Life? Life is like riding a bicycle: bells and whistles are nice, practice helps, and the right balance makes the whole experience more enjoyable. Balance, of course, is the tricky part, requiring both awareness and a readiness to act. On our bike, we immediately feel any changes in balance and can easily make the needed small corrections. But life is rather more complicated, and balancing a life is not so easy.
Strangely enough, one of the factors making maintaining a healthy life balance more challenging is also one of our strengths: our adaptability. We are quite good at adjusting to minor changes. So good, in fact, we often don’t even notice that we are doing it, and the process flies below our awareness radar. And therein lies the rub. Life thrives within a complex, ever-changing Goldilocks zone in which things are neither too much, nor too little; too fast, nor too slow; too hot, nor too cold, but instead fall within that “just right” range nestled comfortably between the more extreme possibilities. Our adaptability allows us to drift towards the extremes of the Goldilocks zone without noticing it — and that ultimately makes corrective actions more difficult.
A case in point: when it comes to our physical well-being, many of us in the Western World find ourselves a tad out-of-balance and would benefit by bringing more regular physical activity into our life. In addition to its well-known physical benefits, recent research is showing regular exercise to also be helpful for our emotional well-being: it’s proving to be an effective treatment for mild to moderate depression and anxiety. In retrospect, such results are not too shocking. We have good reason to believe that our mind is created, or at least shaped, by activity in our brain — a part of our body. If regular exercise promotes widespread healthy functioning of our body, and it does, it would be entirely consistent to find that it helps brain functioning as well, as part of the package. And if our brain is functioning better, our emotions are likely to be in better balance.
Quick, Robin! To the Bat-Gym! Given the overwhelming benefits of regular exercise, you’re most likely eager to leap from your chair, don a cool spandex outfit, and start your new workout program. Or maybe not.
There’s always a catch. In this case, we might sum it all up as follows: I hate exercise. It’s rather easy to understand why we might feel less than totally enthusiastic about exercising. All too often exercise tends to be unpleasant, inconvenient, and out of sync with the rest of our life. Most outrageously, exercise requires serious effort; it can be out-of-breath, red-in-the-face hard as it makes us hot, sweaty, achy, and exhausted. It can literally be a pain in the gluteus maximus. Perversely, the greater the potential benefits of exercise, the more unpleasant it tends to be — at least in the beginning. And as if all that weren’t bad enough, many exercise activities are repetitive, boring, and generally not much fun. I don’t know about you, but I don’t like hard and boring. I prefer fun and easy. Should I deliberately stress myself in the hope that my body will respond by gradually becoming stronger, fitter, more resilient, and attractive? Well… maybe. But that brings up another major mismatch with my preferences: I like instant results. Working day after day, seeing only minimal, if any, improvement is not an attractive prospect. But that’s par for the course with exercise: getting significant results takes time and persistent effort. And here’s a bonus wrinkle: the older you are — and arguably the more important it is for you to be exercising — the more time it takes to actually see results. Oh, bother! Who’s responsible for this mess?
I’m not done. It would help if it were easy to fit exercise into our already overcrowded daily routine. But it isn’t. Let’s be honest about this. For many of us, regular exercise amounts to a life-style change only slightly less comprehensive than having a sex-change operation and moving to China. Admittedly, one can sneak up on a more active life-style, starting out small. But still, it eats up time, which we don’t have, and requires planning and attention. Even a modest exercise program can easily consume six hours a week, and more is better. Where’s that time and effort going to come from? And who is going to pay for all those spiffy outfits, equipment, and hours at the gym?
In short, exercise sucks. And regular exercise sucks regularly. It’s little wonder so few of us indulge. But that does not change the stark reality: exercise may be the closest thing we know of to a magic elixir: it’s very likely to extend your life while making it noticeably more enjoyable while you’re at it. Would you like to be more attractive? Have more energy? Would you like one more day to spend with your loved ones? To see one more beautiful sunset? Only you can decide if it’s worth the effort, but if you’re like me, and are convinced it is, then our challenge becomes one of tipping the scales, of creating circumstances that make regular exercising, on balance, simply too good to pass up. Among other things, that translates into making it as convenient and enjoyable as possible.
Do you exercise regularly? If so, how do you motivate yourself, how do you make the experience more enjoyable, how do you make it more convenient? In other words, what works for you? We are all individuals, each with our own set of life circumstances. That means strategies and tactics that work well for one of us may not work — at all — for another. Nonetheless, the more ideas we can gather together, the more raw material we will have to experiment with as we each create our own unique life-style balance. Oh, I know there are lots of lists on the net outlining how to motivate yourself to exercise. And those are all great! But I’m not looking for ideas that might sound good, or seem as if they should work. I’m more interested in what we know does work, tried and true tactics that we know work for at least one of us… no matter how off the wall they might seem. Below, I share a few tips I’ve already collected. If you would like to comment, or add some tactics that work for you, please feel free to do so. And remember, people are different. What works for one of us will not always work for others. Each of us will need to experiment to find our own best balance.
Take-a-Tip, Leave-a-Tip
For me, listening to enjoyable, upbeat music seems to create extra energy for exercising and make it more pleasant. I don’t know where that inspirational energy comes from, it seems to appear out of thin air. I only know the effect is real. Curiously, it is not always easy to predict which songs will work best, it takes a little experimenting. I have also discovered that different songs tend to go better with different exercise activities. Thus, one set of songs goes best with walking, another with working on a treadmill or elliptical.
Some people like to jump into activities with both feet, others like to sneak up on them from behind. I tend to be in the latter group. Starting out gradually worked well for me. I started walking and gradually added more strenuous activities. You might prefer bike riding, swimming, or daily ping pong. The important part is to get started. What also helped me is that I liked to walk, so the activity was inherently enjoyable and did not require any initial special equipment (read, “big financial investment”). Later, after trying out several types of work-out machines, I settled on an elliptical and put in front of a TV with DVD player. That made exercise about as enjoyable, easy, and convenient as it can get for me. It also made it harder to come up with excuses for not exercising: so what if it’s raining or my hair’s a mess?
