When Saturday morning cartoons lost their appeal, Saturday morning World of Warcraft took their place.

I played WoW for hours, diving into the fantasy world and totally losing myself there. If you’ve ever lost yourself in an RPG, you know what I’m talking about. There’s an incredible urge, a drive, a need to get to the next level, unlock the next skill, discover the next story.

Video games have an insane power to attract and hold our attention. We catch RPG-OCD, exploring every corner of every cave to make sure we don’t miss out. We think about our next quest when we aren’t even playing, and will sometimes do boring shit for hours just to level up. I still think fondly of games I haven’t played in 10 years.

What if we could harness the power of video games for fitness?

Really, who has never skipped a workout? Before I figured out how to get consistent, I messed with my workout schedule constantly. I would work out for maybe two weeks, burn out, and give up.

Repeat that every 6 months and you have my old life. I told myself, over and over, that I’d “make it up tomorrow.”

Spoiler alert: I didn’t.

I know what it feels like to try to get fit. It’s hard to find the time. It’s hard to stay motivated when life gets in the way. It’s hard to deal with friends and family that don’t understand why you’re trying to change (and keep sending carbs and fried food your direction). Sometimes it feels lonely.

All that, and you still have to actually do it. That’s hard.

But playing video games is easy. I’m not going to stand here and claim that you can make fitness as much fun as video games, but using some of the psychology of video games can make everything easier.

Fortunately, video games are literally designed to be rewarding and engaging. Paying attention to the video game psychology, and using it to gamify fitness, can keep you consistent, on track, and constantly motivated.

The Psychology of Video Game Design

Video games tend to have psychological characteristics in common [1]. Most good games have these four characteristics:

1. Social interaction
2. Player control and autonomy
3. Compelling storylines
4. Reward and punishment systems

Think of your favorite game of all time. It probably has these four things.

I fucking love Final Fantasy Tactics Advance for the Game Boy Advance. I replay it at least yearly, and guess what?

• You can get items by linking with friends
• You have complete control over your characters and in-game strategy
• The story is absolutely brilliant and the characters are compelling
• You can level up, get new skills, get new items, die, and be sent to jail

Great games fill these four characteristics because those characteristics are the reasons we play games in the first place. Video game psychology is based on filling psychological needs, including our desire to be good at shit, our need to have control over things, and our need for social interaction [2].

Seriously, think about how these characteristics line up with your favorite games. Some examples are coming up.

Social Interaction in Video Games

MMORPGs are some of the most addicting games out there because of social interaction. In fact, online social interaction is a key predictor of video game addiction [3].

Guild Wars 2 flipped the typical MMORPG structure on its head, creating an environment that encouraged teamwork among complete strangers. There’s an incredible joy in coming across an in-game event and rallying a group to beat it—just from random people passing by.

Add in guilds and PvP, and there are tons of opportunities for social interaction and teamwork.

Control and Autonomy in Video Games

Humans do not like uncertainty; research shows that uncertain situations activate the threat centers of our brain and reduce activation in the reward pathways [4].

Similarly, control over our environment and the ability to make meaningful choices are powerful psychological needs that might even be innate [5]. These needs are a big part of self-determination theory, a popular theory in psychology [6].

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance gave you an incredible amount of choice. You could choose two professions per unit, change professions at will, create a team of different races, mix-up units for each battle, decide on a variety of strategies and moment-to-moment tactics, change-up equipment on the fly… the list goes on.

This is also why games like Skyrim give you like 2,000 options for your character’s nose. When you have the power to make choices, you connect more deeply with the game.

Narrative and Storytelling in Video Games

Humans love stories. Famed cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner argued that we use stories, narratives, and characters to organize and explain the events of our everyday lives [7]. We even conjure up stories to describe the movement of abstract objects [8].

Not only that, but we tend to tell our own stories in the same way throughout our lives. In fact, the way we tell stories has been proposed as a way to measure our personalities [9].

I didn’t play Tales of Symphonia until 2015, 12 years after its release. I was instantly hooked. The puzzles were interesting, but sometimes tedious. The combat was ok, but outdated (and honestly I didn’t even figure it out for most of the game).

But the story was enthralling.

Incredible plot twist followed incredible plot twist and kept me on the edge of my seat. I played for hours on end hunting for the next step in the story. It was almost an interactive TV show instead of a game.

Rewards and Punishments in Video Games

Leveling up. Better equipment. New quests. Death.

All of these are rewards and punishments that make gaming addictive. Grinding in games is usually tedious and boring—but I still do it all the time.

Going all the way back the original Pokemon games, I would sit in Victory Road for hours battling Onyxes in the quest for higher level pokemon. I searched the Safari Zone for Chansey, and used literal slot machines at the Game Corner to get a Dratini.

Rewards look different in different games, but well timed rewards that progress steadily and unlock new gameplay can keep people playing for hours on end.

At the same time, too many rewards (or rewarding the wrong things) can really ruin gameplay.

When I asked Jamie Madigan, author of Getting Gamers: The Psychology of Video Games and Their Impact on the People who Play Them, about times when rewards are dangerous, he said:

“The overjustification effect happens when we start offering extrinsic rewards (money, points, discounts codes for gear, etc.) for something that people were already doing just for the enjoyment of it. Over time we shift towards thinking that those external rewards are the reason we’re doing the activity instead of the internal pleasure. So if those external rewards go away or become irrelevant, we’re left with less motivation than if we had simply let people continue to do things how they want.

I’ve seen this myself in certain running apps. I’ve used a few different kinds of apps to track my runs. I like running and all I really want is something to record and visualize my progress towards my goals. I purposely ignore or even try to disable any leaderboards, games, goofy challenges, or achievements because I don’t want those external motivators to replace the simple joy of running and trying to do better than I did on my last run.”

Reward yourself for things that are difficult; be careful rewarding yourself for things you already like doing.

The Fifth Factor: Flow in Video Games

There is a fifth psychological factor that affects the fun of gaming: flow.

When you’re in flow, you’re entirely engrossed in what you’re doing. If you’ve ever been “in the zone,” that’s flow. It’s a state of being totally focused and attentive to what you’re doing. It happens when your skills are perfectly matched to the difficulty of your task.

And it feels awesome.

So if a game can get you into flow, that’s a good sign that you’ll have a good time playing that game.

There are 4 aspects of video games that help you get into a flow state [10]:

• Concrete goals with manageable rules
• Goals that fit player capabilities
• Clear and timely feedback
• Few distractions

Do you know what you need to be doing? Are you capable of doing it? Do you know when you’re doing it correctly? Is there anything else to do? If you can answer yes to those four questions, there’s a good chance a game is going to get you into flow.

(hint: ask yourself the same questions for fitness)

One of my favorite examples of a flow-inducing game is the browser game TagPro. The game is simple: it’s essentially capture the flag where everyone plays as a hard-to-control-ball.

But it fits each of these four characteristics:

• The goal is to capture the enemy flag and defend your flag
• At every skill level, there is a role you can contribute to your team
• When you mess up, your ball “pops” and you respawn
• There’s nothing else to do in the game

It’s a simple example, but flow states can occur in a wide variety of game genres, and they make a game highly engaging. In fact, distorted time perception (one characteristic of flow) is a predictor of video game addiction [11].

Gamify Fitness

Great, you know a thing or two about video games, but how is that going to help you get fit?

If video games are appealing because they meet our psychological needs, meeting those needs in exercise should make fitness appealing.

How can you use the psychology of video games to gamify fitness and incorporate each need?

Social interaction:

• There are dozens of online forums dedicated to fitness. I used to love hanging around Fitocracy. Nowadays I prefer /r/fitness, /r/weightroom, and /r/advancedfitness. There are dozens of fitness Facebook groups, and FitBit is getting popular. Finding a place to talk about fitness online makes it part of your social interactions,
• Get a workout partner. My old workout buddy is now one of my best friends. Working out with someone is a great bonding experience.
• Join a team or group fitness class. A great way to meet new people and friends.
• Try any of the other methods in my free ebook. There’s a whole section titled Getting Gym Motivation From the People Around You.

Control and Autonomy:

• Give yourself control over your workouts. Too many people print out cookie-cutter programs (that may or may not work) and follow them to the letter…and then quit. Do you have exercises you especially enjoy, and some you don’t? Make your workout yours.
• Do your workouts on your terms. It’s tempting to try to work out in the morning and eat every 2 hours because that’s what you’re “supposed” to do. But if it’s not how you work best, you’ll burn out.

Narrative and Storytelling

• What story are you telling yourself? The way you talk about your story can have a major impact on how consistent you are.
• Look at other fitness stories. If you need to get motivated, almost nothing is as compelling as reading success stories of people like you. Seeing those successes helps you believe that fitness is possible.

Rewards and Punishments

• Rewarding yourself for fitness isn’t a new idea, but most people do it wrong. Use a small reward after each workout to give yourself a boost.
• Remember that workouts are inherently rewarding. Watching yourself get stronger feels awesome
• Check out this article I wrote for more specifics on how to use good rewards

Flow

• Your workouts should be easy to understand and you should know how to do them
• Your workouts shouldn’t be too easy or too hard (they should match your skill level)
• You should get feedback when you do things well. Just finishing reps is a start, but having a friend or trainer can help with this.
• You shouldn’t be distracted. If messing around on your phone or listening to a podcast gets you to the gym, that’s fine. But you’ll be more likely to enjoy the process if you’re fully engaged.

You don’t necessarily need to use every piece of video game design to gamify fitness. But as you glance over these lists, think of the slight changes you can make to your workouts to make them more fun and keep you more consistent.

What’s your favorite video game? Can you see these psychological factors at play?

 

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Citations:

[1] King, D.L., Delfabbro, P.H. & Griffiths, M.D. (2010). Cognitive behavioural therapy for problematic video game players: Conceptual considerations and practice issues. Journal of CyberTherapy and Rehabilitation, 3, 261-273.

[2] Przybylski A. K., Scott C., & Ryan R. M. (2010). A motivational model of video game engagement. Rev. Gen. Psychol. 14, 154–166.

[3] Hull, D. C., Williams, G. A., & Griffiths, M. D. (2013). Video game characteristics, happiness and flow as predictors of addiction among video game players: A pilot study. Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 2, 145–152.

[4] Hsu, M., Bhatt, M., Adolphs, R., Tranel, D., & Camerer, C.F. (2005). Neural systems responding to degrees of uncertainty in human decision-making. Science, 231, 1680-1683.

[5] Leotti, L. A., Iyengar, S. S., & Ochsner, K. N. (2010). Born to choose: The origins and value of the need for control. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14, 457–463.

[6] Ryan, R.M. & Deci, E.L. (2000). Intrinsic and extrinsic motivations: Classic definitions and new directions. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 25, 54-67.

[7] Bruner, J. (1991). Narrative construction of reality. Critical Inquiry, 18, 1-21.

[8] Heider, F. & Simmel, M. (1944). People create stories from abstract images. The American Journal of Psychology, 57, 243-259.

[9] McAdams, D.P., Bauer, J.J., Sakaeda, A.R., Anyidoho, N.A., Machado, M.A., Magrino-Failla, K., White, K.W., & Pals, J.L. (2006). Continuity and change in the life story: A longitudinal study of autobiographical memories in emerging adulthood. Journal of Personality, 74, 1371-1400.

[10] S. Baron (20012, March 22). Cognitive flow: The psychology of great game design. Retrieved from http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/166972/cognitive_flow_the_psychology_of_.php

[11] Hull, D. C., Williams, G. A., & Griffiths, M. D. (2013). Video game characteristics, happiness and flow as predictors of addiction among video game players: A pilot study. Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 2, 145–152.

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.”

I was a scrawny nerd with no self-confidence, maybe a couple of friends, and I was going to spend my life doing research in psychology.

None of that is true anymore.

But changing that story took time. I always knew I wanted to change, but I had locked myself into a particular narrative for my life, and my role in that narrative was locked too.

I was convinced that I couldn’t really ever be fit and muscular. I was frustrated because I would work out for 2 weeks…and then quit for 6 months. When I did work out, I pulled my workouts from YouTube videos because I wasn’t sure what else to do. When I told people what I was trying to do, they asked “why would you want to do that?”

Luckily, I was wrong.

But stories are powerful.

We have a seemingly innate tendency to create stories for ourselves (and everything else). One of the earliest studies in storytelling showed that we’ll even create narratives to explain the actions and thoughts of simple shapes.

Legendary cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner repeatedly argued that we use stories to construct our realities. We make sense of the world around us by creating narratives to explain events. The way you tell your story matters.

I do this. You do this. “I want to work out, I just struggle to get motivated,” is a fitness story. “I’ve always dreamed of being fit, but I’m not sure where to start” is another one. I’ve definitely experienced both.

As Jean-Luc Godard once said “A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but not necessarily in that order.” If we unpack “I’ve always dreamed of being fit, but I’m not sure where to start,” it’s easier to see how this is just a story:

• “I’ve always” implies that this has been going on for a long time. It’s the story’s beginning.
• “Dreamed of being fit” implies that you aren’t fit right now. It’s the end you’re hunting.
• “I’m not sure where to start” is the middle of the story. It’s where you are right now.

As psychology research on personality shows, you tend to tell your story in the same way over time. Measuring storytelling is actually becoming a way to measure personality.

But that doesn’t mean your stories can’t be changed if you recognize them for what they are.

One of my favorite articles ever on the internet is The Story I’m Telling Myself. When you respond to any event or make any kind of decision, you are telling yourself a story that may or may not be true.

When I was tempted to skip the gym after work I would tell myself “I’m tired and I have errands to run. It’s just one workout. I can make it up tomorrow.”

Of course, I don’t skip workouts anymore. Clearly that story wasn’t true.

When are stories useful?

The stories you tell yourself can be useful too. If a friend snaps at you angrily, there are a few stories you can create:

• My friend is a mean and angry person
• My friend is a good person that’s had a rough day
• I did something to upset my friend without meaning to
• I’m a terrible person because I made my friend mad

Obviously, some of those stories are more helpful than others. With the middle two stories, you can figure out what’s wrong and work from there. With the others…things probably aren’t going to turn out as well.

How is this helping me be fit?

What fitness stories are you telling yourself? How are you constructing your reality?

If you wonder how to start your fitness journey, there’s a hidden story that’s affecting you.

If you say “I’ve tried everything, but nothing seems to work for me,” you’re telling yourself a story. Is it really true?

If you say “I’m just so busy. It’s hard to find the motivation to work out,” you’re telling yourself a story. You can change it.

My story changed from “scrawny nerd destined for life in the lab” to “guy that loves fitness and works in business as a writer (and maybe is still also slightly a nerd).”

My fitness story turned into a fitness success story. But it didn’t get there overnight.

Tell your story. Your new story.

To change your story, challenge it. If you’re too busy to work out, can you do 1 push-up? If you’ve tried everything, can you find success stories of other approaches? Gradually chip away at your assumptions to rebuild and reframe your experience.

Instead of “I’m too lazy and can’t get motivated” say “I’m having trouble figuring this out, but maybe there’s another approach that would work.”

Instead of “I dream of being fit but don’t know where to start,” say “I don’t know everything, but I can do something.”

I was a scrawny nerd headed to the lab. Now I’m the fit writer that loves exercise science and psychology.

In one sentence, what’s your story?