This past February marked my thirtieth anniversary studying how to create sustainable exercise motivation and participation, and coaching clients in the system I designed and evaluated to achieve those goals. So imagine my discomfort when I found myself struggling with an issue similar to those I’ve coached so many people through over the course of my career: feeling unmotivated by my own exercise.
Let me explain.
I’m at that age when, like so many women and men, I found myself wanting to learn more about bone health and how to prevent osteoporosis. My grandmother had osteoporosis, and we all know genetics counts for a lot. I had always assumed that my lifelong (since my early teens!) running, which in recent years had transformed into daily walking, would be sufficiently protective.
But in studying the ins and outs of this life phase, and reading research and popular media articles, I learned that my lovely, leisurely daily walk actually might not be as protective for bone health as I had presumed. In fact, some research suggests that a better choice for my bones would be to walk at a firm pace to ensure higher impact, a type of stressor that helps build bone mineral density. So, good student that I am (and going against three decades my own research, insights, and experience), I said to myself, “Michelle, let’s start walking at a good clip so you can better promote bone health in your later years!”
A couple of weeks into my new regimen, however, I started feeling a little less enthusiastic about my walks. My dog didn’t seem as excited about them either. Instead of feeling, “Oh! It’s time for my walk!” I felt, “Oh, I should take that walk now …” Instead of the burst of energy I always got from my slower, more centering walks through the changing seasons and landscapes, I felt ambivalent, quite meh.
Yes, this was ironic! One of my biggest messages to clients (which you’ve heard time and again as a subscriber to this newsletter) – and one based firmly in science – has been to move in ways that feel good, that fuel you, that are meaningful to you, and that help you reset and renew. This is what I’ve come to know works from decades of sustainable-change research and coaching. And this influence has been seen across the lifespan, including among teens, parents, and older adults.
Back to the story. I was fully aware of why I had made this different choice to push myself on my daily walks, and I knew that this decision was grounded in a truly valuable reason. But I also couldn’t deny the non-optimal results on my daily walking motivation and well-being. That realization took me right back to an early research project of mine, and the counterintuitive and frankly startling findings that helped shape the rest of my career.
Why Exercising for Future Goals Doesn’t Motivate Most People Long-Term
In the early 2000s I published some studies suggesting that being physically active in order to gain future health benefits was associated with lackluster motivation, non-optimal self-regulation, and decreased participation when compared to activity that aimed for immediate benefits like energy and renewal. In fact, when I first analyzed those data it shocked me. At that time I had assumed (and formally hypothesized) that improving health would be a potent lifelong motivator for exercising. But those surprising findings were not so surprising after I dove into other scientific areas to better understand what was going on.
There seemed to be three primary reasons explaining why health goals don’t motivate most people long-term. First, aiming for better health outcomes (e.g., bone health, avoiding diabetes) results in a myriad of demotivating outcomes. In particular, if today’s exercise aims to benefit us in ten, twenty, or forty years, it doesn’t stand much of a chance of remaining a daily priority in the Busy Here and Now!
Second, the data also suggested that exercising for improved health all too easily takes us to “Should Land,” a punishing destination that easily leaves many of us unmotivated to move regularly. The reasons health-promoting and aging-optimizing exercise goals often lose their motivational power for so many is because of the dilemma I found myself in: They leave us feeling meh about actually doing the exercise. If we feel like we can take it or leave it, we generally leave it.
Third, when our activities follow an exercise prescription based on optimizing how intensely and long we must exercise in order to optimize the health benefits, it can easily generate the negative experiences associated with inactivity because we don’t like moving our bodies in that way.
And this brings us right back to my conundrum, one that so many other people face on a daily basis: I wanted to exercise for those amazing health benefits, but I just didn’t like the experiences I had while exercising in the ways that I knew I should, that I was forcing myself to do.
If you don’t like how you feel when you exercise following prescribed exercises, if focusing on pushing yourself to walk at a faster clip robs 75% of the well-being benefits you get from your walk and curbs your enthusiasm for stepping outside (as it did for me), then it’s critical to step back and reflect. Using self-awareness, analyze your prior years of experience to proactively discern what is right for you. Like all decisions, what’s right for one person isn’t going be right for another.
It may be that this act of introspection leads you to keep up that faster pace, or alternate slower with faster bouts. My reflection showed me that sacrificing the nurturing, positive experiences I derived from my typical walking pace wasn’t worth it. And I mindfully gave myself permission to revert to the slower movement that fuels and renews me on my daily walks.
But that’s not the end of the story. I still wanted to give my bones the attention I know they need, so I continued my journey of learning. This time, I was looking for other ways to strengthen my bones that don’t drain my well-being and – this is critical – that I could also easily integrate into my daily life.
Moving toward Movement for Better Bone Health
To jump-start my process, I enrolled in a practical strategies for bone-health webinar put on by Monica Reinagel, a nutrition and behavior change colleague I highly regard, and Joanne Fagerstrom, a new bone-health-promoting exercise role model. What I learned during this brief time was game changing for me. They delivered easy-to-use information that I have been successfully, and happily, building into my days. If this piques your interest, you can find more information by following the link above. (Please note: I am not associated with this program and do not benefit from your participation.)
I’ve been choosing Opportunities to Move (OTMs, as my clients sometimes call them) – talking the stairs instead of the elevator, for example – for decades. Now I also seek out opportunities to incorporate simple (and fun!) bone-health and balance-building movements, such as standing on one leg or doing heel drops while waiting for the water to boil for tea. As I learn to make changes in my physical activity, I am now following my own advice: focusing on adding just one or two new exercises at a time, and regularly checking in with myself about how they are working for me before adding anything else.
And, full disclosure: Now that I’m outside of the Shadow of the Should, sometimes when I feel like it (or my walking partner urges me to pick up the pace), I do speed up and actually enjoy it.
Prescribing the Middle Way in Medicine
I typically don’t write about my own experiences with exercise, but I also don’t tend to get stuck in issues I’ve built my career around solving for others, either. And believe me, this journey was humbling, reminding me that when I say “most people” I am also talking about myself. But I am also talking about a much bigger story than just my own.
Most of us, when we get concerns about our health, truly do want to follow best practices and recommended treatments. The problem is that this targeted, bulls-eye approach genuinely can’t be sustained by most. Because while it might be the ideal, it’s just not realistic for the long haul. We find ourselves disliking it (as I did), or life repeatedly interrupts our best intentions, or the point we are aiming at just seems so far off that it stops making sense. And then what happens? So many of us go from the extreme of trying to follow the health advice to the letter to not doing any health promoting activities at all. After all, why bother if we can’t do it right?
Fortunately for me, once I put my expert hat back on, I was able to resolve my low motivation and quickly turn things around. But most individuals, patients and clients, and most clinicians, don’t know a system that efficiently guides people to navigating their true medical behavior-change needs within their personal desires and daily scheduling needs.
Navigating this path between extremes is what I refer to as The Middle Way in Medicine. It is a journey of discovery; one where patients (and their clinicians, too) learn how to balance and integrate their very real and often urgent medical behavior change/self-care needs with the realities of their personalities, preferences, caregiving responsibilities, and work-related needs.
Most individuals will not and cannot sustain health promoting and disease management behavior without finding The Middle Way. Why? Because even when its critical for our health, it’s nearly impossible to maintain a behavior that doesn’t fit with our unique hearts and lives.
My new (not yet published) research with patients is bearing this phenomenon out, and efficient ways to guide us in The Middle Way in Medicine are easier to design than people think. My hope for the future is that there will be greater incentives within the health system to more highly value this mindset and these methods. And I sincerely hope that learning about my personal motivation challenge and how I resolved it is helpful in some way to you personally or professionally.
Feel free to share this post with others who share your interest in the science-based how-to’s of creating lasting changes that can survive in the real world.
Copyright © Segar, Michelle.