How I exercised every day for 10 weeks…at 5:40 A.M.
I will start this story from a peculiar angle. Bear with me!
January 14th:
University — the first semester ended, and I finally had free time! Yippee!
Finally, time to rest and do the things I want to do! So, of course, there is time for writing! And starting an exercise routine! And reading! And learning math! Or restarting publishing after a month’s pause because I had too much to do at university.
At least that was my thought process.
Of course, being me, I was a bit ambitious — planning to start all these habits that I always had trouble dedicating myself to.
What was I thinking!? I have no idea. I had so many plans for January. I wanted to start exercising, writing, and learning math. I forgot the most important thing — rest!
I forgot that I had to have energy to do these things.
So, I planned too much and was so overwhelmed that I didn’t do any of it.
There was also a different component to this.
At that time, I made a goal to get fit in two years’ time. The most concrete goal was to do a full push-up — not from the knees but a “real” one. I have never been able to do that correctly and with control. That is a dream to me.
So that was the goal I set for myself.
Of course, being me I didn’t stop there, I set goals for all areas of my life. And that’s where it all went wrong.
January 19th:
Slept 4 hours, had no energy, no motivation to do anything. Just wanted to sleep and disappear. I realized I do not feel good. I was running away from everything again.
So I asked myself a powerful, simple question:
“What am I running away from? And why?”
I just asked that and listened.
What came out?
In summary: I didn’t want to do anything because I was afraid! Also, I had set too high expectations of myself that I could not meet. Of course, that feels demotivating. No wonder I didn’t want to wake up in the morning.
I wrote about it here: how I got over my fear of dreams, or Dreams vs. Fears: Confronting the Paralysis of Ambition (Will post this next week! )
So I decided — I will start over. Today.
From that day, I scrapped all my plans — I had nothing I needed to do. I scrapped my blog, math, everything.
I decided on one goal — exercise. That would be my only priority.
I would concentrate on one thing. Exercising every morning for 20 minutes.
That still seemed too much.
So I decided on another goal, that seemed so silly at the time.
All I had to do every morning was to wake up, take my mat, lay down on it, and watch an exercise video. That’s it!
Just watch it. I could even continue to sleep if I was so tired. But on the mat!
That one change in perspective changed the way I exercise.
Now, 2 months later, I have not missed a day (except when I was sick and could not get up from the bed without a serious headache). And I will continue to exercise every day. I am not planning on quitting soon.
And not once did I just watch the video.
I wanted to exercise — if I was already there, why not do it? So I did.
This powerful shift changed everything.
At first, I thought it was silly — to seriously just sit there with my mat and watch an exercise video.
I am wasting time.
But then — I have a two-year goal of getting fit. What is one month of just sitting on a mat, in that scope? It’s just 1/24 of the time. If it gets me started, then I will do it. No matter how ridiculous I feel.
And it worked!
I lowered my expectations, gave myself such a low bar that I could not fail, and I did much more than I have ever done!
So that is how I did it. In the end, it was so simple. I have never been able to make exercising a habit, but this worked. I set a realistic goal and very minimal expectations for myself. So low that it was very hard to fail.
The point was to create a habit — space and time for myself to exercise. It was important to just start, and I thought that if I had a habit in place, then it would be easy to change what I do with that time.
And I was right!
If you too want to start doing something that you could never stick to — be realistic and create a very low bar.
3 minutes of meditation.
5 minutes of reading.
10 minutes of writing.
10 minutes of programming.
Just start.
Create the space and time for the thing you want to do, and after a month or two, you will be able to naturally increase the time and activity to whatever.
Hope this helps!
