The Process of Putting Yourself First

Kate (not a real name, just an amalgamation of hundreds of stories I have heard) was on a third follow-up call with me. She just couldn’t find a way to get herself into an exercise routine. She had the time, the equipment, a plan, and she was physically capable of following a routine, but when the time came around to execute, there was a mental block.

I asked her to elaborate. I asked her to tell me the story her brain tells her. She explained that when the time came around to exercise, she would look around the house at all the things she would need to do. So she would take care of that first. I asked her to describe the emotion she felt surrounding exercising when she believed all the other things in the house needed to get done.

“Guilt,” she said.

And therein lies the theme that holds many people back from spending time to take care of themselves. I work in exercise promotion. Something that requires less than 30 minutes per day to extend the quality and quantity of your life. Something that will prevent chronic disease and improve mental health. Something that will boost your confidence and something that you can form strong social connections over.

So why do we feel guilty about taking 30 minutes for ourselves?

Only you can answer that because your situation is unique to you, but often, it boils down to past learned behavior through experience. This past experience leads to standards and then to identity. If these past standards include taking care of everyone else before you and an identity as a caregiver, behaving incongruently with this identity causes discomfort—perhaps in the form of guilt.

In this case, maybe you learned as a child that you needed to do all your chores first and all the work around the house. You learned that exercise was a luxury. Maybe you were scolded for playing when you should have been doing chores. An association begins to form.

Think about your own situation. Maybe you have tried to exercise, but when the time comes around, your brain tells you a story. A story that, in its essence, reads like this: "Everything else is a priority before me."

If this describes you, I want to take you through an exercise (not an actual exercise).

First, a concept. There are two different types of motivation: reflective motivation and automatic motivation. I won’t bog you down in these concepts, but reflective motivation is logical. You know exercise is good for you so you have good intentions to do it. Automatic motivation is emotional. It's based on feelings.

Right now, if you want to exercise but struggle to do it, you have a conflict between reflective motivation and automatic motivation. You’re fused to a feeling, which leads to a thought, which leads to a conflict between your good intentions and actions.

I am going to work you through the processes of unfusing (or dislodging, some word like that) the thoughts and feelings that hold you back. This concept has a name: "workability."

First, I want you to think about why you want to exercise. But we need to move past the simple, "I want to be healthier." What is exercise in service of? What will you get out of it? I could type up an explainer here but honestly nothing demonstrates this concept in relation to exercise better than this video, so please take three minutes to watch it.

Ask yourself, what is your emotional connection to change and verbalize what you will get out of it.

Now, I want you to write out the story your brain tells you when the opportunity to exercise presents itself. Then, I want you to write down the feeling you have when you think about exercising instead of doing what your brain tells you to do. Maybe you said, "My ultimate goal is to be able to be physically capable of playing with my grandchildren but the emotion associated with it is guilt."

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Workability involves asking yourself one question: “If I let these thoughts and feelings guide my behavior, will it help me achieve my ultimate goal?” If not, the thought is considered unworkable, and we must, therefore, reject it from guiding our behaviors. It’s not an easy process, but just like how we learned these associations over time, we can unlearn them.

I know the process of putting yourself first may not be easy, but I know from speaking with hundreds of people that it is worth it, and to take that even one step further, you are worth it.