Conflicted feelings about exercising?

"I want to and don't want to"

*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.

Photo by Max on Unsplash

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.

Photo by Alex Cook on Unsplash

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.

Photo by Paulius Dragunas on Unsplash

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