2022 Will Be Different, Right?

The alarm goes off. It’s Monday again and it’s already 7.00am. Shit. I have to get to work and there isn’t enough time for breakfast, let alone any kind of exercise. I really should do my physio exercises, intended to make sure my muscles don’t cramp up in awful ways while I work and strengthen them against bad behaviour. Regularly at morning and night, he said, would be a good start. I haven’t done them in weeks. Probably not since I saw him last to ease those same aching muscles, wrestling them back into a semblance of submission before I let them slowly work their way into knots again.

Work is busy. The phone won’t stop ringing. I have several packages to send via courier to patients. My storeroom is in desperate need of a tidy and a stocktake. 5.00pm rolls around, so I drag myself home cursing the peak hour traffic. Before I get to sit down, I walk the dog, cook some dinner, and eat while watching whatever’s interesting on Netflix right now. I blink and it’s ten in the evening. Probably time for a shower and bed. Dang it, I forgot to exercise again. Before I know it, several days and then weeks fly by in a similar fashion.

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This kind of routine is probably not unfamiliar to you, dear reader. You’ve got your own wake up times, work schedule, dependents to look after, and ways to unwind when you get some precious time to yourself in the evening. An exercise regime is notoriously hard to start, let alone maintain, in the whirlwind of daily activities that make up our lives. Why is that? We (mostly) remember to eat as our bodies tell us they’re hungry, and we (mostly) sleep when they tell us it’s time to close our eyes. But exercise routines are a common New Year’s resolution that so many of us want to achieve but struggle with, and I’m no exception!

The health benefits of exercise are well known and undeniable. Exercise serves many physical benefits such as increased cardiovascular, respiratory, and muscular function, decreased stress, decreased weight, and all of the associated effects of those benefits such as decreased risk of heart disease, diabetes, and blood pressure issues. Exercise also has mental health benefits, including decreased stress, improved mood, and improving the quality and quantity of sleep.

Knowing all this, you’d think it would be easier to exercise, but the unfortunate truth is that exercise takes time and effort. Often, the benefits take time to make themselves known, and it’s all too easy to give up on an exercise routine before it’s had time to form into a habit.

As someone with a bit of an obsessive compulsive perfectionism in my personality, I have read more than a few books on self-improvement, including the science behind habit formation. One of my favourite books was The Power Of Habit by Charles Duhigg, where I first learnt about routines, habits, and the habit loop.

After reading the entire book from cover to cover, I was of the opinion that I had finally found the formula for success. I wrote down good habits I wanted to form and bad habits I wanted to break. But in order to do that, I had to properly understand what habits and routines were, and how to make them work for me.

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Let me start with some basic definitions. Habits are small actions, behaviours, or routines, triggered by particular stimuli or cues, and give us some kind of benefit or reward after we do them. This is the basic formula of the habit loop and if you’ve done any kind of basic psychology course, you can recognise Operant conditioning, more colloquially known as a Pavlov’s dog response, at its foundation.

Habits make up a large portion of our days and can be good or bad in nature. The interesting thing about habits is that most of the time they are unconscious and we are barely aware of them! Habits can become uncomfortable when we are unable to perform the action or behaviour in response to the original stimulus or cue.

To contrast with habits, routines also need a definition, as the two are actually different. Routines are actions and behaviours that require time and effort to initiate. Routines often encompass actions or behaviours we already struggle with, find difficult, frustrating, or strenuous. For this reason routines don’t feel as uncomfortable as habits do when we skip them from time to time, and to the contrary, it sometimes feels better to do so.

Most importantly, routines are a precursor to and a superset of habits – that is, habits are a type of routine, but not all routines are habits. But, if we perform routines often enough and consistently enough, we can trick our brains to go on autopilot and routines can turn into habits.

Now that I had clear definitions of habits and routines, understood how the habit loop worked and how routines could become habits over time, surely I could get this one sorted and make exercise easy for myself. I just had to define my cue, my routine, and my reward. Oh, not to mention decrease or remove entirely as many factors as I could that increase the time or effort that an exercise routine takes. Easy, right? Well, let’s break it down.

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My cues for exercise have generally been time related. I set myself a goal to exercise three days a week – Monday, Wednesday and Friday – usually after work, as that time has worked the best in previous attempts at an exercise routine. I set aside time in my schedule using my bullet journal – a paper-based combination planner, diary, and to do list. I was lucky this time around that I wasn’t working shift work anymore – no more weekend work, public holiday work, or night shift – which allowed me to set a regular time to exercise.

I also linked my cue, specific days, and a specific time, with another habit I already have – checking in with my bullet journal in the morning. This is a form of habit stacking, a technique where a new routine is paired with an already existing habit, with the hope that the strength of the old habit assists in cementing the new routine into a habit as well. Excellent, I had the cue part of the habit loop sorted.

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The routine itself is simple enough – exercise! Right? In order to give myself a better chance of success at this attempt at an exercise routine, I tried to determine what kinds of exercise are the least effort (at least in my own psyche!) as well as what I truly get a buzz out of doing.

Although there are heaps of apps for running, I am not all that good at it, and I especially don’t enjoy it in the early stages where lungs and muscles take turns at making my life miserable. Running is also usually an outdoor activity, unless you want to take a chance at a treadmill, and the erratic Melbourne weather often ruins plans to go running anyway, which can be very discouraging.

Some years ago, I decided to invest in some exercise equipment, which I’ll admit has been sitting unused in a room since I bought it. It can be used for bodyweight exercises, assisted by yet another book I have on how to do those, and I find bodyweight exercises to be useful and easy enough to do.

Finally, with an aerobic step, a yoga mat, and my TV, I have indulged in aerobics and yoga classes. Not only are these more exercises I can do inside and therefore not dependant on the weather, they’re actually really fun to do and can be quite intense! Not to mention, if you look hard enough you can find some awesome videos on YouTube from the eighties to exercise to – and giggle at the lycra!

All of these are exercises have worked for me in the past, and I gave myself some wiggle room in allowing the routine part of the habit loop to reflect the time and energy levels I had each day that I exercise. I used to wonder if this was where I was shooting myself in the foot, not being consistent enough in the type of actions or behaviours in the routine I was trying to form. This time around, I was just happy to get myself moving in the right direction, and allowing for variations in the circumstances of other life patterns from day to day felt like a good idea. Routine – check!

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Finally, the reward, something I have always struggled with in general. Setting myself a reward feels weird and unnatural, and it’s hard to decide what kind of reward makes something worth doing. I had tried using activity trackers like Fitbit and MyFitnessPal, and gamified fitness apps and trackers like ZombiesRun and Habitica, as well as general trackers like the ones in my bullet journal in previous attempts to form habits. While I do get quite a kick out of ticking off a “To Do” list, completing a tracker, or gaining a level in a gamified app, it doesn’t appear to be quite enough of a reward to overcome the pain and exhaustion of actually exercising!

When I think of rewards I think of three general categories – food, drinks, and relaxing. The issue is that I would want to have these in my regular routine, regardless of whether or not I exercise or not! Therefore I had to think of examples of these that are particularly special, and appropriately times, to act as proper rewards for my exercise routine.

For the food category, I love myself a charcuterie board. Since this is something quite small, I was more than happy to use a small charcuterie board as my regular reward every day that I exercised. For the drinks category, I love going to the pub for a few drinks at the end of the week. Since this has already a weekly ritual in the past, I was going to alter it slightly and only allow myself the ritual if I had been successful with my exercise routine for a whole week.

For the relaxing category, I would love to go back to the Peninsula Hot Springs for a day soaking in hot water with my partner. This is a much bigger type of reward, so I decided to make it the reward for completing a whole month of the exercise routine successfully. And boy, what a reward!

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With cue, routine, and rewards all defined, it seemed like the only thing left to do is get on with it! But even this process of analysis, of planning, is familiar, despite my life circumstances changing over the years. What made me think that this time will be any different? Why was this time going to be successful when previously I had failed? My doubts that I would be able to succeed and the inevitable understanding that I would be too tired, too lazy, too unmotivated to achieve my rewards put the plan on the backburner once more.

Excuses start to come, almost too easily. I’ll totally start next Monday. Or the first of next month. When I have a work routine to schedule it around. When I get settled into the new job. Procrastination is easy when you’re tired, or there are other more interesting things to do, or just don’t want to put in the effort. I knew I was making these excuses, but it was also important to acknowledge the challenges I have personally faced in the last two years, as well as those we’ve experienced as a community.

The coronavirus pandemic has added a layer of complexity to habit formation. Our normal routines have been shaken up, manipulated, reformed, or complete disappeared altogether. This makes creating habits even harder as we try to adapt to the uncertainty that each day brings.

The coronavirus pandemic has brought with it restrictions on gyms and personal trainers, limitations on movement outside of the home, and a drastic narrowing of potential rewards, all of which have affected the way people exercise, and whether they do at all. I have heard more than one person mention “COVID weight” in reference to the kilos piled on staying indoors in a more sedentary environment with only junk food to console us.

My community here in Melbourne is perhaps weeks away from opening up to a “COVID normal” state. For me in particular, the return of greater freedoms will impact on the rewards available to me to make sure that my exercise routine finally sticks this time. Perhaps these rewards will also mean more, after not being able to take advantage of them on a regular basis for almost two years.

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For now, I’m glad I have spent some time thinking about my exercise routine, delving into what works and what doesn’t, and finessed the rewards that will motivate me to be successful. But the timing isn’t right, with the demands of a new job exhausting me most days of the week, needing the weekends for recovery, and a lack of access to two thirds of my planned rewards making resistance to exercise even easier than before.

The alarm goes off, but its Saturday. I have an essay to write today, about how I still haven’t managed to get into an exercise regime. The draft was due last week, but I got an extension as I hadn’t found the time to even look at the brief properly until a couple of days before the deadline. My back is sore, so I try to do a few physio exercises before I head to the computer to write.

The house needs a clean, and my partner is coming back down to my place again today to spend some time with me over the weekend. I’m sure he’s expecting to relax, maybe get a fire going in the fire pit outside if it isn’t raining, and catch up on what’s been happening. I put one foot in front of the other and decide what needs to be prioritised before I need to be switched on again for work on Monday.

I decide that I may not be exercising, but I’m definitely not idle. My diet and sleep patterns have drastically improved with the nine to five, Monday to Friday job. I’ve managed to almost completely quit smoking as the stresses of the new position are vastly different from those of the old one. For now, I think it’s best to just keep trying, stubbornly and persistently to exercise, even if that means continuing to think and plan. I’ll eventually wrestle exercise into a habit as well. Maybe I’ll start tomorrow.