What Netflix can teach you about going to the gym
It’s 1:30 on a Saturday afternoon. You’re sitting on your couch, you’ve been watching Netflix since you woke up. You told yourself that this is the last episode before you go to the gym.
Suddenly, you see this:
You’re left with a choice: you could get up, change, walk ten minutes in the cold, and get your workout on….
Or you could do literally nothing and another episode will play.
Netflix is a brilliant company. Watching another episode is the default option. It’s so default, in fact, that you have to actively do something if you want to stop watching. They’ve harnessed the power of inertia in a serious way.
Inertia is a powerful force. An object in motion stays in motion. An object at rest stays at rest. The same is true for people: most of the time, changing your behavior isn’t about taking massive actions. It’s just about giving yourself enough of a push that doing the thing you want to do is easier than not doing it.
We can harness this force for good. If you want to get better at sticking to your fitness goals, you have to shape your environment so that eating well and going to the gym is easier than ordering pizza and watching eight more episodes of Laguna Beach. You have to make it automatic. The desired action has to be easier than the alternative.
Two ideas for harnessing inertia
- Schedule your workouts, and make this time sacred. Put them on your work calendar, right there next to your annual salary review and status meetings. Most professionals treat their calendar appointments as sacred — use that fact to keep yourself honest and your colleagues from accidentally imposing on your gym time.
- No junk food in the house. You’ve probably heard this one before, but it bears repeating. I am a huge fan of cheat meals or even days, and I eat like a monster on them. But even then, nothing stays in the house at the end of the day. It’s a lot harder to mindlessly eat a large bag of chips if you have to walk to the grocery store to get them first.
A challenge
Pick one of these ideas, or come up with one of your own, and implement it in your life. See if it doesn’t help with making healthy choices a little more automatic. It can be small, it can be simple (in fact, it’s better if it is), but do yourself a favor and actually do it.
When it comes to health and fitness advice, it’s a lot easier to read it than it is to put it in practice. That’s why I wrote a little booklet to help you get to the gym and follow through on your goals:
If this helped you, do me a favor and hit the 💚 below so it can help other people too.
