Building resistance to stress enables us to easily and enthusiastically embrace problem-solving in our life.
Conditioning our body and mind is an active and eager process of engagement. When we feel as though we; “have to” exercise we deprive our self of the ability to function well.
Exercise is not a chore.
Exercise and physical activity should not feel like a chore, if you can get out of bed in the morning, dress and get on with your day, you are exercising enough to suit your chosen lifestyle.
The issue with physical fitness arises when there is a desire to live a life beyond the drudgery of the everyday. Therefore, many of us appreciate our holidays as a break from daily business.
“Relaxing” on a vacation almost always means engaging in physical activity, be it skiing in winter, swimming in summer, hiking or simply shopping for new wares.
If we do not invest in our physical fitness during our everyday life, the holiday may become a chore with the stress of the additional physical demands.
A ground breaking study
The chore mindset to exercise is debilitating because unnecessary energy is expended in “making the effort” rather than enjoying the experience of being able to move with strength and enthusiasm.
A ground breaking study was done in 1998 by Roy Baumeister and Dianne Tice, a married couple at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland.
The study held 67 students in a room with the smell of freshly baked chocolate cookies. The students were then divided into groups, some were offered the cookies and others were offered radishes to eat.
The students were then given an impossible puzzle to complete in 30 minutes. The results were extraordinary.
The radish group gave up on the puzzle in 8 minutes whereas the cookie group persevered for nearly 19 minutes.
The researchers concluded; that those who had to resist the cookies and force themselves to eat pungent vegetables could no longer find the will to engage in another torturous task.
Self-control is a muscle
The citing of this research is not meant to advocate for the making of poor food choices but rather emphasise that willpower or self- control is like a muscle and it can be exercised to exhaustion.
Many people who abandon exercise or a healthy eating plan do so because they are too tired from thinking about how to coerce themselves into exercise or healthy diets.
Therefore what looks like “laziness” is actually exhaustion. Exhaustion may help to explain why after a long hard day, we are more likely to snap at our partner or have one drink too many. We have simply depleted our self-control.
Is there a solution for healthy living?
The solution is simple, but difficult to implement because it is against our current order of living life. The following are three “easy” steps that will see you succeed.
- Rest and recover from the exhaustion of trying to get fit and plan a healthy intervention.
- Plan to exercise in the morning and make it a habit so that nothing will then get in the way of maintaining your physical fitness.
- Review your diet, plan and prepare meals ahead of a busy week to ensure you have ready healthy meals at hand.
The order of implementation of this healthy lifestyle is important. Diet is 80-90% of a healthy lifestyle, however, if you are tired and sedentary, your willpower and self-control will not be strong enough to sustain the energy needed to implement a lifelong change.
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I leave you this week with a few words from William Shakespeare’s, Hamlet.
Hamlet complains to his friends that he feels imprisoned. However, his friends disagree. Hamlet retorts that prison is a matter of a person’s perception, and he feels chained by his situation!
It is not too hard to get up in the morning to exercise, but thinking makes it so……
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Live well and eat well
Anna
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