Here is Why your Workout Motivation will fail you!

Wanting to have better health is good, but how we want it is the concern I am addressing here. In my work as a psychologist, I come across concerns with self-esteem, body image, and anxiety-related concerns in young adults. When working on this, I was able to identify in some clients that the drive to work on themselves came from how they do not like the way they are. I personally observed this while interacting with some gym mates too.

It got me thinking that It is completely alright to change something that you don’t like. But, how much you don't like that version of you and how you treat that version matters. 

Let me tell you why it's unhealthy,

When you try and push everything under the rug while cleaning, there is very less cleaning and more avoidance. so when new dirt comes in, the old dirt will pop out when you are pushing it under.

Imagine this: Person ‘X’ feels fat and he looks fat and he wants to change it. While working out, he remembers all the bullying and the shame he felt and never wants to experience that again. 

This story can go two ways. One, this person might want results sooner and could get disappointed when he does not see the results that his trainer promised. or he got the results and he got fit and after a few months when he gets some weight back, he’s anxious and stressed that the past is coming to haunt him. 

What I am focusing on here is the drive to keep going. Here, there was hatred of the past which is the drive and the motivation.

Therefore I invite the thought of accepting the part that causes the hatred. This makes the journey more compassionate, more kind. When the mind is put through the stress of running away from a version, it gets confused, it mostly starts getting anxious.

When you hold on to how a version of yourself was the reason for bullying and resent it, even if the body changes the mind will be haunted by the constant comparison to the past and it will assess how far you are from that version. 

Therefore before changing the body, I ask you to challenge the mind, by asking questions like 

1. How am I letting bullying (any adverse event) disturb me?

2. How can I work ahead by keeping myself as a starting point rather than dirt under a rug?

3. Am i doing this for myself or for others/

4. How can I be kind to myself through the process?

After the mind is treated nicely, and after a good workout plan and a healthy lifestyle, let's say you gain a few kilos, I promise you won’t enter into a spiral of ‘Oh shit it's happening again, I am getting fat’. but rather, you know where you need to work on, because no step of the process or your past was under the rug.

Writer’s Note:

This is written from my experience as a psychologist with clients and from interactions with friends at gym. What I have proposed above is a hypothesis and the questions I suggested are points of reflection you can use to see how this hypothesis sits with you.