How to Keep Exercising After Motivation Wears Off (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Because I think a lot of people, you know, they make these resolutions at the beginning of the year, but get to the end of January, early February. Talk to me about that moment. Like how do you maintain the motivation at that time?

[00:00:11] Speaker 2: Right. Well, motivation comes and goes. After people listen to this interview with you, their motivation is going to be pretty high. Right? That motivation may not even wane by like, you know, February 2nd. It may be waned by the afternoon when they actually have signed up for that class.

[00:00:33] Speaker 1: How did you get interested in this?

[00:00:35] Speaker 2: I've been a long-term mover. I grew up loving to move. I mean, my parents used to take me backpacking and we worked in the garden and it was very much part of our family and our lifestyle and joy. And then I actually ended up developing an eating disorder and becoming very inflexible in my movement where I would, you know, go on a Stairmaster for an hour and a half or wake up really early and have to run a certain number of miles to burn off the calories that I'd eaten. So I'd experienced both the joy of movement and also the inflexibility of movement. And in my career, I started studying something called psychological flexibility, which is your ability to pursue what matters to you in a much more flexible way as opposed to rigid rules that our mind makes or shoulds. And that led me down this path of exploring more nutritious ways of moving my body and helping my clients do so as well.

[00:01:34] Speaker 1: And then writing this book, which I love the title, I Know I Should Exercise, but 44 Reasons We Don't Move and How to Get Over Them. This book is the culmination of a lot of those experiences you've had?

[00:01:45] Speaker 2: Well, the book is something that I wrote with Katie Bowman, who is a biomechanist, and her angle is something called nutritious movement, where she's looking at not only exercise, but how are we moving our bodies in our lives? And then my angle was, why aren't people moving their bodies if they know exercise is good for them? Mortality rates go down, cancer rates go down, but only about a quarter of us are actually doing it.

[00:02:16] Speaker 1: 44 Reasons We Don't Move and How to Get Over Them. How did you come up with 44? Did you just start listing them off and you got to 44 and stopped or what happened?

[00:02:25] Speaker 2: We pull their audiences and say, why don't you move your body? Tell us. And people put in, they sent in all sorts of things because my cat climbs all over me when I'm trying to do my exercises on the floor. That was one of them. Because my dog protests when I try and take him for a walk. Because my teenagers won't get off the screen. I'm a hairdresser and I'm on my feet all day. I don't want to go out and get on a treadmill. It's the last thing I want to do. These are real reasons from real people about why they can't move their body. And so we got a number of them in and we chose 44 because it's Katie's favorite number. And I'm like, sure, take it. I don't care. Kate, 44.

[00:03:02] Speaker 1: You know, it's interesting for me, and I was just thinking about this as you were talking, I have this bike ride that I'm doing with a bunch of friends and it's got a week long bike ride. And you know what it is, doc, for me, it is fear of embarrassment more than anything else. That gets me riding my bike early this morning, you know, to make sure that I can actually keep up with everybody. Some of whom are far younger than me, but I set a goal for myself and I keep sort of establishing these goals throughout the year, a race or something like that. That's what seems to work for me. Most people don't have that. And instead they're sort of balancing this idea that I don't have enough time, I have all this work to do, I got to take care of my kids and the movement is an add on or the exercise in this case is an add on to my day and it'll be the first thing to go. They don't give it the same priority, right? And when you write about this in the book, you say that's a bit of a mental trap to sort of rely on the idea that the clock just isn't there for you. What did you mean by that?

[00:04:02] Speaker 2: Well, there's a couple of things. One, movement has been sort of sectioned off into leisure time and many of us feel like we're having to choose. Like, do I go to the gym after work, you know, do my bike ride or do I go get groceries? Do I go to my kids' soccer game and watch them play or do I go to my own exercise class and let myself take care of my body? So we have this either or mindset when it comes to movement and that's just what the mind tends to do. It tends to be pretty dichotomous. And one of the things that I really encourage in terms of psychological flexibility and cognitive flexibility is to shift from that either or mindset to a both and mindset. Is there a way you could go to your kids' soccer game and you don't have to choose. You still get to move your body. That may require, as I do with my kids' baseball games, walking around the field, not sitting on the stands in the chair with, you know, with the cup holders watching your kid exercise while you're sitting there, but maybe standing and cheering and stretching. Sometimes it is about prioritizing our time and how we are using our time. And there's actually some research out of UCLA from Cassie Holmes that looks at perception of time and something called time affluence. Our time affluence is malleable. When we are doing things that are meaningful, we feel like we have more time. So we could work on how could we move our bodies in ways that are more meaningful and more generous. And you might end up feeling like you have more time as a result. And then you do need to look at people's lives and the reality of people's lives and do a little bit of a time audit. How are you spending your day? Because there's probably way more places where you can put movement that you are not putting movement. Even just ordering your groceries online, you think it's saving you time, but you know what it's not doing? Getting your body out to the grocery store, walking around the grocery store. When I go to the grocery store, I take those like baskets that are super uncomfortable to hold and I fill it with like my milk and my cans of food and I hold it in one hand, one arm and I walk and then I'll switch arms and guess what? I'm building up some strength in my upper body. When I go on a trip, I will hold my luggage and carry it up the stairs, just like that farmer's carry that I do at the gym.

[00:06:26] Speaker 1: I think in airports, I've seen that person carrying that bag up the two flights of stairs. Look, the escalator is working perfectly fine. What's going on here?

[00:06:35] Speaker 2: Yeah, well, convenience is a problem for all of us. It's not healthy for us.

[00:06:41] Speaker 1: And it's going to continue, right? We are just becoming a more sort of, we want efficiencies, we want these conveniences built into every aspect of our life. As you say, we have cameras in our cars, we have garage door openers, remote controls, all these things, that's going to keep happening. And the big one, I'm holding up my phone, is the fact that scrolling our phone feels so good compared to heading to the gym. It's that dopamine surge that you write about in the book. Again, we know this, and we know that you get those sort of short-term dopamine surges, but that's got to be really hard to fight against, I imagine, when you're counseling your patients.

[00:07:24] Speaker 2: Well, I would first ask, how long does it feel good for? Because it may feel good for a little bit, then there's this point of diminishing return where actually it doesn't feel good and you stop liking it. You're like, when you take three bites of that really delicious, rich chocolate cake, and then like 10 bites in, you're like, that makes my stomach hurt. The same is true for our phone use, that there's something called the incentive sensitization theory, which is basically, we have two systems going on. One system is our dopamine system that is the wanting system. We want it. We want to pick it up. We wake up in the morning, I want to see the news, or I want to see my Instagram account, or I want to see who texted me because I had a little thing show up in my text. We want it. And then we get on it and we don't quite like it as much because what happens is you get sensitized to the wanting, you're creating increases with these dopamine hits, but you become habituated to the liking. You need more and more to get the same kind of good feeling. You don't, you know, it doesn't feel quite good just to get one text for the person. You need like multiple back and forth and back and forth, or you need the more fun Instagram reel than the last one. What I encourage people to do is just first to bring a little bit of mindful awareness to it. Can you pay attention to the point when it no longer feels good for you and how long is it? Is it like five minutes or 10 minutes, or maybe it never really feels good for you? And then do an experiment. What if you were to give yourself your phone after you move or only use your phone if you're moving? I'm okay if you're on the treadmill and you want to do that temptation bundling where you get to do your like really bad reality TV or YouTube or whatever it is, but you're moving, that's fine. But you only pair it with movement or you only give it to yourself after you move. You use it as a reinforcer. You can use it for that as well. But notice how it feels different when you are engaging in movement because movement and exercise doesn't have that same, I want it, but I don't like it. Over time, you will start to want it and like it. And that is the sweet spot.

[00:09:39] Speaker 1: I always feel the best right after I finish exercise. I mean, that's the thing, as you point out, Doc, if I'm on the phone and I'm doing scrolling or something like that, I'm probably coming out of that episode feeling worse. And after I exercise, I feel my best. That's usually the best part of my day is right at that moment. And part of it is, I think all the endorphins and the BDNF, the brain derived neurotrophic factors. But I think a lot of it is, you know, I just, I just feel good and, and my, I had control over my time and there was autonomy and it was, it was my time, you know, so there's all these things that sort of go into it. One of the things you hear besides time is that people, and this is a weird one, but people are tired and, and they will spend eight hours sort of sitting at a desk or, you know, really not moving, being very sedentary and then be tired, which seems very counterintuitive, right? Cause you haven't really done anything. So why are they tired and how do you overcome that?

[00:10:37] Speaker 2: There's a type of junk food rest that we all know very well. Just like there's junk food that, yeah, it may be, it gives you the feeling of your resting, but you don't feel really rested afterwards. Just like junk food. It gives you a feeling that you're eating, but you're not really nourished. In the short term, yeah, you may feel a little bit more kind of rested cause you're not working as hard, but in the longterm, you know that it weakens you over the time and it doesn't give you more energy. Try some other things out because the pull is always towards sedentarism, both biologically for us, but also just our environments are set up that way. You walk in the door and everything in your environment, in many of our homes, is encouraging us to sit down. When you walk into my spaces in my home, I have big open spaces with nothing in them. I'm a believer in less is more in terms of furniture, because if you have less furniture and you have young kids, you can put out a big twister mat. Or at one point we had a ping pong table in our living room when you walked in the door and there'd be like kids playing ping pong. In our playroom there's, in our TV room, which is our sort of play area, there's a basketball hoop. So anytime we're watching basketball, we're watching the Warriors, we're playing basketball. And then we're getting a different kind of rest rather than just like hanging out watching other people move, we're moving alongside them.

[00:11:59] Speaker 1: You know, I have to say as well, just that movement that you talk about, even if it's 10 minutes or so after dinner, it is very interesting physiologically how beneficial that is. You're obviously not burning the calories you just ate. The math doesn't work that way, but the idea that you're sending these signals to your body that, hey, you've just consumed energy and that this is a body that is going to utilize that energy. So don't store it immediately as fat. It's kind of interesting. And the way that they've figured this out, as you may know, Doc, is through actually continuous glucose monitoring. So people who would have a huge sort of sugar spike, glucose spike after a meal, if they walk immediately after or soon after, it really modulates how high those glucose spikes are.

[00:12:47] Speaker 2: Sure. And I look at things holistically as well. Many cultures walk after dinner as part of their community building. They walk around the block, they see other people, their dogs, maybe they're lonely and you're walking after dinner and you're having some social contact. Or maybe that walk after dinner is the one time in the day when you can talk to your partner while your kids are kind of like running alongside and you get to actually like have like 10 minutes with your partner where you're chatting, you know? So one of the things that I think is really important is that we look at movement in a much more holistic way of sort of like the whole person.

[00:13:26] Speaker 1: You know, I've been a medical reporter for 25 years and I think this idea, like you've stated at the top of your book, that people generally know that movement, they know it's good for you. They know it's good for you physically, mentally. There were studies that also came out about how you actually grow new brain cells when you move. And that's really the only evidence proven way to do that. So that's been out there for a while. And as you say, though, still just about 25% of people actually get enough movement. So I've always thought that the message of the benefit is not the problem here, unless people don't believe it. Do you, first of all, do you think people believe that they're going to accrue these benefits simply through movement? Or did you or did you find that that's not necessarily the case?

[00:14:11] Speaker 2: Sure. I think people believe it, but it has to be individualized and personalized to you. So for example, the, you know, the statement that exercise is good for heart health. That doesn't move me. That doesn't motivate me. But it motivates my neighbor two doors down who's 77 years old and he goes jogging. I see the guy jogging down our street at 12 o'clock pretty much every day reliably who had a heart attack in his late 60s. He hears movement is good for your heart. He knows what it was like to have a heart attack. He doesn't want to have another one. He wants to take care of his heart. That is a very personal reason for him that motivates him to go out for a jog. The reason why I want to move my body is because when I'm with my clients on the mornings that I move, I'm less ruminative in my own self. I'm more present with them. And that's really important to me.

[00:15:00] Speaker 1: I will exercise every day. I'll do something every day. Typically swim, bike or run or stretch or lift weights or do something. When I have events coming up, such as this bike ride, for example, I'm far more motivated. I was up on the Peloton early this morning, you know, making sure I got the miles in. I knew I was going to be talking to Dr. Hill, so I wanted to make sure I wasn't ready for that. But, you know, it's just, I think we have to find our own sources of motivation.

[00:15:28] Speaker 2: Absolutely. For some people, those types of goals are super motivating. Some people love like the 21 day program. What happens on day 21, 22? So we also need to, you know, we need to know that about ourselves. There's ways that we can add things in that are those types of motivators having a goal. But we also need to combine that with structuring our environments to support movement and then also have some deeper motivations that aren't just about, you know, sort of reaching the goal that maybe are also about the process of the enjoyment of the movement itself that is motivating in the moment. How do you feel today on your Peloton? Were you making it fun? Were you listening to great music? Were you on, you know, listen to a good podcast? Were you doing what's called temptation bundling, where you add in things that are enjoyable to your movement, which will increase your chances of doing it again? It all makes sense.

[00:16:24] Speaker 1: I mean, everything you say makes total sense. And yet I keep getting stuck on this idea that people don't do it. And this time of year, it's particularly important because I think a lot of people, you know, they make these resolutions the beginning of the year. It's a natural sort of part of their calendar, but get to the end of January, early February, you probably know the data better than I do, but that motivation, which they clearly had. So it wasn't like they're incapable of having motivation. It's not like they're incapable of understanding the benefits of all these things. And then it starts to diminish if not evaporate. Talk to me about that moment. Like how do you maintain the motivation at that time?

[00:17:01] Speaker 2: Right. Well, motivation comes and goes. If a lot of people listen to this interview with you, their motivation is going to be pretty high, right? That motivation may not even wane by like, you know, February 2nd. It may be waned by the afternoon when they actually have signed up for that class. The thing that I work a lot on with my clients is how do you set up a behavior that is small enough that you will engage in it when your motivation is really low? You're really tired. You had a really bad day at work. Your house is a mess and you have nothing for dinner. How are you going to get yourself motivated? Not motivated. How are you going to get yourself out the door to go on that 10 minute walk? Maybe it's not a 10 minute walk. Maybe we commit to when you come in the door, the first thing you do is put on your shoes and you're willing to go for two minutes. We have to make our commitments to move small enough and throughout our whole day, not just dependent on one hour of the day, which is our, quote, leisure time that we're banking on. And then when your motivation is high, go for it. Sign up for that race. Make that commitment. Go for the long run. Go for the big hike. Do that as well. And then it'll all, you know, come out in the wash. You'll be moving in lots of different ways.

[00:18:22] Speaker 1: I think that point about taking advantage of the motivation when it comes is so important. Like you'd know it, you feel it. In that moment, you know, whatever it is, whether it's signing up for a race, going for a run, calling somebody when you're out for a walk that you'd normally don't call. I think, you know, taking advantage of that is really important. You write a lot in the book about finding the right movement or exercise for you. And you know, I was curious, what does that mean? Is it something that you just enjoy doing or are there certain exercises that are just going to be the right exercise for certain people? How do you define that?

[00:19:00] Speaker 2: Sometimes the right movements for you are beneficial for you because they're connected to something else. So for example, I got a knee injury a number of years back and I had to do that really annoying knee exercise where you sit on the ground and you lift your legs straight up and down, up and down, up and down to build the muscle on the front of your quad. That was the right exercise for me to help heal my knee injury, but it was not a joyful one. It wasn't one that I particularly wanted to do. I would much rather go hike with friends, but I connected it to healing this part of my body is connected to other things that I love, that I want to do. So sometimes the right exercise for us isn't always the most pleasurable one. This is why I'm a little bit hesitant to say only move in ways that you love. So we can think about times in your life when you've enjoyed movement and you may have to go way back to when you were really little. You may have to go back to like, were you the six-year-old that was rolling down the hill of grass? Or were you the six-year-old that was dancing in the kitchen? Or were you the six-year-old that was like me that loved it when my mom sent me out to the garden and I could go pick tomatoes and like look for worms? That may tell you a little bit about the types of movement that you want to incorporate back into your life. The other aspect of it is social because we know that we're more likely to maintain movement when we do it, you know, with others. And there's a lot of cognitive benefits to moving with others as well. So movement and these sort of practices of learning how to accept discomfort in our body or learning how to bring more pleasure into things or learning to see ourselves as more holistic humans has such a bigger impact on our life than we give it credit for. Especially when we're just looking at it in this mechanistic ways like calories burned or shoulds or CDC guidelines.

[00:20:49] Speaker 1: Is that something that you've always incorporated into your own life, this idea that you're basically translating some of those skills that you're learning from movement into other parts of your life?

[00:20:59] Speaker 2: My 13-year-old goes to this middle school where they go on these bike trips and parents can go on them. And then finally my 13-year-old this few months ago came to me and said, Mom, will you come on the bike trip with us? So these bike trips have like, you know, you have to go like 30 miles and some of it's off road. And it was this moment where, wow, I've written a book on movement and I'm unwilling to move my body because it's too scary, you know? And I said, yes. And so for the past few weeks, my son's been teaching me how to ride a bike. Does that translate into my life in beneficial ways? So many beneficial ways. I'm spending time with a 13-year-old boy that maybe we wouldn't connect around other things. I'm also learning about myself of how to be taught something, how to do something that's outside of my comfort zone in the service of something I care about. That's a skill we all could learn. And how we so quickly say no to things in life because they're scary or they're uncomfortable or we have a thing in our head, I just don't ride bikes. I just don't sweat. I just don't run. I just don't, you know, all the things. I don't swim. I don't get wet. All the things that people have. Well, that translates into life. But the more willing you are to be uncomfortable, the more flexible you are in life, the deeper connections you'll have, the healthier you'll be, and the more full your life will be.

[00:22:23] Speaker 1: What I struggle with, though, is something you mentioned. And that is that the motivation is mostly there, but it comes in waves, as you said. And I'm looking to make the waves last longer and be bigger. And what would you recommend for that?

[00:22:41] Speaker 2: I think the motivation to have the waves last longer and be bigger for me is to make it about something that's not about you. Chase after chasing life. Chase after something that is bigger than you. How does your movement, when you feel better after you exercise, how does that impact the people in your life? If I go for a run and I walk in my kitchen and it's a complete mess because my kids are making pancakes, you're going to get a different mom than if I didn't go for that run. And that matters to me, to not yell at my kids. But maybe it matters for you to have the physical stamina to help a friend move. And you can go lift a couch or lift some boxes, and that matters to you. So if you want a motivation that's sustained over the long run, make it a big motivation that's bigger than just you, make it connected to your values, make it about who you want to be in this world, how you want to contribute to this world, and moving your body will help you with that. I guarantee it for the long run.

[00:23:48] Speaker 1: I really appreciate you writing the book. I think there's probably something in here for everyone because I think everyone struggles with this a bit. I think just about everyone. You're a hugely motivating person, Doc. I mean, just talking to you for an hour, you know, I can definitely, I see why your patients would keep coming to you. It's very motivating. So I really appreciate your time.

[00:24:10] Speaker 2: Yes. Thank you. I appreciate your time too. You're a hugely motivating person as well and motivate people to do all sorts of things in terms of benefiting their health and their life. And I appreciate the hour with you.

[00:24:22] Speaker 1: You got it. Hopefully we'll do it again. Appreciate it. Good luck to the kiddos.