Book summary: No Sweat - Science of motivation, Michelle Segar, PhD
Your beliefs become your thoughts,
Your thoughts become your words,
Your words become your actions,
Your actions become your habits,
Your habits become your values,
Your values become your destiny.
-Mahatma Gandi
What sustains us, we sustain.
I have always been fascinated by what makes people tick and enjoy reading a lot about psychology. This was a great book on a research-based motivational program to achieve a lifetime of fitness. No Sweat is written for individuals looking for real and sustainable ways to feel better, live better, and become happier, healthier, and fit. It’s a pretty simple concept of taking any and every opportunity to move, in any way possible, at what-ever speed you like, for any amount of time. Do what makes you feel good; stop doing what makes you feel bad. It requires you to start on a journey to a new way of thinking about things. That requires the right map - or in this case, MAPS (meaning, awareness, permission, and strategy).
Takeaways:
Meaning - your meaning for exercise and eating right creates your relationship with your approach to health and wellness.
You develop your Meanings for things over your entire lifetime.
*If you want to change your relationship with being physically active and eating right, the starting place is understanding and changing your meaning of it.
Changing your Meaning for exercise can help you take ownership of it and feel more in control of your physical activity choices.
What does the word “exercise” mean to you? Does it have positive or negative connotations? Do you choose exercise for the wrong reasons? Is exercise a chore or a gift? How do you escape the vicious cycle of failure?
Awareness - Being physically active in ways that feel bad to you turns your Meaning into a “chore”.
How do I feel while I exercise?
Research shows that when you choose to make movement a regular part of your life for personally compelling reasons and choose to move in ways that feel good for you, you are more likely to stick with exercise and to maintain weight loss.
People tend to approach things that feel good and avoid things that feel bad.
Inactive time undermines cardiovascular and metabolic health and is as serious a health hazard as smoking.
You can accumulate exercise, do it at lower intensities, and count life-centered activities like housework and gardening. The key is just to remain as active as possible throughout the day.
It’s important to have realistic expectations.
An important step toward embracing movement in your life is to simply to become aware that your choices about how you move through your day are truly your choices.
“To be healthy” tends to be the Wrong Why for many people because it is too abstract and doesn’t provide the immediate feedback we need to keep striving toward it. People are more motivated by immediate results than future rewards.
Reward substitution - replacing a future reward with something positive that you can experience immediately - converts behavior from a chore into a gift you want to give yourself.
Permission - Giving yourself Permission to prioritize your own-selfcare is the key to make regular physical activity a reality.
The more energy you give to caring for yourself, the more energy you have to give to fuel what matters most in your life.
When you spend time in activities that are meaningful and generate positive emotions and experiences, it increases meaning, resilience and well-being.
Your self-care mindset (your deep-seated beliefs about your priorities and the value of self-care) can prevent you from believing that your own self-care and sense of well-being belong at the top of your priority list.
Caretakeitis - feeling overwhelmed, exhausted, and fatalistic about the possibility of ever changing anything or having enough time - results from allowing your endless should tasks to take priority over your own self-care needs. Caretakitis keeps you depleted.
When you tune out everyday messages from your body and don’t take care of yourself in basic ways like getting enough sleep or exercising, you put yourself on a path of unhappiness, low productivity, and even serious physical and emotional issues.
Understand your own self-care hierarchy and what your foundational, non negotiable behavior is.
In order to integrate self-care into your life, it needs to feel compelling and play a meaningful role in your daily life. Try to consider your own self-care and well-being one of your top personal projects.
*If you don’t take care of yourself, no one else is going to do it for you.
“What sustains us, we sustain” - The sustainable cycle of self-care begins when you choose a self-care behavior to help you with being who you are and to fuel what matters most.
Strategy - If creating lifelong behavior is your goal, your focus should be on learning how physical activity can fit and stay in your busy life.
Feeling positive and energetic gives you more energy for what you care about most.
When your objective is to maintain consistent physical movement for a lifetime, you need to appreciate that you are in an actual learning process and become comfortable using Strategies that will help you find ways to be resilient and successful in the face of challenges.
Having a learning mindset and goals will lead you to intrinsic motivation, persistence, and resilience so you can better sustain your behavioral and well-being aims.
The Strategy of beginning with the end in mind asks you to take the long view. When you want to stick with something for life, you start asking different questions and looking for more in return.
Feeling positive and energetic gives you more energy for what you care most about.
Learning how to integrate physical activity within your daily life is a process that will help you develop the beliefs, insights, self-awareness, drive, personal responsibility and negotiation skills necessary for you to sustain a physically active life and enjoy living the fullest.
When your behavior aims to achieve something meaningful. You want to protect it from its challenges.
Become your own skilled self-care negotiator. 10 Negotiation strategies…
Give physical activity clout. Understand the specific value that movement brings to your daily life.
What type of physical activities will help you realize the benefits you want? When will you do them? For how long? Where?
Confront challenges, not roadblocks. Responding to each challenge mindfully, without added angst, provides valuable information about the sorts of things that can get in the way of maintaining your physical activity and how you can deal with them now and in the future.
Bring friends and family on board.
Use if-then planning. The specific back-up plan and alternatives you make helps you overcome the challenges that will arise in your plans.
Dance with your challenges, be flexible, and improvise.
Hesitate before you respond to a request.
Listen to your body’s messages. Forcing your body to do something its not up for sends the message “chore”. If you force yourself to exercise in ways that feel bad, you’ll likely choose not to move at all.
Learn the links between being physically active and the rest of your day. Identify the links between not moving and moving and how you feel. Notice how your choices influence your physical and mental states and how that further influences what matters most.
Evaluate and recalibrate with compassion and non-judgement. This allows you to celebrate your successes and become more mindful of what gets in your way so you can become skilled in preventing and overcoming these challenges.
~Thea