Life Goals Health and Fitness

In the last blog we spoke about existentialism; the meaning of life and how we define many aspects of our own life. In this blog we will discuss how existentialism helps define motivation and behaviour. But first we need to understand two things; that many of our behaviours are sub-conscious and secondly that we learn many of our behaviours. Further, we can sub-consciously learn behaviours and enact these behaviours. To create an example, young girls learn that  females use makeup; girls might have to learn how and what makeup to use but rarely do young girls make a conscious decision about wearing makeup. In fact a lot of what we do each day is a matter of automatic programming and happens sub-consciously. A human operating on automatic pilot is not always a bad thing, if we had to consciously think about our every action we would not be able cope.

So how does this affect our health and fitness? Once we create a definition of ourselves that definition becomes part of our personality and it is very hard to change that definition. To use the example above, most women would find it difficult to not wear makeup; the term “difficult” needs to be explained. People will go to extraordinary lengths to maintain their definition of themselves and as some of our behaviour is subconscious we don’t even realise what we are doing. Hence some of the behaviours we use to protect our definition of ourselves appear to lag logic. The first is denial; we can simply deny the facts. So, a health example might be that we refuse to accept that we have put on a bit of weight or that we might not be as fit as we could be. As we put on weight or lose fitness incrementally denial is a tailor made excuse mechanism.

A more insidious form of defence is sublimation, where we convert a negative into a positive. So, someone who lacks confidence or needs constant attention might act out as being as quite outgoing, even outrageously so. Often people who are unfit will make jokes about themselves, they might brag about how many beers they can drink. Hence, the behaviour becomes central to our personality. Fortunately once people understand what is going on they can change their behaviour. A very successful strategy is find behaviour and attitudes which are more pleasing and adds to our lives. A realistic example is someone who is always trying to impress other people, telling other people all the extraordinary thing they have done; a much better strategy is to talk to people about what the other person has done.

At an even more detrimental level is self sabotage. People actually sabotage their own efforts to get fit and there are several reasons, but we will just go into two. People become very attached to their perceptions of themselves, they feel that if they change their whole life will collapse and that up to date their whole would have been a lie if they change. Example, someone is overweight and makes excuses for being overweight, let’s say the whole family is overweight, if that person then loses weight the excuses that they have used for so long are no longer valid. People don’t want their excuses to be shown to be false, and they don’t want to accept that for all those years they could have had a normal weight. Seems strange, but many of these processes go on at a sub-conscious level.

Stepping it up again, self sabotage is often related to “fear of failure”. Again these processes go on sub-consciously, a person is so afraid of failing that they set up excuses beforehand. People might set unrealistic goals for themselves to begin with so that when the project fails they can blame the goals rather than their efforts. People might have difficulty starting a project, they procrastinate; the procrastination is all about being worried that they will fail. Fear of failure is a difficult thing to combat on your own and you might need some help. In all the above situation the goal is to preserve the status quo. Life goals that would drive us forward and improve our life have been sublimated with barriers.

Of course people should not talk themselves into a psychological condition that they do not have. Often people eat ice cream when they are trying to lose weight, because ice cream tastes nice.

However the start to deal with all these problems is action. Set small, even trivial goals, but keep lifting the bar. Breaking tasks into time intervals helps some people. So instead of setting a goal of running 5 kms, set a goal of running for a minute walking for two minutes, and then increase this to running for one minute, fifteen seconds etc. I know this blog is headed life goals but the first thing is action. Once you are moving then we can talk about life goals and that is what we will be doing in the next blog.