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You’ve tried everything to change a habit that no longer serves who you want to be. That super-annoying (to you, mostly) part of your behaviour that’s in a raging conflict with your new health and fitness goals.

Mustering willpower didn’t work. Changing your environment didn’t work. Replacing the wine with tea and doughnuts with carrots didn’t work. You’ve tried it all. And it didn’t work.

The problem isn’t the habit. The problem is the inner dialogue that causes you to lean into the habit in the first place.

Because a deeply ingrained habit is often nothing more and nothing less than a physical reaction to something going on inside.

Focus on solving what’s happening inside. And you’ll change the habit.

What are you reacting to?

-J

Process goals are the actions and habits you take to reach your health goals. As in, “To reclaim my energy and strength, I will lift weights twice a week for 30 minutes and do a 20-minute dance class twice a week.” Or something like that.

Zero discomfort with your process goals (“Instead of the usual 90-minute interval, I will now get off the couch once an hour to get more Doritos.”) means it’s unlikely that your process goals move you closer to your big goal.

But if you aim for too much discomfort, you won’t stick to it (“I haven’t done any running for years, but starting tomorrow, I will run 60 minutes a day, backwards, up a hill, while towing my kids in a flat tyre wheelbarrow”).

There’s no universal rule on how much discomfort you can tolerate when changing lifestyle habits. But you’ll just have to start somewhere.

Here’s what I tell most new clients.

Your process goals should feel like a stretch, but you’re still 90% confident you can complete them most days.

Now, where did I leave that wheelbarrow?

-J

As I wrote yesterday, there’s nothing wrong with prioritising work over health as long as it’s a conscious decision. Sometimes there are no other options.

But prioritising work over health becomes an issue if you don’t set a strict deadline for when the work takes the backseat. A deadline for when you’ll make your health and fitness a priority again. Whether that’s five months or two years from now.

Because you don’t want to wake up seven years from now and tell your kids you can’t kick a soccer ball with them because your lungs will explode.

-J

Struggles and disappointment with our wellbeing arise when we’re not clear about our priorities.

When your work demands a humpbackwhale’s share of your time and energy, it’s unlikely that now’s the best time to reach for an ambitious fitness goal. Especially while juggling it all with the borderline insanity that comes with a growing family.

This might mean that instead of aiming for two or even one proper training sessions each week, you’ll find ways to do the minimum that keeps your health and fitness from going down the shitter. Just to keep your health spiralling into the abyss.

Are you going to be your healthiest self doing so? Hell No. But you’ve consciously decided to prioritise something else in your life, for now. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

-J

Most of us would feel more patient, happy and healthier if we’d become good at wanting what we already have.

How much more time would this leave for exercise? How much more creative would we feel in our day-to-day life?

And what would our relationships look like?

Maybe the solution to finding more time in our days isn’t so much a physical thing, but a mental shift.

Instead of one day looking back on our life and realising how we had all we could’ve asked for, we can try to live in it now.

And appreciate all we have.

-J

When we’re struggling with a physical problem, we downplay or even ignore how much our psychology affects our physical wellbeing.

When we’re wrestling with psychological gremlins, we ignore the impact our physical wellbeing has on our mental health.

And we’ll likely live with suboptimal results for as long as we keep the two disconnected.

-J

When you’re just getting started or struggling to see results with what you’re already doing, cramming in as many weekly workouts as possible is tempting.

And then, about two weeks, maybe a month into it, you’re feeling about as fresh and calm as a wildebeest who somehow made it across the crocodile-infested Mara River with a cut wound or two.

Extra workouts, intensity, or a jump in daily physical activity are the last thing you need when dealing with an already hectic schedule. You’ve got no base to build it on.

Instead, start by figuring out how to reduce or manage some of the stressors in your life. Find ways to improve your recovery. Prioritise sleep. Call in some favours. Make your life feel less hectic.

And use that extra recovery to create a solid foundation for where to build your workouts and all the other stuff.

-J

When you’re going through a significant life event, a hectic period with your business, or just struggling with sleep for whatever reason, it all affects your nervous system. And the more sensitive your psychological makeup is to stress, the more you’ll feel these stressors in your body.

Knowing this might help you reframe your pain. To something that is caused by the sensitised nervous system. And not an actual physical issue of some sort.

You can also use this pain as a signal to focus on physical and non-physical activities and treatments that help you reduce stress and feel more relaxed.

And if possible, you could use these pain signals as a sign to make some fundamental changes in your life to reduce the sources of stress. Or, if that’s impossible right now, to try to find ways to reduce your stress response.

I am not saying that any of this is easy. Or that pain of any sort doesn’t suck (because it does!). Or that the pain is not real because it’s in your head. Because it is very much real when you feel it.

But sometimes, a small reframe makes the pain easier to deal with.

-J

ps. Obviously, prolonged pain is worth getting investigated by an appropriate professional with mad clinical skills and a deep understanding of pain science. If you ever struggle finding such a person, please let me know, and we can try to find someone to help you where you’re at.

You, better than anyone else, understand who you are and what makes you, well, you.

Knowing what you know about yourself, what is the path of least resistance to get you to your health and fitness goals?

Align your actions to go with the grain. Not against it.

-J

If you haven’t done it in the past six months, now is a good time.

It’s surprising how many non-essential activities and distractions creep into our daily lives without us noticing it.

Log everything you do for three days (or a week) to find the time leaks. Activities that don’t align with what you value in life.

You might notice that maybe getting in that extra hour of exercise each week isn’t as impossible as it seems.

-J