Hi, folks. I'm struggling hard to find the motivation for a workout today and I thought it might help me reset if I did a really honest check-in about what has been on my mind lately.
My mental health and my physical health are interrelated, interdependent, but also in some ways in tension with one another. Right now, after more than 16 straight weeks of dedicated exercise with FB programs, my physical health is probably close to the best it has ever been, and my mental health is also at a good place relative to my normal. It's just that I feel like I'm walking a very fine line with both, and I'm worried that if I'm not very careful they are both going to crash.
Regular, strenuous exercise is an absolute necessity for both my body and my mind. I'm prone to depression and anxiety, and exercise helps me to elevate my mood and shed some of my anxious energy. It also helps me regulate my sleep which in turn improves mood and stress management. On the purely physical side, I am proud of the strength and endurance that I've built up; it's very empowering to be able to do physical tasks with more ease than ever and to have more energy throughout the day.
But at the same time, I can feel how deeply I am also being motivated by fear, by body negativity, and by toxic notions of what gives a body (and a person) value. The more I work out for the sake of working out, the more I focus on different ways of measuring my body (and for me this does include measures like how much I can lift), the more I feel caught in the grips of a value system that scares me. So far, my actual behavior around exercise and food has, I think, stayed in the realm of "healthy" or "normal" vs. compulsive or disordered -- but my mindset and my motivations in the past 16 weeks have not always felt so healthy.
In my 20s, I didn't struggle with this so much because it didn't take much of a change in my exercise or eating habits to produce an almost immediate and pretty noticeable effect on my appearance. So, a small healthy change went a long way and I didn't have to reorganize my entire life to see a difference. That made it a lot easier to maintain other priorities while still having sufficient motivation to make positive changes.
Now, a few years into my 30s, it takes more than a small change to see a difference. It takes more, even, than 50-60 minutes of strenuous exercise every morning. It pretty much requires round-the-clock discipline over what I'm eating (and when, and how much, etc etc etc) to see any changes, or even to maintain. Is using discipline when eating inherently bad for my mental health? No, not necessarily. Is exercising for an hour every morning inherently bad for my health? Obviously not! But being in a place where I feel like I HAVE to keep that up, every day, all day, forever and ever, or I'm worth less as a human being -- that is not good. That is not my vision of health.
Appearance isn't the only motivator here. But it is still one of the most powerful, one of the most salient. If it wasn't a factor, how might my behavior change? Would I work out for less time in the mornings, and spend the difference doing something else that gives me as much or more enjoyment? Would I eat more, and take pleasure in more indulgences? It's frustrating, because the path of least resistance for me has always been to go much too far in the other direction: to never exercise and to eat to excess frequently. That, entirely apart from any effect on appearance, leaves me feeling sick, weak, anxious, stressed, and moody. So, I am wary of being guided entirely by my own tendencies.
Today, I am just feeling tired, and unsure of what I am doing this for. I hope that I have come too far to go back to how things were, but I guess I am just unsure where I am going from here. I'm grateful that the values of this site and this community support a more comprehensive kind of health and that this space exists to air out some of these difficult feelings. Thanks to anyone who took the time to read all of this. ♥
On trying to care for both body and mind
Hi, folks. I'm struggling hard to find the motivation for a workout today and I thought it might help me reset if I did a really honest check-in about what has been on my mind lately.
My mental health and my physical health are interrelated, interdependent, but also in some ways in tension with one another. Right now, after more than 16 straight weeks of dedicated exercise with FB programs, my physical health is probably close to the best it has ever been, and my mental health is also at a good place relative to my normal. It's just that I feel like I'm walking a very fine line with both, and I'm worried that if I'm not very careful they are both going to crash.
Regular, strenuous exercise is an absolute necessity for both my body and my mind. I'm prone to depression and anxiety, and exercise helps me to elevate my mood and shed some of my anxious energy. It also helps me regulate my sleep which in turn improves mood and stress management. On the purely physical side, I am proud of the strength and endurance that I've built up; it's very empowering to be able to do physical tasks with more ease than ever and to have more energy throughout the day.
But at the same time, I can feel how deeply I am also being motivated by fear, by body negativity, and by toxic notions of what gives a body (and a person) value. The more I work out for the sake of working out, the more I focus on different ways of measuring my body (and for me this does include measures like how much I can lift), the more I feel caught in the grips of a value system that scares me. So far, my actual behavior around exercise and food has, I think, stayed in the realm of "healthy" or "normal" vs. compulsive or disordered -- but my mindset and my motivations in the past 16 weeks have not always felt so healthy.
In my 20s, I didn't struggle with this so much because it didn't take much of a change in my exercise or eating habits to produce an almost immediate and pretty noticeable effect on my appearance. So, a small healthy change went a long way and I didn't have to reorganize my entire life to see a difference. That made it a lot easier to maintain other priorities while still having sufficient motivation to make positive changes.
Now, a few years into my 30s, it takes more than a small change to see a difference. It takes more, even, than 50-60 minutes of strenuous exercise every morning. It pretty much requires round-the-clock discipline over what I'm eating (and when, and how much, etc etc etc) to see any changes, or even to maintain. Is using discipline when eating inherently bad for my mental health? No, not necessarily. Is exercising for an hour every morning inherently bad for my health? Obviously not! But being in a place where I feel like I HAVE to keep that up, every day, all day, forever and ever, or I'm worth less as a human being -- that is not good. That is not my vision of health.
Appearance isn't the only motivator here. But it is still one of the most powerful, one of the most salient. If it wasn't a factor, how might my behavior change? Would I work out for less time in the mornings, and spend the difference doing something else that gives me as much or more enjoyment? Would I eat more, and take pleasure in more indulgences? It's frustrating, because the path of least resistance for me has always been to go much too far in the other direction: to never exercise and to eat to excess frequently. That, entirely apart from any effect on appearance, leaves me feeling sick, weak, anxious, stressed, and moody. So, I am wary of being guided entirely by my own tendencies.
Today, I am just feeling tired, and unsure of what I am doing this for. I hope that I have come too far to go back to how things were, but I guess I am just unsure where I am going from here. I'm grateful that the values of this site and this community support a more comprehensive kind of health and that this space exists to air out some of these difficult feelings. Thanks to anyone who took the time to read all of this. ♥