Hit Reset On Exercise Motivation
Have you ever gone through a period where exercise seems impossible to prioritize? You know you should do it, but literally everything else crowds it out? Or, by the time you have a second to yourself, you’re simply too tired and have no exercise motivation?
The truth is that motivation ebbs and flows, and it’s natural to have seasons where consistent exercise feels harder to achieve (or unappealing to do even if you technically have the time). This can happen for many reasons, like a busy month at work or a stressful transition in life.
Of course, when it comes to sustained low motivation, it’s also smart to check in with physical causes of low energy. For example, sleep disruptions, hormone fluctuations, and insufficient calories (among other things) can all profoundly impact your zest for exercise.
But if you’re struggling with garden-variety motivation issues, a big part of the problem could be that you’re relying too much on motivation and not enough on habits.
Habits are “motivation put on autopilot.” Routines sustain us through less-motivated periods without having to lean heavily on willpower.
It’s all about rewiring your brain through repeated action – what takes focus and intention now will be automatic and effortless later.
This is important for behaviors like movement, because the benefits of consistent exercise are indisputable – boosted mental health, improved physical health, better weight management, and more resilient aging, just to name a few! By putting habits into place instead of relying on feelings, the magic is that doing something we feel “unmotivated” to do can actually improve our actual motivation!
Action often causes changes in feeling, rather than the other way around!
But it’s not just about repetition – there are some “hacks” to achieving and maintaining higher levels of motivation. You have to work with your psychology, however, instead of trying to fight against yourself and your natural tendencies.
Here are my 10 top strategies for hitting reset on your exercise motivation. You may not be familiar with some of these concepts – pick a few to try out!
10 Tips for Rewiring Your Brain for High Exercise Motivation
Tip #1: Positive habits are easier to build than “negative” habits
It’s easier to start something than to stop something. For example, instead of focusing (negatively) on quitting oversleeping, plan (positively) instead on getting to the gym by 6 AM daily.
By the way, this positive vs. negative aspect of habit change is even more powerful when it comes to nutrition – it is easier to add protein than it is to take away sugar, for example.
Choose your goals mindfully – what do you want to add to your life? Focus more on increasing than on reducing.
Tip #2: Cues are essential for habits
Habits don’t come out of the blue – they’re often “cued” by a preceding event. Empower yourself and choose the “triggers” that will prompt your habit response (i.e., exercising consistently after morning coffee, then coffee starts to become associated with “it’s time to exercise”). Putting your routines in a particular repetitive order helps to strengthen habits and your exercise motivation – this is called a “habit loop” and has been written about by Atomic Habits author James Clear and The Power of Habit author Charles Duhigg.
Again, this is very easy to notice when it comes to quitting a habit, because the triggers become glaringly obvious – you reach for an afternoon snack after a stressful conversation with your boss, for example.
Take charge of your cues, and plan your routines so that they became a cascade of automatic behaviors in a way that makes sense in your individual lifestyle. Cues make “motivation” and subjective feelings less essential.
Tip #3: Environment matters
In terms of habit resilience, environment is incredibly powerful. “Environment” could mean your kitchen, your workspace, your bedroom, your home gym, etc. Environment could even mean how close (or how far away) your gym is, or how early it opens or late it stays open. Environment can also include basic habit tips like putting out your exercise clothes the night before (which I do myself, even though I’m a very “motivated” exerciser overall).
Cues and environment tend to go together – think about how you can tailor your environment to promote success with the behaviors where you want to feel more motivated. Make it easy – I promise you will feel more motivated when your environment is supportive of the behavior changes you’re trying to make stick.
Tip #4: Habits benefit from “pairing”
“Cuing” means that one behavior comes after another, getting “triggered” by the first behavior. “Pairing,” on the other hand, means that you combine two habits into one (and I love the way Gretchen Rubin writes about this). With pairing, you especially focus on how you can make the less-desired behavior (i.e., exercise) more intrinsically enjoyable. For example, you could watch Netflix while treadmill running or listen to your favorite podcast or music while lifting weights. You’re doing two things at the same time, so that they both become associated with fun, enjoyment, relaxation, or “me time.”
An example of strong pairing that often presents a problem is watching TV while eating snacks at night. The two become associated, and it becomes a harder behavior to change (if needed).
Make pairing work for you! I often recommend that clients choose a “guilty pleasure” activity to go with exercise – watching a show their spouse doesn’t enjoy, or indulging in music that they can’t blare with their kids in the car. The more you pair it up, the more exercise becomes associated with it, and the more you crave exercise as part of enjoying the associated behavior. It’s a motivation recipe!
Tip #5: Avoid putting exercise last
Sounds obvious, I know, but hear me out…
Routines benefit from being in the right order – some tasks tend to be more open-ended and are like a magic cup that keep refilling as you empty it. E-mail, Slack, and housework tend to be like this – no matter how much you do, there’s always something else to do. If exercise gets consistently pushed to the end of a to-do list (“I’ll do this when I finish __________”), good intentions may not suffice to actually get there.
Open-ended, undefined, “unfinishable” tasks often push exercise right out of the schedule, because exercise doesn’t need to get done, but the other responsible behaviors do, and tend to be more time sensitive.
This is classic Stephen Covey “4 Quadrants” territory – many housework and computer work to-do items are “urgent but not important,” while exercise is “important but not urgent.” Sorting out the order of your routine to put important things first (even if they’re not urgent) can be game-changing.
This doesn’t mean that exercise doesn’t need to be in the morning – although many people find that (for them) this is what it means. Instead, it means that exercise needs to be at the beginning of the chain. This chain of routine might start after work, or it might start after your kids go to bed.
In other words, if exercise is at the end of the list, it probably won’t get done. But if wrapping up your work e-mails is at the end of your list, it probably will get done, because you’ll stay up late to do it.
Tip #6: Focus on “keystone habits”
This is another concept from habit giants James Clear and Charles Duhigg. What habits positively influence other habits? What behaviors tend to trickle down to other areas of life, making you perform and feel better overall? Focus on those habits.
For example, morning exercise can kickstart a positive cascade of behaviors for an entire day because of how it sets the tone. Whether it’s a morning walk, a tough HIIT class, or a solo run, the exercise becomes the “setting event” for the entire day, influencing how you eat, how you feel about yourself, and even how you go to bed that night.
On the flipside, paying attention to your nightly bedtime routine is another example of a keystone habit. When people sleep irregularly or not enough, it has a powerful effect on their exercise motivation, mental health, and food cravings. When people sleep sufficiently and roughly at the same time each night, they are sharper, more energized, and more in control of themselves.
Instead of trying to improve every aspect of your life at the same time, zero in on the habits that set a positive cycle in motion. The result is that you feel more motivated overall, because you get hooked on the positive results of your “keystone habits.”
Tip #7: Game-ify it
Gamification can look different for different people, but the idea is to compete with yourself or others to make exercise more fun, meaningful, or – yes – even addictive!
For example, “big goals” make small routines make more sense in the big picture. Signing up for a 5K makes the morning runs (or agonizing speed runs) feel more “worth it.” Challenging your friends to take 50,000 steps in one month gives you a kick to take those extra after-dinner walks that are good for your health. Competing with your spouse for who completes the most workouts in 30 days can make you feel more “motivated” to hit the gym when you otherwise wouldn’t.
Gamification builds in natural “reward” (as well as social connection, usually), and reward is a complex but very satisfying part of making habits. In the best case scenario, a fun goal or competition causes you to follow through with a behavior so many times that it becomes more automatic, so that after a certain amount of time, you don’t need the reward anymore, because “motivation” has become more automatic and intrinsic.
Tip #8: Be patient – it might take more than 21 days
21 days is a glib recommendation for habit formation, but research actually shows that habits take about 10 weeks to firm up, depending on the complexity of the habit and how often you repeat it.
We make habits extremely quickly when we do them several times a day and always in the same order. When we renovated our house, we moved the toilet paper holder from one side of the toilet to the other side. It only (“only”) took me about six days to stop reaching for the wrong side, which was just a blank wall. That was a fast habit change!
Exercise, on the other hand, is a more complex habit that doesn’t benefit from that kind of intense repetition. Something you only do once per day (and is more effortful) may take longer to “stick,” but it does happen if you keep doing it. Just be patient.
But this leads to me to my next point…
Tip #9: Habits are more easily made when they’re repeated often, in the same place at the same time
Want to fast-track the previous tip, and make a habit faster? Do it more often, in the same way, at the same place, at the same time, every single time (or as often as possible). Our brains love this consistency, and you will make a habit much faster if you do it this way.
When someone is struggling with exercise consistency or motivation, the mainstream advice (coming from a place of encouraging self-compassion) is to lower the bar. “Don’t focus on exercising seven days a week! Just do it once a week, and once is better than none.”
I would take the spirit of this advice, but change the specifics (and many of my clients will recognize this from our sessions): if you’re struggling with consistency, don’t do exercise less often… but do it for less time and with less challenge.
In other words, don’t back off if you’re struggling with consistency. Lean in. But lower your expectations for yourself. Go every day, but go for 30 minutes instead of an hour. Go every day, but do two sets of everything instead of three. Go every day, but use more moderate weights (or running speeds, or whatever) than you feel like you “should” to get a good workout.
We need the repetition and consistency to encourage the habit formation itself – this will transform your motivation! Focus on “going through the motions,” and eventually the motivation (and exercise performance) will catch up.
Tip #10: Focus on accumulation, not on streaks
Streaks (i.e., “I exercised 20 days in a row!) are easy to keep track of… but they’re also easily broken. And, unfortunately, they tend to stay broken once the streak has ended. Accumulation gets real results, largely because it is more realistic and resilient.
For habit formation, it doesn’t matter if you miss one or two days here and there. This concept is simple, but can feel difficult to embrace if you identify as a perfectionist.
So instead of counting up your consecutive days of adherence, count the total number of days of adherence within a particular time frame. For example, while working out 20 days in a row is pleasing to the ego and possibly the start of good momentum, it isn’t so great if it ends and doesn’t pick back up, so that you only exercised 20 days out of 60. On the other hand, even if you miss a workout here or there, exercising 50 days out of 60 (with more even distribution) is a lot better.
In my work with my clients, I look at their monthly calendar of “check marks” to see what percentage of their month was adherent overall. Generally 80-90%+ is going to be very favorable to good results, but it doesn’t matter when the workouts happened or if days were missed here or there. These are the clients who get the best results, and end up feeling the most “motivated” about exercise!
Which of these 10 motivation and habit tips was the biggest revelation to you – or which one speaks to you the most? Which few are you going to try out?
