I am an all-or-nothing kind of person. A lot of us are. It has its pluses and minuses. I can be very driven about the things I want to achieve. That’s good. But for the things I know are necessary but not what I want to do, I fall into Newton’s first law of motion – I am an object at rest that isn’t going to be anything but at rest. That’s not good.
The reality is that there is very little black and white in the world. Most of it is shades of gray, but I just don’t think like that. Add my tendency to have my feet on the figurative gas pedal and the brake at the same time, and you have the ideal setup for failure.
Of course, this hits the hardest for me with exercise. Because it’s me. I hate it, especially cardio, which works like magic on blood sugars. And maybe food logging, which (to paraphrase 10 Things I Hate About You) I hate with the power of a thousand suns.
Intellectually, I know that starting small, building a foundation, and growing it slowly is the best way to create any new habit. But somehow, I always end up making “small” too big to succeed. My go-to has usually been 10 minutes at a time, sometimes even five. Anyone can do exercise for 10 minutes, right? Or five?
Apparently not.
It’s not a capability thing, either. It’s a brain block. My brain is much stronger than any other part of me. When it digs in its heels, talking it down is a painful process. Even though I know I feel better when I exercise. Even when I know I will feel a sense of accomplishment if I do the 10 minutes. Or the five.
And yet, here I am, still on the couch.
I had an unexpected conversation this week, with someone I had never met before. (You know how these conversations are sometimes easier with strangers than with well-meaning loved ones?)
She follows this Instagram account, The Brain Doctor, who is actually a brain doctor (neurologist), and talks a lot about building habits. Apparently, one of the things she talks about is making the first starting small step laughably easy. Like, one or two minutes laughably easy. I thought that’s what I had been doing with the five minutes, but I think five minutes still sounds like some kind of milestone. For example, it takes about five minutes to grab my trash, walk it down the hallway to the trash room, and come back.
But two minutes? You can’t do jack in two minutes. Can you?
My kind stranger then pointed out that something is better than nothing, even one or two minutes. Because that one or two minutes is still better than what you did from the couch.
Huh.
Is it really that simple?
I mean, walking around my apartment takes about a minute, and I do that all the time without thinking about it. If I do that on the treadmill, say, I wouldn’t be up there long enough to tell whether I was in the mood to exercise or not.
The second thing she said that really struck me was that when you set yourself up for failure, and you succeed in that failure, a) it is self-reinforcing, and b) you prove to your subconscious that you can’t be trusted. (It’s that last piece that smacked me upside the head.)
She’s right.
I’ve written about the inherent distrust in a physical self that has failed me, but the idea that I am spreading that with (lack of) action by my intellectual self is kind of horrifying.
No wonder I am tired all the time. Adding the kind of mental gymnastics I play with myself to the disease burden, social stuff, trying to build a business, and everything else that constitutes living my life is a lot.
The more I think about it, the better it sounds. I don’t know if laughably small will work better than all the other ways I have tried to psych myself into exercise, but I will give it a try. And maybe, as I roll my eyes at myself for one or two minutes every day, a habit will grow while I’m not looking.