Q&A: Where do you find the motivation to workout or eat better? Especially if you’re in a slump.
A: You don’t find it anywhere. Our feelings are nowhere to be found. They are not lost keys nor a lost phone. Here’s a reality check: the time spent “looking for motivation to workout” or for anything, is procrastination in a cocktail dress. (Google says that cocktail dresses are fancy, and Google is never wrong.)
Stop thinking about “why don’t I feel like it,” and just do whatever “it” is. “Why don’t I feel like it?” is another example of procrastination and self indulgence in a costume of virtue.
We’ve been sold that answering “why questions” will solve a problem, but really we’ve been conned twice: the first lie is that anyone but God can know why, and the second is that anyone can truly solve a problem. I will tackle them backwards.
There are no solutions when you’re looking for motivation to workout
Life is not arithmetic class. There are no solutions, only trade offs. You can’t spend the same hour relaxing, scrolling or contemplating motivation and that same hour exercising. Sure, you can toggle between scrolling and exercising for an hour, but you’re doing 30 min of exercise and 30 min of scrolling. In other words, you have traded half your workout for scrolling.
Can you solve marital problems? No. You can only manage them. You can manage the inherent difficulties in a marriage by resolving conflicts, improving communication, spending more time together, and all sorts of other positive things. Only single people have no marital problems, but single people have manage single people problems. Insert cliché about greener grass, taking good with bad, walking a mile in someone else’s shoes, etc. and they all fit.
We help our clients manage their exercise consistency, and some of them make it hard to help them.
Not Why – The Unsolved Mystery
Here’s a mystery: why would someone without a developed frontal lobe (child) not automatically choose to do boring, tedious and/or frustrating things (homework) instead of fun, easy and/or relaxing things (literally anything else)? It’s a conundrum of sarcastically epic proportions.
In modern times we parents are told that we should help our kids figure out why their feelings are the feelings of a child. Implied is that this un-frustrating process will lead to an epiphany that yields the logical next steps to transform the child’s relationship with homework and thereby “solves the homework problem.”
Here’s a better question: do the children who do their homework consistently actually enjoy doing boring, frustrating and/or tedious things? No.
Do people with better eating habits actually prefer the taste of broccoli to French fries? Not if they’re being honest.
These 2 questions are “better questions” because they expose the fallacy that “knowing” why we feel the way we do about hard, effortful and/or less pleasurable things will make doing them easy or automatic. To paraphrase Yogi Berra, “the hard thing about hard things is that they are hard.”
The real “power of why” is that it’s an infinite blackhole of time, energy and attention that looks a lot like virtue. Since it never works, but seems like it should be helpful, you can sell people a lot of books and consulting…
Bottom Line for when you’re looking for motivation to workout
Hard things can not be made easy, but hard things can get done. And, getting them done is all that matters. Hard things do not get any easier by contemplating why they are hard. Hard things don’t even get easier by repetition – you just get better at taking action. Hard things are always hard things, but hard things get done by… drum roll… doing them.