“I don’t want to EXERCISE” - Why Your Brain Lies to You

Today, learn how your brain tricks you into avoiding exercise and why it's crucial to overcome this instinct. Understand the neuroscience of movement, uncover the surprising benefits of any form of physical activity, and explore strategies to make exercise enjoyable again. From childhood fears to unexpected swimming adventures, I share personal stories that will inspire you to break free from your exercise limitations.

Citations

The Joy of Movement: How Exercise Helps Us Find Happiness, Hope, Connection, and Courage, by Kelly McGonigal, Ph.D.

Your next podcast: How to Stop Procrastinating

Transcript

  Today I'm going to be talking about making the shift to autumn or fall by talking about the effect of movement on us.  Hi, I'm Shelley Treacher from Underground Confidence. I help people to heal from the emotional side of overeating. So these podcasts are all about the emotions that we experience as human beings, how difficult they can be at times and how to work through them.

Movement can make a massive difference to how we feel, but I'll talk about that in a bit. But first, as I often do, I'm going to start with a quote. So somebody has said to me, I now feel my weight has got out of hand and that I've gone beyond the point of return with it.  The reason I'm quoting this is because it's something that I hear a lot.

That people feel like it's just too overwhelming, that weight has gone so out of control, or that eating has gone so out of control, what's the point in actually doing anything about it? It feels so hopeless.  I wanted to say this to you today because I know a lot of you will relate to it and I would say in response that it can help to shift your focus from losing weight to healing the way you feel about yourself. 

This is something that can only be done in a step by step process of recognizing how you talk to yourself now, understanding that you probably don't treat yourself very well and learning how to do that differently. This is where your journey might capture your interest. Whereas focusing on your weight just induces stress, which of course will make you want to eat more.

I am creating a program that helps you to do this, so please send me a message with the word info and I'll send you the details. But now let's talk about movement. I've been talking for the last couple of weeks about how you can make an adjustment from the breezy, relaxed atmosphere of the summer to the perhaps more stressful autumn shift that comes with more challenges. 

In the first podcast, I talked about coping with disappointment and making a shift from something you enjoyed to something you're not potentially thinking you'll enjoy. In the second podcast, I talked about how to cope with the stress that might come at this time of year. And now today, I'm talking about moving your body.

One of the things that I've found interesting in all my years of working with people who comfort eat or who worry about how they look and their weight is that often, somewhere in their history, they used to enjoy exercise. This may not be you, and I'm not judging you if it isn't, but it is something that's come up more often than I would have expected. 

But for the purpose of this podcast and the message that I'm trying to communicate to you today, I'm not really just talking about exercise, I'm talking about any movement. One of the most interesting neuroscientific facts to know about how movement interacts with our brains is that our brain lies to us about what will feel good.

I've said this best in a social media post, so here it is for you. You know how you never want to do exercise when you wake up in the morning, or you finish a day's work and you're like, Ugh, really, do I have to exercise now? And if you're anything like me, sometimes that wins out and I'm like, no, I'm too tired.

I'm just going to sit on the sofa tonight. Cause that's what I need to do. I've worked hard today. Apparently that is your survival mechanism kicking in. So for  survival's sake, right, we're wired to only be interested in conserving energy for survival or pleasure. So it's our brain's way of checking whether we really want to do this thing and whether it will actually contribute to our survival or to our pleasure. 

So you kind of have to not trust it and get past that and be like, oh, I know what you're trying to do. No, I do get pleasure out of exercise. I am going to go because I know more oftentimes than not, if I go, I'm really grateful that I went and I feel a lot better. But another couple of pieces of research have shown that any movement can have a positive effect on our brains and make us feel better.

We traditionally really only know about the dopamine and endorphin hits that we get from exercise, from cardiovascular exercise. But actually there are other things that happen with any movement. There is of course strong data to suggest that getting your heart rate up is known to improve your mood, to decrease depression.

But there's fairly new research that shows that any muscle contraction produces an antidepressant chemical. It also changes our reward system so that we can feel more pleasure and expect good things. As I've said previously, when you're addicted to a substance or a behaviour, you get a fake dopamine hit so your natural dopamine system stops working so well.

It takes at least six weeks to recover this process, but movement, any muscle contraction, can speed up that process. One of the things that I'd suggest is coupling enjoyment with exercise. If you feel incapable of enjoying movement, literally set a goal for walking every day. Up to 10 minutes, eventually.

The smaller your goal, the easier it will be. But just like my clients who come in saying that they used to love movement and exercise when they were younger, can you think of a time when you did love movement? What I've seen with lots of my clients is that they start to move again and they remember how much they enjoy it. 

I'm convinced that a lot of this processing is the nervous system kicking in to survival mode, telling us that we don't want to move. Our triggering, when our nervous systems feel unsafe, come with a lot of side effects. So one of your goals might be to tell yourself that you're safe to move, that you're going to enjoy it.

I feel quite lucky, because I've known that I enjoy movement for a while now. But it hasn't always been that way. As a child, I was really nervous of moving, and I was always one of the last to be picked on the school teams. I was so tiny and nervous and quiet. I think I was probably triggered and in fight or flight much of the time.

But as I grew older, I started with slower movements like yoga, and then I found dancing. And for the longest time, that was the only exercise that I would do, because I thought it was the only one I'd enjoy. And then I found running. And true to my word, I started very slowly with that. I started running for just one and a half minutes, like it suggests that you do on couch to 5k. 

And literally, I would just try and get through it.  Now I've been running for a couple of years, and I've changed up and down in that time. Sometimes I've run for a long time, sometimes I've run really fast. Now I really only run for about 20 minutes. But the more I've done it, the more evidence I've got that it makes me feel good.

Funny enough, I can even relate to this survival story in something I did this weekend. So this weekend, I went swimming with the Bristol Bluetits.  The most fantastic name for wild swimmers I've ever heard. The majority of the people swam for quite a long way and then swam back. Of course, I wasn't going to go against the crowd.

I followed what everybody was doing. But quarter of the way, third of the way, half the way through, I'm thinking, I don't know if I'm going to make it to the end of this because I'm not an actual swimmer. I'm really just a dipper. I want the cold water effects. I didn't really want the exercise. So all the way along, I'm like, my neck hurts.

I'm not enjoying this.  I'm going to look like I'm swimming. I'm just going to get to the end. I really didn't enjoy it at all.  And then I got to the end, came back and don't ask me how or why, but something kicked in that told me I could do better than this. And so I started actually swimming. And the more I did this, the more I loved it.

And I found myself overtaking all these women who were ahead of me. Then my competitive spirit kicked in. And so with every stroke I'm thinking, oh my god I'm doing it, I love this, I'm exercising,  maybe I'm a swimmer after all.  It's only now that I reflect on that that I reckon for the first half of the journey I was trying to conserve my energy for survival  and then when I realised that there was nothing to survive and that I was safe, I swam and enjoyed it.

So my question to you would be how might you be limiting yourself from enjoying exercise?  Of course, another thing that might help you to enjoy exercise is doing it with another person, but I'm going to talk about that next time. There's so many thoughts that can trip us up with exercise. There's negative thinking about body comparison.

There's how we think about how we're aging and the losses that we experience. Really, the message here is to work with your mind around it. So to put yourself in the best circumstances that you possibly can to not be negative about it. Perhaps to prepare for it the night before. Perhaps to take one small step at a time.

What I often suggest is getting your kit ready and going out the door and then seeing if you get any further but really your goal being just to go out the door and then the goal next time to be to go to the gym or the park or wherever it is or the class. There's classes in everything these days, right?

Without the pressure to actually do anything. But seeing how far you get. Music can help with exercise. Music that's empowering in particular. My running list is very exciting.  And nature also helps. Just going into nature puts you in a different state. So maybe that's a good place to start.  What I've done today is give you another way to shift from summer to autumn.

First I gave you a client quote about feeling that your weight is far too big an issue to tackle. Then I talked about movement. I talked about the neuroscience of movement and how our brains trick us into not moving to conserve energy for survival or pleasure. I also told you about different research that shows that movement can have an antidepressant effect on us.

and improve our reward system. And I encouraged you to find various ways that you can enjoy or approach movement.  Next week, I'm going to finish this series on talking about how you can transition from summer to autumn, make adjustments to change by talking about community and connection. And then I'll be taking a break for a week.

After which I plan to talk about money, our attitudes towards money. I'm going to end on something that my supervisor said. This was in a period when I was experimenting with unfurling  my spine and standing up a little bit more with my head up, feeling more confident in that posture. And what she said sums up how I feel about this whole embodiment subject.

But I'm leaving it with you to respond to the first quote that I mentioned at the beginning of this podcast. She said, If you move a couple of millimetres, You can change everything. My wish for you is to change how you feel about yourself, both physically and emotionally, which I know to be able to change everything.

If you want help with this, please do respond by sending me a message saying info and I will let you know how I can help. If you're ready to disrupt your way of thinking and you know that your emotional world is what's causing your eating, let's see how I can help you with that. Thank you so much for listening today.

I will see you next Thursday. Bye. This has been Underground Confidence with Shelley Treacher.