What will your life look like one year from today?

Time seems to pass quickly working 9-5. Sure, the hour between 4pm and 5pm slows to a crawl, and on Monday the next weekend seems ages away. But it’s also easy to wind up in October wondering what happened to June.

So it’s easy to look back 6 months or a year and wonder: how has my life changed?

It’s also easy to come up with a depressing answer: it hasn’t.

Of course, that doesn’t have to be the answer. By gradually changing your habits, you can look back 6 months or a year and realize that everything is different – even though the change was so gradual that you barely even noticed it.

You probably already have had experiences like this.

When I think back to the person I was in high school, I cringe. I was scrawny, nerdy, and socially awkward. I’ve changed so much since then, and it’s amazing to look back and see the amount of progress. That’s the level of change that I’m talking about.

Focus on an exercise habit and the results can be enormous (I know, because it’s what happened to me). In one year, you could:

• Look fit, trim, and muscular (with that 6-pack)
• Have people gravitate towards you and listen when you speak
• Look in the mirror and feel confident in what you see

And the lifestyle you live to get there doesn’t have to be crazy. You don’t need to work out two hours a day and eat nothing but dry chicken breast.

With gradual changes, you could reach the point where you:

1. Work out 45 minutes to an hour at least 3 times per week like clockwork, with a specific routine you understand well and confidently perform in your gym
2. Have a mental menu of healthy meals that you know how to make off the top of your head – and keep most of the ingredients on hand
3. Be able to spruce up leftovers or even make entire meals with ingredients you have lying around in your kitchen
4. Keep a couple of quick meal options in reserve; things that you can make quickly and with low effort
5. Accomplish all of this without sacrificing the things you enjoy doing (because it’s all rolled up into systems that get things done as fast as possible)

Right now, some of that probably looks lofty. But it IS possible.

I definitely feel where you’re coming from. When you get home from work, you’ve got stuff to do! Books to read, games to play, Netflix to watch, and friends to hang out with.

When you’re done with work, you’re tired and ready to relax. It’s easy to think ahead to a 2 hour workout and imagine how awful and grueling it will feel. To think of the fact that you still need to cook dinner and do laundry when you get home.

It’s easy to think of those things and think “I’ll make this one up tomorrow.”

It’s even easier if you aren’t sure what kind of workout to do, aren’t sure what kind of food to eat, and don’t know how to cook.

Plus, sometimes life gets in the way! This week I had to reschedule a workout because it clashed with a cool psychology lecture, and a friend hit me up wanting to play chess after work. You don’t want to miss out on those opportunities.

But again, it IS possible. Overnight change is a myth, but incremental change is almost inevitable.

How to Start Working Out

To start on that incremental change, I want to focus on two things:

1. Going to the gym – even if you don’t work out
2. Overcoming fears and doubts about the gym

Going to the Gym

You’ll never work out if you never go to the gym. It’s key to set foot in the gym, even if you don’t actually work out!

This is important for a few reasons:

• It gets you in the habit of going to the gym straight from work (or before work)
• It removes a barrier to going to the gym (you’ve been there before, know how to get there, and know how long it takes in transit)
• It’s easier to go when there’s no pressure to work out
• It gets you feeling comfortable in the gym (it will fill familiar)
• Once you go, chances are you’ll do some kind of workout anyway

If you go to the gym and read a book in the lobby, great! If you go and run on treadmill for 5 minutes, great!

Just like with mini habits, building this base of going to the gym lets you scale up. You don’t need to do every lift right away. Over time, as you get more comfortable and confident, you can up the intensity.

Overcoming Gym Anxiety

I used to feel out of place in the gym. The grunting and banging and squating and chalk dust everywhere – it felt like I didn’t belong in the gym because I wasn’t already a super fit person.

I wrote this post on Mind Body Green about my experience, but the gist of overcoming these feelings is: poke holes in their logic. For example:

Original thought: “I don’t belong in the gym because I’m not already fit and in shape, and I have no idea what I’m doing“

Then I started to battle that thought:

• Who says I don’t belong? Aren’t gyms for people trying to get in shape? I’m exactly the kind of person who should be here!
• I don’t really know what I’m doing, but I can learn! I can find something simple to do and do it. That’s manageable (I later learned that other people don’t know what they’re doing either!)
• I want to be in shape, and this will get me there. It’s silly for me to give up on that.

The important part about this is doing it on paper (or a computer. Outside your head). It makes it easier to expose thoughts as inaccurate.

This technique is straight out of psychology. I didn’t invent it; it comes from cognitive behavioral theory and is some of the most effective psychological treatment out there.

But it isn’t the only way to overcome anxiety either. Going with a partner helps enormously. If you have someone to hang out with, everything gets easier. My lifting buddies are still some of my closest friends.

Learning about fitness helps a ton. Knowing what each exercise in your routine accomplishes keeps your confidence levels high. If you know exactly why you’re doing your workout, you’re free to focus on it and stop worrying about what everyone else thinks.

Going to the gym helps too! The simple step one of going to the gym even without working out is super helpful. As you become more comfortable in the building, your anxiety will fade and you can start getting into working out.

Take the first step

The first step is the most important. The goal of your first workout is to get to your second workout, and your third, and so on. Starting small and scaling up is a great way to make that happen.

Doing things is hard. But there are ways to make them less hard.

That’s the essence of Stephen Guise. On his website, he describes himself like this:

“Since I was born a slacker, I’ve needed superior strategies to live well. I’m still pretty lazy by nature, but my strategies are so effective that I’m productive every single day. Anyone can benefit from the strategies I teach, but those who aren’t type A workaholics may benefit the most from them. My first book, Mini Habits, was the culmination of 10 years of searching, experimentation, and research.”

If you have trouble getting things done (and let’s be real, who doesn’t?), you need to have systems in place that help you take action.

From effective goal setting, to smart rewards, to strategic changes to your environment, there are a lot of systems you can use. Stephen Guise focuses on one: mini habits.

The idea of mini habits is simple: big things are hard to do, but small things are easy to do. Small, everyday habits are the key to success. But behind the simple concept of little habits is a lot of very intelligent and counterintuitive psychology.

(By the way, this is a message that resonates; over 8,500 people have signed up for the Mini Habits course on Udemy.)

What Makes Mini Habits Effective?

The power of mini habits is that they focus on the one factor that actually matters: consistency.

A lot of systems have overblown promises. “How to change your life in just one minute!” is kind of a silly claim. But some mini habits really do only take one minute; the trick is that they take one minute per day. Consistency is key.

It doesn’t matter how much you sweat, how much weight you lift, or how sore you get if you never come back for day 2. One workout is not an exercise habit.

If you’re trying to write a book, it’s more effective to write 100 words a day than write 10,000 words in two days and burn out.

It’s easy to get excited by short-term goals, but focusing on long-term success is more effective. Making small changes in your life is the key to success.

So how do mini habits help you stay consistent?

1. They lower the stakes

If your goal is to work out for 2 hours every day, that time is going to loom over you. You’ll wake up on Saturday morning and thing “do I really have to do that today?” You start to look for ways to “get out of it.”

If your goal is to show up to the gym, it’s a lot easier to follow through. You can even show up and not work out, but I bet that once you get there you’ll do at least a little exercise.

Showing up is the first, and most important, step of building an exercise habit.

2. You can build on them

When I was teaching a friend to work out, I told him to start with one rep of one exercise. He said “but that won’t accomplish anything.”

This is a really common concern, but it misses the key power of mini habits. When you set your sights low, you often wind up doing more anyway. That one rep of one exercise often turns into a pleasant 30 minute workout, it just doesn’t need to for you to consider yourself successful.

The other point is that mini habits help you build your baseline habits. Even if you’re only doing a single push-up every day, you now have a dedicated time to exercise. That’s an incredibly powerful tool.

Once you’ve been executing on your mini habit for some time, you can easily scale it up. If it fits your goals, you might even reach the point of working out 2 hours per day (although that’s usually not necessary). Having the tiny habits makes it possible to develop bigger healthy fitness habits.

3. They’re easy to do

When you get home from work, you’re tired. You still need to make and eat dinner. You spent a whole day at the office and just need some time to relax. I’ve lived that life, and it’s sometimes hard to get the energy to work out.

But you can do one push-up.

Mini habits are easy to do, so they strip away fears or excuses. Not having enough time might be a valid excuse for skipping a two hour workout, but not a two second one.

Why Don’t People Talk About Small Habits?

If small habits are so powerful, why don’t more people use them?

Actually mini habits are quite popular: it’s just that not everyone calls them that.

The Seinfeld Technique was made popular by a now-famous Lifehacker article. In short: pick the action that best suits your goals. Do it every day, and mark an X on the calendar for every day you complete it. Don’t break the chain.

The technique even spawned a popular and very supportive subreddit, the X effect, for people working on their habits. A lot of time these are small habits; again, small habits are easier to stick with.

In The Slight Edge, Jeff Olson argues that just 10 minutes of work a day will compound over time and have massive pay-offs.

Stephen Guise adds a level of precision, approaching mini habits from a structured psychological perspective.

Challenges to Mini Habits

Mini habits are easier to do than huge actions, but there are still some challenges that need to be overcome.

1. How will this even help?

It is so, so easy to get overzealous and want to do more. It’s easy to think that a mini habit can’t possibly affect your life.

Remember: you can scale up eventually. I bet you’ve already tried (multiple times, even) to work out. I know I used to work out for 2 weeks and then stop for 6 months at a time. Start small, end big.

As you start, remember why this habit is important. Write down three reasons this goal is personally important to you, and focus on how you feel every day you successfully complete the habit.

2. It’s easy to not do

As Jeff Olson says in the The Slight Edge, it’s easy to take these small actions. But it’s also easy NOT to take them.

Because these actions are so small, it’s easy to think that skipping one day won’t make a difference. For mini habits, it will.

Don’t get me wrong; missing the occasional day isn’t a reason to get derailed and quit altogether. But the point of mini habits is to do them every day.

Mini habits are powerful because they are small enough that you can do them every day. Skipping days misses the whole point of a mini habit.

3. It’s easy to forget

When I started working on mini habits, I struggled for a simple, seemingly stupid reason: I forgot to do them.

The action is small. It’s something you can take care of quickly. And because of that, it’s easy to put off and think that you’ll take care of it later in the day. Until, like me, you wind up lying in bed with the realization that you forgot to do it at all.

There are a few ways to handle this. A common suggestion is to set an alarm reminder, which I’ve found to be marginally effective.

The method I recommend is setting aside a consistent time to do your action. If you do the action during the same part of every day, it truly becomes a habit.

When I recently began meditating, I didn’t just say “I’m going to meditate for 10 minutes every day.” I actually built it into my morning routine: brush teeth, shower, meditate, breakfast. Even though I’ve only been meditating for a month, I’m able to stay consistent because it’s become part of my day.

Pick a specific time and place to do your action to keep yourself from forgetting.

What to Do Next

First of all, definitely check out Stephen’s website. He has a ton of experience teaching and building mini habits, and there’s a lot to learn by reading his stuff.

Then, pick your mini habit. There is no universal list of good habits. Answer these questions to get mini habit ideas:

• What is your goal?
• Why is that goal important to you?
• What action can help you reach your goal?
• What’s the smallest version of that action?
• When will you do it?

Get started. You’ll be amazed by the results.

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To get started on a healthy, consistent exercise routine, download my free guide and learn how to use psychology to stop skipping workouts.

Let’s Get Started

You’ll also learn how to make the leap from motivation to habit with the free eBook “51 Fitness Motivation Tips.”

The fitness industry has a problem: exercise sucks.

Well, actually no. It doesn’t. And yet, we are constantly told that exercise means endlessly punishing your body in the gym. That a “beachbody” is the result of hundreds of hours of impossible workouts mixed with a carefully regulated diet.

I won’t claim that being super fit is super easy. It does take work. But, as any gym-rat will tell you, exercise can and should be enjoyable.

But for whatever reason, the media we are exposed to on a daily basis glorifies exercise that drives us to the breaking point, showing exercises we “love to hate” and an endless barrage of hard-ass trainers.

In other words, we constantly learn and relearn that exercise is an exhausting activity worthy of hate. Ever wonder “why do I hate exercise?” This is why.

Need some examples?

• How I Met Your Mother ran for 9 seasons, and regularly made references to the main characters’ laziness. Here’s a clip of Ted being beaten down by an aggressive trainer in the one episode they do work out.
• BoJack Horseman, the critically acclaimed animated comedy on Netflix, depicts its protagonist struggling on a run, proclaiming “running is terrible, everything is the worst.” Even the encouraging words at the end of this clip imply that exercise needs to suck at first.
• Famed fitness personality Jillian Michaels is absolutely brutal on the Biggest Loser. One highlight: “you’re not acting strong, you’re acting pathetic!”

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be called a “worthless piece of crap” when I work out. I don’t like being called pathetic while I’m at the gym.  I’ve been working out for years, but I would still probably quit if every workout knocked me on my ass while being screamed at by a “trainer.” Is it any wonder people hate working out?

And yet these examples are everywhere in pop culture. And it starts to affect everyday life.

This past New Year’s, I witnessed two women come in to work out every day. Every rep was  precisely counted and tracked. The circuit workout they were doing was intense, enough that it caused me to look up and notice. And every time a rep wasn’t deep enough, one would shout at the other: “NOT GOOD ENOUGH! DO IT AGAIN!”

They were gone within two weeks.

The Flipside: Everyone Loves Fitness

The flipside of “exercise sucks” is that most people DO want to be fit. Given a choice between six-pack and potbelly, most people would choose six-pack. There’s a reason “lose weight” was the most popular New Year’s resolution of 2015.

The media and messaging around exercise take advantage of this in the most blatant way possible. And again, the messages around exercise make us feel terrible.

I once attended a marketing conference where the speaker held up “Get Bikini Body Confident” as a slogan that “[made her] feel like a pile of shit.” Similarly, this classy “beachbody” article in Cosmo claims that “You don’t need to bust ass for months to look like a goddess in a bikini.”

And men are hardly exempt from this treatment. Beachbody articles for men remind us that “our tops come off, imperfect bodies and all.” The tagline of this T-Nation article is “chances are, you’re either a fat bastard or a skinny slacker.”

An advertisement for Iron Gym’s pull-up bar depicts an oiled up, dehydrated, shirtless model and begins “Wanna get strong. Wanna get lean. Wanna get ripped.” Listen to the macho voice and music and ask yourself: did he really have to be shirtless for this?

Get ripped, get jacked, get slim, get sexy, get hot, get abs. The messages and images we see aren’t designed to make you feel good about yourself.

But is it even about feeling good?

At this point someone inevitably is thinking that exercise isn’t about feeling good. It’s about discipline. It’s about hard work. Exhaustion, even hating your body—that’s just part of the territory.

In his wildly popular BroScience videos, “Dom Mazzetti” (played by Mike Tornabene) pokes fun at this idea. In an often-quoted phrase, he claims that “The day you started lifting is the day you became forever small. Because you will never be as big as you want to be.”

A mixture of insecurity and hardassery leads people to believe that hating your body is just part of it. One client said to me that “I feel like you should always sort of hate your body. Otherwise you’ll stop wanting to improve.” Dr. Cox on the show Scrubs supports this idea, calling it the “key to his exercise program.”

But a century of psychology tell us that isn’t true. When actions have positive consequences, we are more likely to repeat those actions. This “Law of Effect” was discovered by Edward Thorndike around the turn of the 20th century, and has since become the subject of extensive study in the field of behaviorism (spoiler alert: it holds up).

If we turn exercise into a shameful, degrading, negative experience, why would anyone want to work out? Despite Breitbart’s claim that “science” backs up fat shaming as an effective motivation for exercise, study after study shows that a focus on improved body image and internal motivation proves more effective over the long term.

Where does that leave us?

The Strange Triumph of Laziness

On one hand, pop culture tells us that exercise is a brutal sacrifice. On the other, marketing tells us that we need to get ripped, get lean, and get abs. There’s a dread or fear of exercise. We are caught between our need to avoid pain and our desire to be in-shape. So what do we end up doing?

Nothing.

Remember how weight loss is the most popular New Year’s resolution? Only 8% of resolutioners achieve their goals.

Not only do we do nothing, we glorify it. We take pride in it. A joke like “I was going to work out, but this nap isn’t going to take itself” becomes more than just a joke—it becomes a method of rebellion against what society says we “should” be. We make so many jokes about choosing Netflix over the gym that Buzzfeed wrote a whole article describing the Netflix couch workout.

One of the fittest people I’ve ever met likes to say that she is “the laziest fit person [she] knows.” Hell, I regularly downplay the amount that I like to work out. For all that being in shape is desirable, talking about workouts in conversation only makes things uncomfortable. “I don’t work out,” “I hate going to the gym,” and “I hate exercise” are proud statements.

Even when we do work out, we minimize and degrade it. We look for alternatives to working out. Do a quick Twitter search for #IHateExercise, and you’ll find plenty of people disparaging their own workouts. Other relevant hashtags include #solazy and #noworkout.

What would happen if we changed how we thought about exercise? Everyone “knows” that exercise is healthy and has all kinds of benefits. But what if we really appreciated that, embraced exercise, and incorporated into our lives as a pleasurable pastime?

We need to reclaim exercise

For starters, research and several major organizations suggest we’d see pretty substantial changes to our quality of life. The American Heart Association supports cardio as a means of improving heart health and a variety of related conditions (and heart attacks are the leading cause of death in the US, according to the Center for Disease Control). Strength training, on the other hand, is linked to greater bone density and prevention of osteoporosis.

Extensive study demonstrates clear effects of exercise on mood, and more recent exploration suggests that exercise could actually help you grow new brain cells. The medical benefits of exercise are clear.

But clearly that isn’t enough to get most of us moving. It certainly isn’t what helped me (and nowadays I love working out). We need to learn how to like exercise.

Thanks to the internet, it’s never been easier to find accounts of the personal effects of exercise. With a little searching you’ll find that many members of the business and political elite have strict exercise regimes. But you’ll also find incredible, heartwarming stories of everyday people whose lives have been touched by exercise:

• Exercise literally prevented this Elliott Hulse reader from committing suicide  
• Exercise helped this woman manage clinical depression and OCD
• Exercise helped these top trainers transform their lives in a variety of ways
• Exercise helped this man improve his confidence and life in subtly important ways

And of course, my favorite story is Arthur’s, the formerly immobile veteran that used exercise to cut his weight in half and regain the ability to walk. I literally cried the first time I watched the end of that video.

Exercise has an incredible power to transform lives. I know it changed mine.

We live in a society that vilifies exercise, glorifies fitness, and encourages laziness. We are constantly exposed to messages that make us feel insecure and inadequate. Every day, people are treated poorly because of their weight, despite a culture telling them that working out is next to impossible. Movement does not need to be miserable; the human body is an incredible machine with incredible capabilities. We need to appreciate that.

What if, instead of shaming ourselves, we took pride in our accomplishments?

What if, instead of melting into a puddle of sweat, we exercised in healthy, energizing moderation?

What if we developed a positive relationship with exercise and our bodies, and learned to enjoy them both?

We need to reclaim exercise.

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To get started on a healthy, consistent exercise routine, download my free guide and learn how to use psychology to stop skipping workouts.

Let’s Get Started

You’ll also get the free eBook “51 Fitness Motivation Tips.”