to a much greater degree in your control, making them less permeable to feelings of pressure, and you’re unlikely to be that far off in your estimations.

To give an example, let’s say you have signed up to a Pilates class. In an ideal scenario you would…

1. Have a clear reason for participating in the class (e.g. you want to improve core stability to facilitate back health and lay a good foundation for strength training)

2. Have sufficient trust in the instructor to set out an effective series of exercises and teach you how to do them

3. Feel capable of following their instructions

4. Have enough time to make it to the class

5. Feel able to consistently get yourself to the class in the face of psychological barriers (e.g. stress, fatigue, self-consciousness…)

6. Have sufficient coordination and strength to at least attempt the moves in a way that will improve your core activation skills and muscular endurance, knowing that it isn’t just the number of reps (an outcome/result) or completion of a move that matter but the activation of muscles and motor patterns.

In other words, what’s involved in a workout needs to feel manageable and linked to a desired area of progress to you. In an ideal world it would feel like “yeah I can smash that!” but that’s not always available to us for a variety of reasons, so we can also settle with a “I can give that a meaningful go.”

Why does all this matter?

There are a variety of ways in which this concept of self-efficacy is important for successful and sustainable engagement in physical activity, which I will outline below.

1) Clarity over what you are trying to achieve and what you need to do to achieve it reduces uncertainty and therefore cognitive load. The greater the uncertainty, the greater the mental resources needed to navigate an activity like exercise, and therefore the higher the likelihood that motivation for it will waver when you’ve got lots of other things on your mind. Cognitive load (i.e. required mental resources) feeds into your sense of perceived effort, and the higher this is the harder it will be to get yourself to the activity consistently.

Equally, knowing what we need to do and anticipating some kind of positive outcome activates the dopaminergic system in our brains, which energises us towards the activity and helps us focus down on it.

2) We are biologically driven to seek opportunities to act competently and have a positive effect in an area we care about, because evolutionarily speaking such opportunities would further our survival chances. This means we evolved to experience such situations as inherently rewarding, meaning we were more likely to want to keep doing them because we have a positive emotional experience of them. So in setting ourselves up to experience improvements in and actual competence in our exercise activities, we tap into fundamental neurochemistry that makes us feel driven to keep going back.

3) Feeling that what we are attempting is manageable is important in tipping the balance in favour of being active when other factors might tip it the other way - for instance, if what you are trying to do feels only just about doable when you’re super energetic, the likelihood is it will feel not doable when you’re tired. We are constantly undergoing cost-benefit analyses of prospective activities in terms of their energy expenditure according to our physiological and psychological states, and perceived effort can increase as a consequence of this, meaning how manageable something feels can be volatile if we are pushing our limits. Just something to bear in mind if you are doing something very physically challenging - if we can enhance our self-efficacy, we reduce perceived effort and give ourselves a better chance of the cost-benefit analysis turning out in our favour.

But of course we’re not always as logical as this. For example, we can easily talk ourselves out of things, incorrectly believing we are incapable of attempting something or convincing ourselves that we just won’t be able to achieve the long-term outcomes we want. Emotions can come up that interfere with connection to our desired goals, or we can fall into perfectionistic traps of convincing ourselves that we “should” be able to attempt something that actually we can’t at the moment. Then the next relevant question is: “how do I accurately assess my competence/knowledge?” But that’s for a future post!

Chloe
Psychology of Movement

One of our specialities as sport and exercise psychologists is that of creating long-term behaviour change, most commonly in terms of health behaviours such as exercise and nutrition. Throughout my time working with people on this, and also along my own journey with developing such habits, I have come to realise that one of the biggest barriers to success is the underestimation of what is required and the need for greater self-knowledge. This post is therefore a meander through the requirements and challenge of long-term change - primarily behaviour change, but of course this also demands psychological change. I’m going to go about this via metaphor, because it provides a useful framework on which to hang and organise all of these realities.

This is the view from the top of Smith Rock State Park in Oregon over towards what I believe are the Three Sisters mountains. My husband and I spent 3 weeks driving round Oregon in the summer of 2017 and found ourselves up here one morning. Let’s imagine my goal is to summit the highest peak you can see in the distance, which will serve as an analogy for pursuing a behaviour change goal.

When I took this photo, I naively guessed that those mountains were just a few miles away… but they are in fact 30 miles away as the crow flies. They are also bigger than they look from this vantage point – they’re just under 3200m (2 miles) high, but from the 915m at which I was standing they didn’t look so tall.

This is symbolic of the “motivational phase” in which we often set goals – perhaps it’s the New Year, or some event has inspired us. We feel energised and excited to get going, and everything seems doable. These states of inspiration can be helpful to leverage, but the problem is that they are temporary, and they also lend themselves to excessive optimism. We tend to underestimate the reality of things when we are in this “high” phase of setting goals, as I did as I stood up the top of Smith Rock. The fact that we’d gotten up there in 40-degree heat made me feel pretty chuffed about the fitness my running activities had afforded me, which might give me an inflated sense of confidence if I were to consider hiking to the Three Sisters. But in reality, Smith Rock is well-maintained with many steep yet manageable paths, whereas the Sisters are three times the height and surrounded by wilderness.

This reflects the reality that to give ourselves the best chance of making a long-term change, we need to understand a few things first. We need to understand exactly where we are situated in relation to this goal – what the true distance is (i.e. the time and effort it will take), despite rose-tinted glasses, and what the demands of making that ascent are in comparison to what we have done before. It’s helpful to take note of current achievements, skills and resources, but we must also understand what else we need to develop. Not only does this help prepare us to take on the task practically speaking, but it reduces the likelihood of crushed expectations when the rubber hits the road. This is one of the classic barriers: we bump up against unexpected realities in behaviour change journeys and things aren’t how we predicted, so it feels like we can’t do it. We can, it’s just that we need to know more than we currently do.

This is juxtaposed against the reality that we can’t see the entire route ahead. Where the light fades out towards the mountains, the terrain isn’t visible, so I would need to progress along my journey to see what’s there. In other words, it’s natural to not know what things will be like that far ahead, but to succeed in our quest we need to be prepared to navigate unknown challenges.

This means acknowledging that what we see in the foreground might be totally different to the rest of the journey. For instance, the houses you see below in the photo are the only settlements between the two places, and there are no roads travelling in that direction, unless you went all the way left, out of the scope of the photo and looped round, making the journey about 60 miles. Equally, the flat nature of the immediate landscape is misleading, making things look easier than they perhaps will be once you’ve run out of that initial momentum.

Alternatively, you could look at the flat landscape and consider that things might not look so interesting from down there as they do from up here. It might even get boring for a while, and turn into what feels like drudgery. This brings us to a key element of successful long-term behaviour change, which is that something needs to make the day-to-day processes feel worth it when the end goals are still far away. Either the end goal has to endow the present-moment tasks with sufficient meaning and purpose, or something about the process has to be made enjoyable and meaningful independently. Perhaps this challenge in itself presents an opportunity to work on your values, such as developing the capacity to tolerate discomfort and boredom; or maybe you orient your attention to the things that remain pretty despite being lower down.

Now let’s imagine I start this journey. I’m currently up high, and need to get down to the ground first. Descent is a rich symbol with many meanings, but the first that jumps out at me here is that of humbling, getting down to earth. When we get into a behaviour change journey, there comes a point where we need to get off the “high” of being inspired and then face the true reality of moving forward every day. This often means realising that things are harder and take longer than you think. To do something challenging often involves feeling “lower” than you did previously; by definition, setting yourself an elevated goal means your relative position has changed. But again there is also the invitation to recognise what you’ve built up already – skills, knowledge, resources – that you can use to help you along your journey. Those have not disappeared, it’s just your relative position has changed. This is important because for a lot of people this “coming down to earth” is not just humbling but demoralising – the distance feels too great, the pull of the mountain too weak to make it worth it. Something needs to change about how we feel about that gap, and what it means to elevate your expectations and desires for yourself.

Once into the journey, we can see that if I were to walk as the crow flies it would involve trespassing, which is an interesting metaphor. It could refer to the act of stepping into areas your mind does not believe you belong in, in which case it is going to chase you out. Or alternatively perhaps it could symbolise the need to respect other parts of yourself and be flexible in your route – we all have other needs and motives as well as those to get fitter or healthier, and sometimes they need to take priority for a period of time, so we will have to fit around them. The difficulty here is avoiding the common trap of “because my routine is disrupted the whole thing has gone to pot” - a classic case of our minds ending the journey and declaring failure before we have actually finished or failed.

Something we can’t necessarily predict about long hikes is the climate. In this photo it was around 40 degrees – we consumed over 3 litres of water between us on that hike, and it definitely wasn’t enough. Like heat, intense emotions can tire us out and make things that are already effortful harder, or we can be buffeted off course by tempestuous feelings that emulate wind and rain. Or we might even lose contact with our goals and any enjoyment we had of the process, like being shrouded in fog. Emotional barriers are some of the most common, because like the weather, they are immersive and have the potential to completely change our view. It can be hard to want to keep going when it’s dark and rainy. Understanding how we respond under different emotional circumstances and why can be challenging, and it is often that there is more work to do here than we realise.

There is another element to making long hikes which is knowing if you’re on track and monitoring your progress. This is what landmarks are for. Some of us find that once we’ve set a goal we start along a path towards it but we end up just “going through the motions” – we get distracted by other things in life and we may be doing some of what we need to do to pursue our goals but we are not being particularly attentive to the actual direction in which we are wandering. Equally, having landmarks to mark your progress can confirm to you that you are in fact improving. These aren’t the same thing as the mountain, but they’re a sure sign of “you’re on your way, and objectively further than you were before.”

Now let’s return to the reality that we can’t see all the way ahead. We will be entering into unknown and possibly quite unforgiving territory. Contrary to popular belief, sometimes change can become harder once you’ve been on the journey a while. You will have improved in various ways to get that far, but things will continue to challenge you. If it’s a fitness challenge for example, you will at some stage surpass the initial sharp trajectory of improvement that often happens early on, and you’ll find you have to work harder to achieve the same gains. Or maybe if it’s been a while, your sense of drive and motivation feels like it’s fading away and things feel like more of an uphill struggle.

Equally, if we think about hiking up mountains, there may be wild animals hidden amongst the trees. It’s not particularly likely that you’ll be threatened by a wild animal in these areas, as far as I’m aware, although they certainly do inhabit the forests. But there are always some people who will, and for me this is symbolic of how a portion of people end up sabotaging themselves before they achieve what they set out to achieve. This is particularly the case if the achievement would change their view of themselves; although this would typically be in a positive direction, if it would dismantle old narratives sometimes that feels too destabilising to engage with.

For others, encounters with wild animals may serve as a reminder that we are in new realms and thus we still have more to learn. Things that can appear easy or “innocuous” can lull us into a false sense of security, while things that genuinely are easy may seem too good to be true and therefore suspicious. Coming across a beaver and Columbian ground squirrel were representative of this for me, with my husband reminding me that despite the beaver’s cute looks it would probably annihilate me if I got too close, whilst my fear of an overly friendly squirrel running up my leg was totally irrational (yes, I was scared off by this small squirrel).

Then there are obstacles in general which may require you to change route. For instance, things in your life can change, temporarily or permanently, meaning you genuinely don’t have access to your normal resources. Whilst in the area, my husband and I went mountain-biking round the back of the Three Sisters on the McKenzie River trail. The terrain was more extreme than I anticipated, and navigating it felt like it far exceeded my abilities. Some of the descents were so steep, with dangerous drop-offs to the side and big, jagged rocks on the trail. I wasn’t a confident biker and at the time I feared injury putting a halt to my athletic training, so we decided to come out of the forest and complete some stretches of the ride on the highway. I felt like I had failed, but this reflects a reality that sometimes you have to do the “lesser-than” version for a stretch of the journey.

Let’s say you go through an uncharacteristically busy or stressful period in your life, you fall ill or injured, or you’re just having a difficult time. The best thing to do if you are truly out of your depth is to take the easier route for a bit. This doesn’t mean stopping, but accepting you may not be hitting the targets you want and moving forward in ways that may feel less valuable, but nonetheless move you forward. If you cease to move forward because taking this “easier route” is considered failing or “not worth it”, you will stagnate and possibly give up. This has consequences - if it becomes a pattern that is repeated with other behaviour change efforts, it becomes a narrative about who you are and what happens when you try to make change and run into challenges. It’s as if a part of you remains stuck there in the woods, haunting you for not completing the task. That’s a common part of my work with people - helping them revisit and look for pathways out of those woods, breaking the narrative of “every time I try to change I fail”.

On the other hand, there are times when what appear to be obstacles are in fact not. When we were hiking around Mount Trillium, we came across an enormous pile of rocks that had blocked the trail following a landslide. I refused to continue, scared of what might happen. My husband pointed out that there was in fact an elderly couple with a small, 3-legged dog who had just clambered over and contentedly carried on their stroll. His point was that if they could do it, we probably could. I have no idea if he was right or not - we didn’t do it because it just wasn’t worth the risk to me. But this highlights the need for discernment of the true nature of an obstacle. Is it an obstacle, or is it some kind of emotional mirage posing as an obstacle?

The point of all this is that making a long-term lifestyle change like becoming more active is for a lot of people much more challenging than they anticipate, and for good reason. It seems to me that people can become more sustainably active - but they need to do a lot more digging and explore the realities of doing so. In the same way that we need an accurate map to complete an actual hike, the best way of navigating a behaviour change journey is to make sure our own cognitive maps are as accurate as possible. That way we can chart a realistic way forward.

Chloe
Psychology of Movement

But there is good reason for this. I use the word “archetypal” quite deliberately - a word reflecting a combination of “archaic” and “typical”, rooted in variants of Greek and Latin words referring to beginnings and patterns/models. When something is archetypal, it is reflective of a universally recognised human pattern that emerges from our fundamental nature - the instinctual, emotional layers to our brains that predate conscious, logical thought and exercise goals.

In other words, a good proportion of the New Year fizzle-out is a natural consequence of the way our brains work, filtering what we pay attention to and colouring our perceptions. When we’re up on that peak, in the positive “motivational” phase, we are overly optimistic in our expectations and gloss over some of the realities we are going to encounter later down the line as that positivity wears off. The initial feel-good sense of determination makes us feel more deeply connected to our true motives than we actually are, and the sense of novelty disappears as we naturally adapt. This isn’t just a personal slip-up - it’s a quintessential pattern that occurs when we rely on temporary inspiration and willpower instead of creating a sustainable foundation.

The reality is that long-term change requires more nuance and preparation than we often realise (see our post about this using a hiking metaphor from the photo above here!), and this is exactly the kind of topic we are here to share information about.

So for January 2026, we are creating a FREE 30-DAY WORKBOOK to help you start this year differently. This is about informing your New Year physical activity pursuits with evidence-based principles of change, illuminating important yet often overlooked psychological factors, fostering deeper self-awareness and equipping you with strategies that give you a better chance of sustained progress.

This isn’t a quick-fix (there is rarely such a thing), nor a deep-dive that will hit on and address all of your exact challenges. Instead, it is a source of information and guidance to help you cover the psychological basics, meaning your approach is a little more robust than it otherwise would have been. The workbook will help you to:

• Understand your motives at a deeper level and get a little more connected with them

• Lay the groundwork for confidence and positive experience with physical activity

• Explore the role of other competing psychological states and motives that will serve as resistance to consistent physical activity

• Understand more about what is involved in long-term change and prepare for inevitable setbacks

At the end you should have made some helpful tweaks to your physical activities and know a little more about yourself, but most importantly understand that you will have setbacks or fall off the wagon at some point, and it is how you MAKE SENSE OF and USE this experience that dictates where you go from there. It’s not about avoiding ups and downs, it’s about using them as catalysts, as ways of stress-testing and fortifying your approach.

Our workbook is composed of exploratory guides, honest psychoeducation and practical strategies to try out. We’ll include weekly audio clips to help along the way and we’ll happily respond to any questions you have as you go through the process.

So no fluff, no quick fixes—just evidence-informed insights to help you identify barriers, plan smarter, and navigate the normal phases of behaviour change.

If you’re someone who wants exercise to become a sustainable part of your life—not just a January fling—subscribe now (it’s free). The workbook will drop on the 10TH JANUARY - keep an eye on your inbox!

Chloe
Psychology of Movement

A fundamental cornerstone of sustainable physical activity habits is having a strong motive, or set of motives. This sounds obvious, however the specifics of what makes a motive sufficiently strong are less frequently discussed.

What does “sufficiently strong” mean?

To answer this question, it helps to understand the fundamental factors that energise or provide resistance to taking action. By “fundamental” here I mean factors that relate to the core processes that underpin our physical functioning as humans, and I’ll be using this word frequently because this post is about working with our biology.

Physical cost-benefit analyses

Let’s start with the reality that physical activity is costly - certainly physically and possibly psychologically and resource-wise too. We have evolved to be energy-efficient where possible - being active where there is promise of significant reward, but otherwise conserving energy. As a result, there are complex processes in our brains that are constantly assessing the predicted and actual energy cost of literally everything we do and plan on doing.

Most of this is rapid and unconscious. There are a huge myriad of factors that feed into this equation - some things you might be able to identify, but many you won’t. We can consciously reflect and consider whether something is logically worth doing, but before this our brains have already formulated a prediction that feeds into our felt sense of anticipated or perceived effort. The greater the perception of effort, the stronger the activation of fundamental tendencies to withdraw from or avoid the activity, all in service of minimising effort. If you’ve ever felt that vague or visceral sense of “this just feels like it’s going to be a strain” and struggled to follow through on your intentions to be active, these processes are at work.

So because energy conservation and hence effort minimisation are big evolutionary drivers, the unconscious processes within our brains are often likely to come to the conclusion that physical activity isn’t worth doing.

There are certain conditions where this is less frequently the case: you are in good health and have plenty of energy, your life feels like it’s on track, you’re not emotionally or psychologically overwhelmed, or you’re in a consistent routine so the activity doesn’t demand much mental load. However, for many people the stars often aren’t aligned like this, and unless physical activity is felt to be something fundamentally good for our whole being, our brains will often deem it too costly. We can try to overcome this with conscious will, but research on the intention-behaviour gap demonstrates that around 50% of the time in people don’t act on such intentions.

In this sense then, a motive being “sufficiently strong” means strong enough that our brains deem activity promising at this fundamental level, meaning these crude cost-benefit analyses come out in our favour.

Competing motives

Furthermore, we have many different motives active at once in our lives not just our exercise motives. These motives also exist at different layers - conscious and unconscious - and some emerge in a “bottom-up” approach from our basic biological needs (e.g. feeding ourselves, recovering, connecting with others we feel secure with), whilst we formulate other more conceptual motives in a “top-down” manner via conscious reflection (e.g. achieving a physique we admire, earning enough money to fund a family holiday). They also have different temporal features - some motives are short-term, others long-term.

Other motives become apparent if we consider the emotions that turn up in our daily lives. For instance, anxiety pops up when we detect a potential threat to ourselves or something we care about, indicating the motive for threat avoidance or mitigation. Stress comes up when there are problems to be solved or uncertainties to be navigated. We feel sadness when we are somehow disconnected from something or someone, meaning the motives for reconnection and preventing further loss are active. Overall, we can infer our motives by taking a careful look at all the things we feel driven to do or avoid.

The bottom line is that we’re pretty complex, and unsurprisingly we’re always going to have motives that conflict to some degree - just because we want one thing doesn’t mean we don’t also want the opposite at the same time, or something else that will inadvertently pull us in the opposite direction.

So, “sufficiently strong” also means that your exercise motives have to be able to compete and regularly win against any conflicting motives - it has to seem worth it given the anticipated effort and opposition from other motives.

How do we make our exercise motives “sufficiently strong”?

One answer to this is that exercise has to have larger promise than opposing motives, which again sounds obvious, but discussions about this frequently neglect the more biological side of things. They tend to focus on abstract, intellectual motives established through logical reasoning which is a good start, but if we want to reduce resistance and amplify positive incentives we are best off also trying to harness the energy of our biology. There is another side to this answer too which is around trying to reduce resistance or perceived costs driven by other motives, but that’s for another day.

There are various ways of amplifying an activity’s sense of promise, but the one I will discuss here is that of making our motives work with other evolutionary drives. Let’s consider the basic evolutionary drive to withdraw that occurs when we’re faced with doing something that disturbs our sense of homeostasis - it requires energy and perhaps involves other things like temperature disruption and risk that will work against us in the cost-benefit analysis (e.g. going out into the cold and dark). In our evolutionary past, the drive that countered this drive to withdraw, and hence ensured we didn’t just hide away permanently and therefore die off, was the drive to get out and explore and pursue resources. This one only activates when there is perceived to be promise of important rewards or resources - it is “worth it” somehow.

The reason working with this fundamental drive is so powerful is because it is more directly linked into neurotransmitter systems that energise behaviour. We have the dopaminergic system which activates when we are pursuing or exploring something promising, and the action of dopamine here creates those senses of curiosity, wanting, motivation and focus that all make pursuing something challenging feel easier and attractive. There are various physiological effects that support this sense of energy and ease too - enhanced motor coordination, sharper attention, increased blood flow, arousal of the nervous system, etc. Essentially it biases the cost-benefit analysis towards pursuing rewards.

Equally, the opioid system gives us that almost euphoric sense of reward when we arrive at the point of achieving something, setting in motion a cascade of positive effects that increase the likelihood that we’ll want to pursue whatever caused that state again. In other words, we create a biological impetus by activating these systems - it is free energy.

Here I will provide some illustrative examples from my personal experience of how you might amplify this drive. When I was at university and training heavily for distance-running, I figured the best time to do my recovery runs was in the morning before lectures started. I also wanted to get more used to running early, considering many road races started in the morning.

However when winter drew in and the mornings were cold and dark, I’d find it a real struggle to get myself out there. I used to dread leaving the comfort of my warm bed and I still felt sluggish from having been asleep and thus the idea of exerting any physical energy was not appealing. But despite this sense of strain and reluctance, I managed to make it a consistent habit, and below is why.

Reason 1: Background context

The thing that got me attempting these early morning runs in the first place was the larger promise in the activity of running itself. This promise was awarded by a) my overarching goals, which revolved around particular events and times, and b) the progress I had made thus far.

But goals and progress don’t automatically create that special sense of promise - for that to be the case, they have to mean something personal to you. In my case, running served as a metaphor for the process of overcoming - challenging myself to do things I had never done and didn’t think I could do. Particularly relevant to me was the act of battling against physical exertion - it felt like I was pushing hard against my limits beyond just the physical, and this felt reparative for me during that time in my life - it was a compensation for feeling hopeless in other domains of life.

I also reached a point where I was running times way beyond what I thought I was capable of, which meant my goals and their sub-activities (i.e. training sessions/runs) provided a deep sense of excitement and adventure as I sought to find out exactly what else I could do. The importance of my goals then leant even more satisfaction to any progress in times. States such as excitement and adventure tap directly into the evolutionary drive to be active, so in essence I had a strong level of background motivation.

Practical take-home: your goals or focus with physical activity don’t necessarily have to involve the exact states of excitement and adventure, but they do need to ignite some kind of positive feeling in you if you’re going to maximise their potency. They’re likely to do this if they are shaped around something that feels fundamental to your well-being, as if it is taking you as a whole person in a positive direction in your life, and reflective of your deepest values. Often shaping goals/foci in this way requires more general reflection about yourself and what you want from your life, beyond physical activity.

Reason 2: having an INCONSISTENT habit in place first

The fact that running in general was endowed with such promise helped me to get an inconsistent habit in place to begin with - if I didn’t feel overly tired or stressed I could get myself out there intermittently. Contrary to popular belief, consistent habits are often inconsistent at the start - this doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t be able to get consistent. Starting anywhere is better than starting nowhere.

Practical take-home: try not to be all-or-nothing, and instead start by trying whatever it is when it feels easy or you feel good, and accept initially that you may not make it when you don’t feel so good. Then you can build over time - you just have to be patient and acknowledge that there are stages of change, and the first is often hit-and-miss.

Reason 3: External accountability

I became more consistent with early runs when I found a training partner (Rachel). I bumped into her on a run one morning and we stopped briefly to say hello, not expecting to see anyone else out and about. In acknowledging this, we agreed to meet for early runs a few times per week. Not only did I not want to let Rachel down, but it was also a very positive opportunity for social connection. She was a very friendly, non-judgmental person who put me at ease, and there is something inherently rewarding about doing something with others who are focused on the same thing.

This is also an example of how just getting out there and trying to do the activity can lead to other things that make doing the activity easier. It’s about exposing yourself to further opportunities, as eloquently discussed in Footnotes for Flourishing here).

Practical take-home: if you can outsource some of the decision-making to someone or something external, it reduces the mental load of the activity and makes it feel more like a done deal or commitment. Even better, the senses of connection and community that come from training with like-minded people are deeply meaningful for most and therefore tap into this sense of promise. There is definitely an argument to be made for learning to rely purely on yourself, in my opinion, but when you’re simply trying to establish a habit it’s best to take advantage of all the resources you can.

Reason 4: Giving meaning to the act itself

One challenge with relying on others to keep you accountable though is that you can’t control when they are and aren’t there - neither Rachel or I would be at university forever, and there were times when one of us couldn’t make it. I also wanted to get to a point where I could rely solely on myself, for my own sense of achievement.

The final and perhaps most potent layer of promise came over time from doing the early morning runs - an example of how if you just expose yourself to the activity even inconsistently more meaning emerges through experience. For me, going out in the cold and dark made me cringe - I was going against what my body wanted me to do - but the fact that it was hard made it somehow hugely satisfying to achieve. It soon felt simultaneously like a slog AND an adventure, and I also began to feel proud that I was making sacrifices for my goals when it would be very easy not to. The fact it made me cringe somehow became enmeshed with the sense of promise.

It also seems to me that there can be a bidirectional relationship between our motives and actions - whilst our motives drive behaviour, what we actually DO then feeds back into our perceptions of what our situation is, and hence influences the motives surrounding an activity. In other words, our actions have implications which are implicitly recognised by our brains - going out into the cold and dark despite reluctance implies promise, because why else would you do it? If you see someone running in the cold and dark you probably assume they have a good reason to. It certainly felt like my more consistent actions fed back into a sense of adventure and challenge for me, which then made the runs more promising even though I didn’t want to get up to do them. And the fact that I was making such sacrifices towards my goals then leant those even more importance for me, and so on, further supporting the idea that what we do towards something has the potential to influence how we feel about it and afford it greater significance. So I somehow became more motivated by doing what felt overly effortful to do….

This is also a prime example of how you just need your motives to win out, not to silence the others. I never shook that feeling of “urgh I can’t be bothered” - it felt like an ordeal every single time, but it had become a done deal in my mind so I’d haul myself out there. Furthermore, there was also a spill-over effect into other related situations. I soon found running in the rain and mud equally adventurous, despite the fact I’d initially cringed at that. Then I felt the same about more intense workouts, etc. - it became an adventure to get out there and do the thing because of the “oh no, not that” nature of it.

I will bring this post to a close by validating any battles you might be having with consistency in physical activity - genuinely our bodies and brains, shaped by evolution, naturally work against us sometimes. It doesn’t mean you can’t do it, it means your tasks are to respect the plurality and power of the drives you have within you, consider how these drives and your exercise motives can work together more effectively, and explore what really makes you tick at a deeper level.

Chloe
Psychology of Movement