Originally posted at: http://www.nerdfitness.com/

A few weeks ago, I got a parking ticket.

I went to meet up with a group of friends at a bar in Nashville, and forgot to pay the $5 for parking at the parking terminal on my way in. After about 45 minutes, while sitting in the restaurant, I remembered.

Oh crap.

I ran out to my car, and sure enough, right there tucked under my windshield wiper was a small manilla envelope.

I sheepishly grabbed it, and saw a fine for $70 plus a processing fee.

My $7 hazy IPA suddenly got a lot more expensive.

I was also having a crap day.

So how did I respond?

I laughed.

Then, I went back into the restaurant and finished hanging out with my friends. Later that night I paid the parking ticket and then transferred the exact amount of the ticket from my “Absent Minded Fund” into my checking account.

(Yes, this used to be called my “idiot fund”, but I’m trying to have a nicer inner critic!)

This is a specific, separate savings account I keep that I contribute a small amount to every month, that is specifically for paying for the occasional mistake that I might make absentmindedly.

Sure, it would be great if I never made absent minded mistakes. And yep, it would be great if some of them were less financially punitive.

But also, this is life. Rather than beating myself up for something I clearly didn’t do on purpose, I can move on with my life.

The important part, just like the ​Ulysses Pact​ I wrote about previously, is that I could weather this storm because of my proactiveness in the past:

Making a decision during a moment of strength, to protect against a future moment of weakness.

I had a lot on my mind that night, and in a moment of weakness, I didn’t pay for parking. But because of Past Steve’s acceptance that “sh** happens!,” this didn’t affect me in the slightest.

And it has me thinking about this in terms of wellness too.

Emergency Workout Fund

I really enjoyed this post from ​Andrew Coates​:

I’ve recently written about what to do when ​you don’t like to work out​. We can help ourselves tremendously if we can make our workouts more physically or emotionally beneficial.

After all, something special can happen when we find ways to work out even on the days when we don’t feel like it.

We can prove to ourselves that we can do hard things. We prove to ourselves that we’re the type of person who can work out even without motivation. There’s a certain sense of pride and accomplishment that comes after too.

And not only that, but in this example, doing a workout when we don’t want to is like putting money into an “Emergency Workout Fund.”

We’re banking extra days off for when we really need them in the future.

I hope this gives you a little bit of a nudge to get that workout in today, even when you don’t feel like it.

Start putting workouts into the Emergency Workout fund! Future You will thank you. I promise.

-Steve

The post Do you have a Workout Emergency Fund? first appeared on Nerd Fitness.

Originally posted at: http://www.nerdfitness.com/

I don’t really like to exercise.

Okay, I kind of like picking up heavy weights and doing handstands.

But I certainly don’t love “cardio.”

Rather than nerd out about biomechanics, I’m more interested in anthropology and human behavior.

Rather than going to run a 5K, I’d rather sit on my couch and play Fallout 4 I (just watched the show, it’s fantastic.)

What I’m trying to say is I’m not a fitness nerd.

I’m a nerd who tries to be fit.

So if you’re somebody who also just doesn’t “like to exercise,” you are in good company.

I also have some amazing news for you.

Back in Time

I recently read ​Exercised​ by Daniel Lieberman, professor of anthropology at Harvard University.

Lieberman has spent large swaths of time studying and living with hunter-gatherer tribes all over the world, including the Tarahumara (who appear in the book Born to Run), the people of Pemja (Kenya), and the Hazda tribe of Tanzania.

Lieberman points out that most studies and research are conducted on very specific, narrow subset of humans:

WEIRD humans!

Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic.

Modern western society only makes up a tiny part of the total human experience.

Homo Sapiens have been around for 150,000-300,000+ years!

So, if our goal is to see “what most humans do,” we need to expand the variety of humans we observe, look way back in time, and observe human behavior outside of modern western culture.

Luckily, Lieberman has done exactly that, living with modern hunter-gatherer tribes and studying ancient cultures:

For generation after generation, our ancestors young and old woke up each morning thankful to be alive and with no choice but to spend several hours walking, digging, and doing other physical activities to survive to the next day.

Sometimes they also played or danced for enjoyment and social reasons.

Otherwise, they generally steered clear of nonessential physical activities that divert energy from the only thing evolution really cares about: reproduction.

For 99.99% of our existence as a species, we needed to conserve energy, not needlessly try and burn extra energy. Whenever we weren’t actively securing our survival, we were resting to conserve energy. This whole modern concept of trying to build excess muscle, or exercising to burn extra calories would be a foreign concept to our ancestors.

Food was always in short supply, which meant every day the bodily cycle for each human has to decide how to use each calorie consumed.

Because we had to burn precious calories to hunt or find our food, needlessly burning excess calories during the rest of the day just doesn’t make any sense to ancient humans, nor to modern hunter-gatherers.

So! Of course…

It makes sense you don’t want to exercise!

As Lieberman points out:

“We never evolved to exercise.

…exercise today is most commonly defined as voluntary physical activity undertaken for the sake of health and fitness.

But as such it is a recent phenomenon…

The mantra of this book is that nothing about the biology of exercise makes sense except in the light of evolution, and nothing about exercise as a behavior makes sense except in the light of anthropology.”

As Lieberman shares in the book, tribes like the Hazda certainly burn more calories than western office-workers, but only because they have to, and not dramatically so: “Typical hunter-gatherers are about as physically active as Americans or Europeans who include about an hour of exercise in their daily routine,” but don’t have abundant access to easily consumable energy the way the rest of us do.

This is where we encounter the “​Evolutionary Mismatch Hypothesis​”:

Differences in stressors between the environment in which humans evolved and the current environment are mismatches that can cause disease.

Up until 10,000 years ago, humans lived a nomadic lifestyle as hunter-gatherers, with different stressors from the ones that people experience nowadays in modern environments.

Note: this is NOT where I’ll tell you to start eating Paleo (​Paleo is a misguided diet​ that works because of math, not “ancestral” reasons).

I’m specifically talking about how our brains and bodies try and function in a modern environment. Edward Wilson said it best: “We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.”

Which means we need to ​start with acceptance​: Rather than beating ourselves up for struggling to build a voluntary exercise habit, we can accept we’re human.

We evolved to survive in scarcity, and now exist in a world of abundance.

Exercise is beneficial AND no longer “necessary”

Exercise is good for us.

Cardio is good for our heart and lungs. Exercise of any type can help create a calorie deficit, and reducing our body fat percentage can help reduce all-cause mortality. Building and maintaining muscle mass and strong bones is critical for our health as we get older. We also feel better after we exercise: thanks dopamine and serotonin and endorphins!

There are literally hundreds of benefits of exercise with regards to our health.

We all know this.

And yet we all think: “I know I should exercise more, but I can’t get myself to do it.”

Let’s set aside the fact right now that we’re all busy as hell, and taking extra time out of our day to exercise is a BIG ask for many (shout out to single parents working multiple jobs!). With that out of the way, why is it so hard for us to build a new exercise habit and stick with it?

Because we’re fighting against biology and our history.

For our day-to-day survival, we don’t need to exercise anymore:

• We used to have to find/hunt our food, now we can hit a button on our phone.
• We used to have to travel by foot everywhere, now we can drive a car.
• We used to have to stay active or die, but we can now survive for a long time even if we’re unhealthy and inactive.

And if exercise is no longer necessary for our survival…

The Only Two Reasons We Exercise

Unless we’re being chased by a wild boar or fell off a boat and need to swim to shore, none of us need to exercise today specifically to survive.

Then why does anybody exercise at all? As Lieberman categorizes it, we exercise for one of two reasons:

• It’s emotionally rewarding
• It’s physically rewarding

We can exercise because it’s emotionally rewarding: We might go for a run because of the dopamine hit, or because we are part of a socially active club. We might strength train because it feels empowering, or because we don’t want to feel lonely or lazy, or because it helps us process our anxiety or depression.

We can exercise because it’s physically rewarding. We might try to get better at pickleball because we’re competitive. Or we might exercise because we want to lose weight and fit into certain sized clothes, or because we don’t want to die of a heart attack at an early age like our dad.

In ALL of the examples above, we’re all having an internal debate with our lazy brains, who would rather conserve energy.

We have to convince ourselves “the benefits of this activity now outweigh the negatives, so I’m willing to take time out of my day to do it!”

Here’s how you can do exactly that.

How to Make Exercise More Rewarding

With “necessity” off the table, we need to find ways to make exercise emotionally rewarding, physically rewarding, or both.

Here are some thoughts to get you started.

Let’s start with making it more emotionally rewarding:

Socializing is a HUGE part of humanity, and includes things like camaraderie, positive social pressure, etc.

• Join a running club where the goal isn’t even “get better at running,” but because it’s your friends.
• Dance classes or martial arts classes in disciplines that seem fun to you.
• A kickball league or pickleball league for your apartment building.

We can also reframe how we think about exercise. Instead of just calories burned, what if we focused your exercise on “This makes me feel better.”

• Listen to your favorite podcasts while working out (​temptation bundling​).
• Treat your daily walk like a walking meditation.
• Running a 5K to raise money for a charitable cause.
• Your Big Why (to be a role model for your kids, to be around for your grandkids).

Can you find ways to make exercise feel physically rewarding? Yep, “look good naked” is still a viable motivator for many. Feel free to keep that as part of your reason for exercise! It’s certainly one of my reasons.

However, for many of our ​coaching clients​, their big shift to sustainable exercise happens when their mentality changes from “How much weight do I need to lose?” to “I wonder what my body is capable of!”

Instead of just weight loss, they have goals like:

• ​Get my first pull-up​
• ​Do a handstand​
• ​Run my first 5K ​

Alternatively, exercise can be physically rewarding when it doesn’t feel like exercise! Dancing, yoga, LARPING, hiking, walking. We’ve even written about ​40 ways to exercise without realizing it​. Movement can be fun.

You may also start to enjoy the physical sensations of exercising and feeling your body move. For many of ​our clients​, focusing on what their body is capable of doing and the feeling of moving their body can completely shift their associations with exercise from noxious to welcoming.

Finally, exercise can be physically rewarding when we find ways to make exercise secretly more “necessary.” Parking at the other end of the parking lot, adopting a cute pup that needs to be walked every day, taking the stairs, walking or biking instead of driving.

It all adds up!

Why I Personally Exercise

This book caused me to reflect on my personal reasons for working out.

I have a single workout folder in Evernote with 1975 notes in it, and my workouts over the last 11 years haven’t changed that much.

How do I get myself to do the same boring workout, 4 times a week, every week, for more than a decade, even though I don’t like to exercise?

It’s combination of all the methods above:

1. Genetic lottery (luck). I exercise because I’ve always exercised. I grew up being active, I played sports, I worked out in college, it’s now just something I do. ​I got lucky​.
2. Working out makes me feel good (emotionally and physically rewarding). When I exercise, I feel like I did something good for myself. Like showering and flossing my teeth, it’s part of my hygiene. I also sleep better and eat better on days when I exercise.
3. Exercise is the path to aesthetic self-confidence (physically rewarding). I might have more fun exercising in other ways, but I know strength training with heavy compound movements helps me look a certain way (like a guy who owns a fitness company)
4. Working out is my podcast-meditative time (emotionally rewarding). I know I have 1 hour where I can’t look at a screen. Which means I can listen to a fun podcast and exercise.
5. I go for meditative walks (emotionally rewarding). When I’m walking I can’t be looking at a screen. I’m also outside. I might listen to a walking meditation, or a podcast, or just force myself to actually be present with my thoughts on walks.
6. Exercise makes me better at golf (emotionally and physically rewarding). I like golf, and I know strength training will make me better at golf. And golf doesn’t feel like exercise, but it gets me out of the house, off my phone, hanging with my friends and walking 5+ miles every time I play.

Remember, it’s okay if you don’t want to exercise.

Exercise is no longer necessary for immediate survival and we didn’t evolve to want to exercise to burn excess calories. This is a modern, mismatched phenomenon.

We’re still monkeys on a rock, built for scarcity, but surrounded by abundance.

So if you can find a way to make exercise more physically rewarding or emotionally rewarding, you’re more likely to turn it into a routine you look forward to, rather than something you have to endure.

Good luck, fellow monkey on a rock!

-Steve

PS: If you hate treadmills, feel free to keep this fact from Exercised in your back pocket:

“Treadmill-like devices were first used by the Romans to turn winches and lift heavy objects, and then modified in 1818 by the Victorian inventor William Cubitt to punish prisoners and prevent idleness.

For more than a century, English convicts (among them Oscar Wilde) were condemned to trudge for hours a day on enormous steplike treadmills.”

The post What to do if you DON’T like to exercise: first appeared on Nerd Fitness.

Originally posted at: http://www.nerdfitness.com/

Today I’m going to teach you a valuable lesson about time from a giant tree.

No, not Groot.

Redwoods.

If you drive down the Avenue of the Giants in Northern California, you’ll find yourself weaving in and out of some of the most majestic, gigantic redwood trees you’ll ever see.

If you’re having trouble picturing this in your mind, think back to the Endor speeder chase scene in The Return of the Jedi. This scene was filmed near the Avenue of the Giants in Humboldt Redwoods State Park.

And as you’re driving down the Avenue of the Giants, you’ll eventually stop at a nondescript gift shop along the side of the road, and this is where things get even crazier.

You’ll encounter a slice of a redwood tree standing on its side. This tree has a diameter of nine feet and was over 300 feet tall at the time of its felling, the length of a football field.

The first observation you’d make: “Sweet sassy molassy, this tree is gigantic.”

The next jaw dropping moment happens when you get closer and notice its concentric rings. As we all learned in grade school biology class, the rings of a tree can tell us the tree’s age: each ring represents a year and tells a story.

This is where the fun happens.

Scattered across this dissection of the tree are little name tags, identifying key moments in history, starting in the center and working its way outward. Photo here from ​Barry Swackhamer​:

1000AD: “Vikings Discover America.”

1096AD: “Oxford University Founded.”

1218AD: “Genghis Khan conquers Persia.”

This head-exploding trip through history continues, from the Ming Dynasty to the Renaissance to the Printing Press, Cortez conquering the Aztecs, Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, Boston Tea Party, and so on, to the founding of the California National Parks System in 1927, and beyond.

Here you can see the entirety of modern history, separated by a few feet within tiny concentric rings inside a 1000+ year old tree.

It’s wild that from the perspective of a tree, just a few feet (1 meter) separate “Vikings reaching America,” and modern life 1000+ years later. Zoomed out, it’s wild to see how insignificant this time gap is:

Which brings me to today’s point.

We’ve got time wrong.

We humans are really good at worrying about what we can get accomplished today, what we ate for ONE meal, what’s important this week, or how much we can change in a month.

From the perspective of a 1000 year old tree, these time frames are comically short and insignificant.

If trees could laugh (like the Ents of Fangorn Forest), they would laugh at us.

This realization had me thinking about time and how to reframe the timeline on which I think about stuff.

As I talked about in a recent newsletter about the ​additive method for habit building​, I’m in the process of building a meditation habit.

And as I was reading Jon Kabat-Zinn’s book ​Wherever you Go, There You Are​, and this quote rattled my brain:

“It may take some time for concentration and mindfulness to become strong enough to hold such a wide range of objects in awareness without getting lost in them or attached to particular ones, or simply overwhelmed.

For most of us, it takes years and depends a good deal on your motivation and the intensity of your practice. So, at the beginning, you might want to stay with the breath, or use it as an anchor to bring you back when you are carried away.

Try it for a few years and see what happens.“

That final sentence completely shifted my expectations.

In the past, I would think “if I could just meditate for 30 days straight, THEN I’ll be really good at mindfulness”

This quote helped me realize I was thinking about this all wrong. I wasn’t going to have some magical epiphany when I reached enlightenment. I wasn’t going to “get there” in weeks or months. Instead, the only goal was to set aside time to sit with my awkward brain and focus on my breath. That’s it.

Suddenly, “trying it for a few years” had me thinking about this completely differently.

Here’s why this is important.

Extend your time horizon

Here are two of my favorite quotes about time:

Bill Gates: “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.”

Daniel Hofstadter: “Hofstadter’s Law dictates it will always take longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”

Everybody is in such a rush to see how many weeks or months it will take to get in shape. Or how long they need to go on a diet to lose the weight, and then they can go back to “normal eating.”

Reality plays out differently: things will always take longer than we want, so we should change how we think about it.

Instead of “how fast can I get there,” we should be thinking “what’s the least amount of work I can do today, to help me be in better shape a year from now?”

If we change our time horizon, paradoxically we often end up making more progress, more permanently.

If everything takes longer than expected, then we should probably pick reasonable goals, sustainable routines, and enjoyable activities that we won’t mind doing for a much longer period of time.

We talk about this a lot with our ​coaching clients​.

I even made this video a number of years ago: “​Think in terms of days and years, not weeks and months.​”

Here’s one final helpful reframing of time horizons:

Whenever I’m finding myself overwhelmed with making a certain decision…I ask myself “Will this matter 6 months from now? A year from now? A decade from now?” By extending my time horizon, it often helps me realize that the thing I’m agonizing over doesn’t matter nearly as much.

What’s one area of your life that you’re thinking about on a short term time scale, that would benefit from thinking on a far longer horizon?

• A short term crash diet, vs. long term reevaluation of your relationship with food
• An unsustainable workout program vs building a daily habit of movement.
• Agonizing over small decisions that won’t matter a month from now, let alone a year from now.

Extend your timeframe, and see if that changes how you think about things.

-Steve

The post What we get wrong about time first appeared on Nerd Fitness.

Originally posted at: http://www.nerdfitness.com/

Last week, I downloaded a new video game to play.

And 30 minutes later, I uninstalled the game. Not because I didn’t like the game, but specifically because I liked the game too much. The game is called Dave the Diver, where you are a SCUBA Diver/Sushi restaurant owner. You spend each day diving and catching fish, and then each evening serving sushi at the restaurant.

This game pressed every biological button my brain has for “efficiency.”

My brain told me I had to execute each dive as efficiently as possible. Each night at the restaurant meant I needed to receive a 100% customer satisfaction rating.

Of course, nothing would happen if I didn’t.

But this game + my brain equaled a recipe for addictive disaster. After 30 minutes I knew if I didn’t delete it, I would spend every possible minute playing the game, and every minute not playing would be spent thinking about how to get more efficient at the game.

Because I’m in the middle of writing a secret-book-shaped-project that I can’t talk about… I knew I needed to save Future Steve.

In other words, it was time to channel an ancient strategy for survival:

A “Ulysses Pact.”

What is a Ulysses Pact?

In Homer’s Odyssey, Ulysses (also known as “Odysseus”) is about to sail past a dangerous island of Sirens who sing beautiful music. This music is so beautiful that anybody who hears it loses all control, and will sail toward the island, crashing their boat on the rocks surrounding the island.

Luckily, our boy Uylsses has been advised by the witch Circe on the only way he and his men can survive. In Madelline Miller’s ​Circe​, she recounts the advice Circe gives the captain:

“[For] the Sirens, there you may use your tricks. Fill your men’s ears with wax, and leave your own free. If you tie yourself to the mast, you may be the first man to ever hear their song and tell the tale.”

As author Corey Doctorow points out in ​a recent newsletter​:

“Ulysses was strong enough to know that he would someday be weak. He expressed his strength by guarding against his weakness.

“When you take some possibility off the table during a moment of strength in recognition of some coming moment of weakness.”

In other words, sometimes giving up on yourself is the most courageous thing you can do. It asks you to accept your weaknesses, and make a strategic pre-planned decision to protect against them.

Ulysses Pacts In My Life

I am a comical disaster trapped in the body of an adult who pretends to be a functioning member of society. I am also my own boss, completely in control of my time. Yikes.

I struggle with impulse control. There are certain experiences that I am just incapable of doing “a little bit.” I also know that once I start an enjoyable activity, it will take over.

Which means it’s practically impossible for me to only do some things “just a little bit” and then say “okay that’s enough for today.”

After all, I know my brain isn’t equipped to handle the life of abundance we’re surrounded with: endless distraction, hedonistic enjoyment, unlimited food, etc.

E.O. Wilson said it best:

“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.”

Rather than lament my lack of willpower when it comes to addictive technology, I ​practice acceptance​ and instead make willpower unnecessary.

Thus, my life is held together with spit, duct tape, and Ulysses Pacts:

• I have an app on my phone called Opal. It automatically activates at 7AM and blocks certain apps, websites, and all social media for most of the hours of the work day. I still pick up my phone 10-20 times per day and try to open those apps, and then I’m reminded to get back to work.
• I use a program on my computer called Focus. It automatically activates at 7AM and blocks practically ANYTHING fun or distracting on my computer until the end of the work day.
• I don’t keep snacks in my house. I love snacks. And once a bag is open, it gets eaten. But when I’m sitting on the couch watching TV (I just finished Fallout and loved it), and I’m craving a snack, there’s no decision to be made. I’m certainly not going to drive to the store.
• I don’t have any games on my phone. I know that I can’t control any impulses, especially for “gatcha” free games that encourage you to buy gems to level up.
• I am locked out of each social media app after 15 minutes every day. Social Media has been designed by behavioral scientists, with billions of dollars, to be as addictive as possible. So I don’t try to “use it just a little bit.” I simply don’t let myself use it for any longer than “a little bit” because I’m literally locked out.
• I don’t play multiplayer games. I have no regulation around “okay I’m done,” so I no longer play multiplayer games. I bet if I played World of Warcraft, you would never get another newsletter from me. Thus, I exclusively play single player games with a story or narrative.
• I automatically donate to two charities every month: ProPublica investigative journalism and the Nashville Food Kitchen. Both of these decisions were made ONCE, which means I never have to remember to donate, nor am I tempted to spend the money once it hits my account.
• Whenever I go to the doctor, dermatologist, or dentist, I always schedule my next appointment while I’m there. Because I know I’ll forget to do so months later, or I’ll tell myself I don’t need to go. Future Steve will not want to get his teeth cleaned or get bloodwork done.
• My workouts are pre-scheduled in my calendar. I would much rather not work out, but I know if I don’t plan for them in my calendar, something else far more fun (but less beneficial) will take their place.

The only reason you get this newsletter every week, and the only reason I get to the gym a few times per week (in addition to ​winning the genetic and environmental lottery​), is because of these Ulysses Pacts.

Here’s how you can use them in your own life.

You-lysses Pacts in Action

Returning to Corey Doctorow:

“Ulysses pacts aren’t perfect, but they are very important. At the very least, creating a Ulysses pact starts with acknowledging that you are fallible. That you can be tempted, and rationalize your way into taking bad action, even when you know better.

Becoming an adult is a process of learning that your strength comes from seeing your weaknesses and protecting yourself and the people who trust you from them.”

Let’s see how we can add some Ulysses Pacts to your life.

To create your own Ulysses Pact: look for opportunities to make a decision TODAY in a moment of strength, to safeguard yourself against an anticipated moment of weakness TOMORROW.

Even better, look for opportunities to make a decision once, and it prevents you from needing to use willpower to repeatedly do the right thing in the future.

A few more examples:

• Decide to not keep problematic foods in the house once, and you don’t have to spend all night, every night, deciding NOT to eat those foods.
• Decide to automatically donate to a cause you love once, and you don’t have to remember to not spend that money on something else and donate each month.
• Delete and/or block social media and time-wasting games on your phone once, and suddenly the decision to read a book or go for a walk rather than mindlessly scroll through TikTok or Instagram becomes much easier.

Remember, acknowledging and creating safeguards against our weaknesses isn’t a sign of giving up or weakness.

It’s a courageous sign of acceptance.

It’s also smart.

What are the Ulysses Pacts you use in your own life? Did this article inspire you to create one for yourself?

Reach out and let me know!

-Steve

The post Ulysses Pacts: STOP believing in yourself first appeared on Nerd Fitness.