You know the meme “like dis if you cri evrytiem?”

It’s been a few years since you could find a “cri evrytiem” comment in literally every comment section, but for whatever reason I still laugh whenever I see it.

Still, there’s one video on the internet that actually does get me a little misty. No matter how many times I watch it.

Look, I don’t claim to be an especially tough guy. I didn’t cry at the end of Marley & Me, but that’s about where my badassery ends. You’re not gonna find me out rousin’ punks, or whatever it is they do in procedural cop shows starring insert-grizzled-veteran-here.  

Whatever part of someone of me that should have cried during Marley & Me but didn’t—that’s where this video hits.

This is Arthur’s story.

I’ll let you watch before we keep going.

There are so many lessons to learn from this video. I think most of them are misrepresented by the title, which makes the story seem like your standard motivational pep talk (as you might know, I’m not the biggest fan of the concept of motivation).

But there are other things to take away. There are lessons about consistency. About discipline.

You don’t see much of them in the video, but you can infer that there are people behind the scenes that Arthur cares about. And even though it isn’t discussed, diet must have played a role in losing that much weight.

All of that is important, and I’ve written about all of it elsewhere. There are other ways to learn those lessons. What Arthur’s story proves better than anything else is this—it can be done.

Sound like your standard motivational speaker, life coach bullshit? It isn’t. Here’s the psychology of why (and why it’s vitally important).

What’s hiding behind lack of motivation

I’ve talked to a lot of people about getting fit, and one phrase pops up more than anything else: “I’m having trouble getting motivated.”

I find this fascinating.

As you already know, I’m not a big believer in motivation. Looking at people who have success, along with the research on motivation, doesn’t seem to show that motivation is all that useful compared to building good habits.

And yet…

“I’m having trouble getting motivated.”

This comment is everywhere. I get it in emails. I read it on forums. I hear it straight from people’s lips. It has to mean something.

The more I’ve read and watched and studied, the more I realize that it does mean something. It’s the default explanation for why things go wrong.

You know when you’ve got people coming over and you haven’t made your bed, so you spread a blanket on top of the mess to cover it up?

That one might just be me, so let’s try another—have you ever quickly shoved something into a closet, so that your living area looks clean?

Motivation is the blanket. Motivation is the door to the closet.

The thing is, it’s actually really hard to figure out what causes giving up on exercise. It takes a huge amount of self-awareness (and often the benefit of hindsight) to figure it out.

I have the benefit of looking at all of this from a distance—plus I’ve seen it hundreds of times, and can read the patterns.

Here’s what I’ve learned: when you say you don’t have motivation, there’s always a deeper problem.

What that problem is can vary. Sometimes the rest of your life is tumultuous (a recent move, a family member passed away, a high-stress job). Sometimes you feel self-conscious (it’s embarrassing to work out, because shouldn’t you already know how to do this?).

But far and away the biggest underlying problem I see is this: you’re not sure exercise is going to work for you.

Does exercise work?

When I talk to people about their fitness struggles, many start by saying they don’t have motivation. Then I dig a little deeper.

And that’s where it gets interesting.

• “I can’t find a routine that challenges me over time, and I’m never sure if what I’m doing is really the most effective”
• “It’s just so hard to keep starting from scratch. Exercise isn’t fun at the beginning.”
• “I’ve been doing the same few workouts, and I get bored of them and want to change it up”

It isn’t obvious at first, but the same belief is underlying all of these statements. “I don’t know what works and what doesn’t.”

It’s pretty clear in the first one, so let’s skip straight to the second.

“It’s just so hard to keep starting from scratch”

If the person who said that had stopped talking right there, I would never had one of my most important realizations (i.e. the key insight of this article).

Thankfully, they followed up with “I start believing it doesn’t matter.”

I perked up right away. This was new. It was interesting. It was the first time I had gone past “lack of motivation” as an explanation—and once I heard it for the first time, I started seeing it everywhere.

Let me use an unfair analogy to make this point.

Imagine that scientists at Stanford University have invented a magical pill. All you need to do is take it 3 times a week, and amazing things happen.

• You start to get more muscular. Not necessarily huge or bulky, but strong. Toned. Sexy.
• You feel better. You sleep better. You’re more alert during the day.
• Your mood improves and you smile more
• Insecurities that you’ve battled your whole life disappear
• Your health improves and you live for years longer

All of those results, with 100% effectiveness. Side effects include temporary mild sweating and heavy breathing. Would you take it?

I certainly would, and I think most people would at least be interested. Of course, I’m not really talking about a pill here, and people have known about it without the help of scientists from Stanford. I’m talking about exercise.

If you knew, 100%, that your exercise and diet would get you the results and the life that you want—wouldn’t you be able to push through the slow start?

If you were seeing results from the same few workouts, don’t you think you would be able to keep doing them, even though they were boring?

If it were just about knowing what exercises to do, you could find a workout routine with 5 minutes on Google.

But it’s not, is it? It’s about knowing which exercises are effective—and that’s something that’s harder to find in a Google search.

I said this was an unfair analogy, and it is—I know that there are other reasons that you have trouble working out consistently. Also, there are some legitimately miraculous medical treatments that only don’t work because of people who refuse (or forget) to take their pills.

Still…

Understanding what’s hiding behind motivation is incredibly important.

When the problem is “I’m so lazy” or “I have motivation,” there’s really not a whole lot you can do to solve it. Phrased like “I’m so lazy,” you are the problem. Making progress means changing who you are instead of changing what you do.

“Maybe someday I’ll find the motivation.”

I’ve heard this statement a lot, and it has the same problem. “Someday” always means “some other day.”

And motivation isn’t something you can find. As much as I wish there were a pirate chest overflowing with motivation, just waiting to be discovered—it doesn’t exist.

Motivation is something you create. When you dig past the surface level and discover why you’re struggling with motivation, you come up with an actionable problem that you can actually work to solve.

Let’s talk about the psychology behind motivation, and how you can build some for yourself.

Goals, motivation, self-efficacy—what makes exercise work

Psychologists have a lot of interest in understanding why people don’t follow through with things.

Exercise really is like that magic pill—and the more people do it, the healthier we can become as a society. A lot of psychologists also use undergraduates as participants in their experiments, and that’s definitely not a group of people that ever struggles with procrastination, right?

The point: there’s actually quite a bit of research on goal-setting and the relationship between motivation and behavior.

I have another article about how to set good fitness goals (which I’ll be updating with more research—stay tuned), but here are some of the most important highlights.

• Your commitment to a goal goes up when you have a role in shaping your goal [1]
• Your commitment to a goal goes up when that goal is important to you [2]
• Higher “self-efficacy” beliefs mean higher probability you achieve your goal [3]

Let’s start at the third one and work backwards.

If you have a high self-efficacy belief, that means you strongly believe in your ability to achieve something.

But what’s interesting about self-efficacy beliefs isn’t your actual ability to do something. It’s that beliefs about your ability to do something affect your ability to actually do it—regardless of how high your real ability is [3].

The picture starts to get a little clearer. Low self-efficacy is part of what causes low motivation. What happens from there?

“I start to believe it doesn’t matter.”

When you’re struggling to achieve a goal, your brain starts to throw up defense mechanisms [4].

This effect is strong. The preservation is so important that people sometimes self-handicap (non-psychologists usually call is self-sabotage) just so that they have an excuse for a failure that might happen [5].

When you can justify not working out, it doesn’t feel like as much of a failure. When people come to me for help, they often admit that they’re embarrassed or nervous to talk about their problems.

That’s uncomfortable, and your brain doesn’t like being uncomfortable. So you come up with justifications. Reasons—either huge, sweeping ones like “I’m so lazy” or external ones like “finding” motivation—that make you feel better.

One of those is “believing it doesn’t matter.”

If exercise doesn’t matter, why do it? Struggling to work out isn’t really problem if exercise isn’t important in the first place.

Do you see what’s happening here?

You struggled to work out because you weren’t sure it would get the results you’re looking for (low belief in self-efficacy). Then, to rationalize that, you start believing exercise doesn’t matter (low belief in importance).

Those are two huge predictors of goal success that are now working against you.

What’s the fix?

What makes Arthur’s story motivational

I haven’t talked about Arthur for a while. After a rewatch (and as Coldplay’s “Fix You” fades out), let’s return to his story.

What makes Arthur’s story so motivational is that it answers the question “does exercise work” in the worst possible circumstance. Arthur was injured in the military. He was hugely overweight. He literally couldn’t walk.

But by the end of the video, he looks great. He’s lost the weight, he can do a headstand, and (most importantly) he can run.

Does anyone doubt that Arthur’s life is better with exercise? Clearly, exercise is important.

Does anyone doubt that Arthur’s exercise and diet program was effective? Clearly, they can get results.

The underlying message is that if this broken, overweight man could succeed—so can you.

Arthur’s story hints at a crucial question about self-efficacy and importance: how can you increase your self-efficacy? How can you come to believe that exercise matters and can work for you?

Here’s what I recommend.

When you’re choosing an exercise program, look for the results. Look for people who have succeeded, even when circumstances were against them. Look for people like you—people who have similar challenges—who have gotten results despite them.

• Read online reviews of your program
• Look for success stories from people like you
• Read my article on what makes a workout routine effective

Exercise does work. The laws of physiology don’t change that much from person to person. But me saying that isn’t the same as you believing it—that will take looking at people like you.

When you’re choosing an exercise program, answer this question—how will exercise improve my life? Make sure you know and believe that exercise will make your life better. Read my goal-setting article for more details on this exercise.

• Think about what you’ll be able to do differently
• Think about how the people in your life will benefit
• Write down three ways your life will be better when you succeed

Don’t dwell on these reasons. Despite what self-help writers advise, the research on visualization shows that visualizing outcomes actually makes you less like to succeed [6, 7].

But appreciate them. Understand that exercise will affect you in a big way. Know and believe its importance.

Take an active role. Take control. (Sorry for rhyming)

If you’re paying close attention, you may have notice that I haven’t discussed one of the predictors of success. When you play an active role in creating your goals, you’re more likely to achieve them [1].

All of the steps above help you take control.

When you are the one who chooses your program, you become more committed to it. That’s why I’m happy to advise people on their programs, but rarely hand out exercises willy-nilly.

When you appreciate why exercise is important, you start to see its impact on your life. That’s why you can read a million articles about “benefits of exercise” and still not take action—it needs to apply to you.

When you do the research. Put in the work. See how exercise has been successful for other people. When you do those things, you go beyond “knowing” that exercise can work.

You start to deeply, deeply believe in the power of exercise.

You start to see how it really is like that 100% successful pill.

And you take it.

 

References

[1] Latham, G. P., Winters, D. C., & Locke, E. A. (1994). Cognitive and motivational effects of participation: A mediator study. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 15, 49-63.

[2] Locke, E. A. (1996). Motivation through conscious goal setting. Applied and Preventive Psychology, 5, 117-124.

[3] Zimmerman, B. J., Bandura, A., & Martinez-Pons, M. (1992). Self-motivation for academic attainment: The role of self-efficacy beliefs and personal goal setting. American Educational Research Journal, 29, 663-676.

[4] Sherman, D. K., & Cohen, G. L. (2006). The psychology of self‐defense: Self‐affirmation theory. Advances in experimental social psychology, 38, 183-242.

[5] Rhodewalt, F., Morf, C., Hazlett, S., & Fairfield, M. (1991). Self-handicapping: The role of discounting and augmentation in the preservation of self-esteem. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61, 122.

[6] Oettingen, G., & Wadden, T. A. (1991). Expectation, fantasy, and weight loss: Is the impact of positive thinking always positive?. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 15, 167-175.

[7] Oettingen, G., & Mayer, D. (2002). The motivating function of thinking about the future: expectations versus fantasies. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83, 1198.

Source: Minuiko, Deviant Art

Daja Kisubo is a blacksmith. Once, she was orphaned in a shipwreck and branded an outcast by her people. A prodigy adopted by a foster family, she was recognized as an adult in her new community by the age of thirteen.

On her hand grows a glove of living metal.

That’s because Daja is a mage. A smith-mage specifically, she is a character in the Tamora Pierce series The Circle of Magic. Growing up, I loved how unique her magic was, how she could grow and change the magical metal in her hand.

Even though many of the details of her story escape me today, there’s one lesson I learned from Daja that has stuck with me.

It has to do with the relationship between working out and meditation. It’s the reason that, even though most fitness buffs are focused on getting, well buff, I’ve always been more interested in the psychological side of fitness.

It’s about the power of exercise to clear your head.

It’s about one of the biggest benefits of exercise that I don’t think gets talked about enough. The ability to take a breath, work out, and spend 45 minute to an hour not thinking about the things that stress you out.

Fire, magic, and meditation

In the book Cold Fire, Daja is tasked with catching an arsonist in an unfamiliar city. The firebug and exploration of living metal takes up large sections of the book—but in the middle of the action, Daja is asked to teach two young mages to meditate.

I’ll give you the short version: it doesn’t go so good.

The young mages are twins, and extremely different from each other. Nia is calm and quiet and shy, and her meditation goes just fine. It’s what you probably imagine meditation is like, and the kind of practice you could get by downloading Headspace.

But Jory…

Jory is fiery and impatient, she doesn’t want to sit still—and she doesn’t. She hates meditation and can’t figure it out.

So Daja tries something different.

Where stress comes from

Let’s pause before we get to Daja’s solution, to talk about where stress comes from. After all, you know the answer to this mystery is going to have something to do with exercise, right?

It would be impossible to track down a single source of all stress, but one of the major factors that contributes to negative moods is rumination.

Rumination usually doesn’t mean much beyond “thinking deeply about something.” But in psychology, rumination has a slightly different definition: thinking deeply about your problems and how bad they are (without considering potential solutions).

Ever lie in bed not able to sleep because your boss was being annoying and you can’t stop thinking about it? Or where you can’t stop thinking about how much farther along in life you should be? Or endlessly worry that you offended someone with that awkward remark you made but didn’t mean? That’s rumination.

Rumination is problem solving gone wrong. It’s fine and good and healthy to think about your problems proactively and try to solve them. It doesn’t do much good to worry endlessly without trying to make progress.

It might not surprise you to learn that rumination is an important factor in depression.

Rumination can make depressive symptoms worse over time (no matter where you started), and can even be used to predict future depression [1].

Why?

Part of the problem is that we (humans) tend to believe what you pay attention to.

When you pay a lot of attention to something, your brain unconsciously tells you “hey, this thing must be pretty important [2].” After all, why else would you be paying attention to it?

So when you spend a lot of time thinking about your problems, you get caught in a kind of spiral.

You think about something a lot, so you start to believe it. But believing it just makes you feel worse—which gives you more negative things to think about.

Not a great situation.

The research on meditation and mood is still young, but the early results are extremely promising. One of the ways researchers think that meditation helps mood is by training you to consciously direct attention [3].

To connect the dots—when meditation is compared to other effective mood treatments (like relaxation), researchers don’t find much of a difference in terms of distress or positive mood.

But they DO see a change in rumination. Meditation seems to reduce rumination more than relaxation treatments [4].

Let’s join Daja again and see what she came up with.

Meditate softly…and carry a big stick

Daja couldn’t get Jory to sit still to meditate. But one day, watching Jory go about her sparring, she noticed something—Jory was both wild and completely calm.

For Jory, fighting was a meditative state.

So Daja picked up a staff and taught her fighting meditation.

Meditation can be a powerful tool to improve well-being, but not everyone likes it. I tested out meditating daily for 3 months before ultimately deciding that focused practice at it wasn’t for me (I do the occasional guided meditation).

But what if you didn’t need to meditate in order to get the benefits of meditation?

One of the benefits of meditation is the ability to consciously redirect your attention. Instinctively, I think that focusing on the exercise you’re doing—feeling the activation of your muscles and using proper form—should have a similar effect.

But I have to admit I don’t know of any research to support that. It isn’t a subject often studied.

As I wrote in my detailed breakdown of why exercise makes us happy—why exercise improves mood is actually not that well understood.

HOWEVER! One of the key ideas that does have some evidence behind it is distraction [5].

When you’re exercising intensely, you can’t ruminate. It just isn’t possible. Good, vigorous exercise makes you focus on fast, intense actions. There’s no space for thinking of any kind.

Gretchen Rubin, author of the excellent book The Happiness Project, has this to say about mood, exercise and rumination:

“When I’m feeling blue, exercise helps a lot. Perhaps that’s because when I’m exercising, I’m distracted and not ruminating on anything that might be upsetting me.”

I’ve heard the same thing from people I’ve worked with. I’ve experienced it! No matter how down you are, exercise gives you 45 minutes to an hour of clear-headedness. Calmness through activity.

Exercise for health reasons, or because you want to look good. But if you’re ever feeling down, and not sure if it’s worth a workout. If you ever need another reason to move. Think about doing some fighting meditation.

References

[1] Nolen-Hoeksema, S. (2000). The role of rumination in depressive disorders and mixed anxiety/depressive symptoms. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 109, 504.

[2] Cialdini, R. (2016). Pre-suasion. New York, New York: Simon & Schuster.

[3] Cash, M., & Whittingham, K. (2010). What facets of mindfulness contribute to psychological well-being and depressive, anxious, and stress-related symptomatology? Mindfulness, 1, 177-182.

[4] Jain, S., Shapiro, S. L., Swanick, S., Roesch, S. C., Mills, P. J., Bell, I., & Schwartz, G. E. (2007). A randomized controlled trial of mindfulness meditation versus relaxation training: effects on distress, positive states of mind, rumination, and distraction. Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 33, 11-21.

[5] Morgan, W. P. (1985). Affective beneficence of vigorous physical activity. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise.

Source: Amazon

I think there’s a subtle thing that I think affects our lives more than we realize. It kind of flies under the radar, but it has a huge effect on habits and exercise motivation.

Everyone does it. Not everyone does enough of it. When you don’t do enough of it, every part of your life gets worse.

It also involves vivid hallucinations and total-body paralysis.

But it also makes you smarter, more fit, healthier, more energized, and more attractive.

Sounds crazy and nonexistent, but it’s actually startlingly common. It’s sleep.

I’m all about fitness and psychology. But I’m also a little bit of a sleep enthusiast. I try to get 9 hours a night, and I like to read a lot of the new research that comes out.

I recently finished the book Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, by sleep researcher Matthew Walker. It’s a little dense, but there are some highlights that I think you’ll find interesting.

I’m going to rattle off the big ones as bullets:

• When we lack sleep, the decision-making areas of our brain (prefrontal cortex) don’t work as well
• Lack of sleep makes it harder to do hard things—people who are sleep deprived are more likely to choose easy tasks compared to people with a good night’s rest
• Sleep teaches motor skills—during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, your brain is actually replaying the physical skills you learned that day
• Sleeping 6 hours per night for 10 days causes the same decrease in performance (400%) as one night with no sleep
• People who don’t sleep enough never realize how impaired their judgment actually is
• Dreams actually have a function. Dreams help us connect new information to our existing knowledge (which helps us be more creative)
• Dreams also help us regulate our emotions. Studies show that dreams with emotional content make us feel less bad about embarrassment, sadness, anger, or trauma
• Lack of sleep affects hunger. People who sleep less are hungrier and eat more. They also choose less healthy foods.

The two systems that trigger sleep

If you’ve ever had any kind of sleep problem, you’ve probably browsed the supplements section at your local pharmacy. Most common among those supplements? Melatonin.

But does melatonin actually work?

The author recommends taking melatonin only if you’re going to be traveling and experiencing jet lag. To understand why, you need to know how the body actually goes to sleep in the first place.

You’ve probably heard the term “circadian rhythm” before. Basically, your circadian rhythm is your level of energy or wakefulness throughout the day. Circadian rhythms are kind of a cycle: most people will feel awake in the morning, experience a dip in the early afternoon, feel awake in the early evening, and then get tired around bed time.

Recent research has increased our understanding of the circadian rhythm by quite a lot. Actually, the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to circadian rhythm researchers. The whole system is pretty complicated, but at a simple level, our bodies produce melatonin to signal when it’s time for us to sleep.

In general, we’re better off trying to stimulate natural melatonin production than taking outside melatonin. Part of the reason is that there’s a second system our body uses for sleep.

When we’re awake, our bodies gradually increase the concentration of adenosine in our brains. As more adenosine builds up, we feel more “sleep pressure,” or desire to sleep. The longer you stay awake, the more sleep pressure you experience, which is why you can still fall asleep in the middle of the day if you’re truly exhausted.

When you sleep, your body dumps adenosine. In an ideal situation, you dump adenosine during a quiet period of your circadian rhythm, so that you can have a truly deep sleep.

The two important types of sleep

The book Why We Sleep also goes into the two most important types of sleep: Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep and Non Rapid Eye Movement (NREM) sleep.

Each type of sleep has its own functions, which are too extensive to fully list here. But as a brief overview:

NREM sleep:

• Is composed of slow brainwaves
• Is crucial to remembering learned facts
• Relaxes fight-or-flight responses, which reduces stress and is healthy for your heart

REM sleep:

• Is when we dream. Dreams, in turn, help us creatively organize information and deal with emotional issues
• Help us learn motor skills
• Help us make new neural connections by assimilating new and existing knowledge

Practical takeaways from Why We Sleep

What does all this have to do with health and fitness habits?

If you’re sleeping less, you’ll find it harder to make the decision to go to the gym.

If you’re sleeping less, you’ll get worse results from the gym.

If you’re sleeping less, you’ll find it harder to eat healthily.

Especially if you’re just getting your fitness habit up to speed, not sleeping will make everything harder.

I remember right after graduating college, I had trouble adjusting to the schedule of my first job. I was sleeping less, I had trouble working out as consistently—and none of my habits tricks seemed to be working.

Then I took a step back. I was only getting 7 hours of sleep. I was exhausted by the end of every day.

And waking up to work out in the morning? Please. I rolled out of bed, showered with my eyes closed, and was out the door in 20 minutes. There was no way I could wake up earlier to work out.

But when I started sleeping more, all of that just…faded away. Habits took hold again. My diet got better, I exercised more, and well, I just felt more like myself.

If you’re having trouble working out consistently, what’s your sleep like? It’s not the only challenge to deal with—using the psychology of habits might be enough—but it’s one that you might not consciously think about.

How to sleep better

But also: “sleep more” isn’t exactly helpful advice. Here are a few specific ways the book (and I) recommend trying to adjust your schedule to get better sleep.

• No screens at night. Blue light from screens inhibits your melatonin production, which makes it harder to get to sleep.
• Exercise, but not right before bed. People who exercise sleep better, but if you do it right before bed your body temperature and heart rate will still be up.
• Sleep in a cold room. Your core temperature drops when you sleep. Sleeping in a cold room helps that process.
• Take a hot bath or shower. When you take a hot bath, blood rises closer to the surface of your skin. Once you’re out of the bath, that makes it easier to release heat and actually lower your body temperature.
• Avoid sleeping pills. Sleeping pills don’t put you to sleep. They make you unconscious. Sleeping pills limit your deep NREM sleep and REM sleep, so you aren’t actually getting the rest you need.
• Avoid alcohol before bed. Alcohol inhibits deep NREM sleep and REM sleep, so you won’t actually get rested.
• Avoid caffeine in the afternoon. Caffeine has a half life of 5-6 hours, meaning that it takes that long for your body to process just one half of the amount you took in. If you drink coffee in the afternoon, it will still be affecting you at night.
• Maintain a consistent schedule. Your body likes routines. If you wake up and go to sleep at roughly the same time each day, you’ll find it easier to sleep.
• Mood lighting. Dim the lights before bed to facilitate melatonin production.
• Keep the room dark. Blackout curtains or a sleep mask are the way to go, so that the sun doesn’t wake you up too early.

If you’re having trouble or things feel overwhelming, check your sleep. It’s a subtle cause that may have flown under the radar. And if you want to learn more about how sleep affects you, check out the full book.