As you may know from interacting with me or from earlier posts, I am not an athletic person, and generally have had trouble keeping up an exercise routine. Sometimes, I can mitigate this by having an “easy fallback exercise,” but not always. I often grow bored, or I have “more urgent things to do,” or I “just don’t feel like it.”
I simply accept those feelings. At the end of the day, there is only one reason why I exercise: because I want to.
If this sounds unsustainable, I agree—at one time, it would have been. I had to learn that every other reason to exercise simply didn’t work for me, then learn to accept that there was a want to exercise that I’d been smothering before. For me, the key was digging out that want and learning to identify and acknowledge it.
Routine
Routine is often cited as something that can help people break out of depression, and I know people who find that helpful. If that helps you, then great! I’m not one such person. The process of creating a routine can help me, and make me feel energetic and engaged.
But the moment that routine is established and I no longer have to think about it, I slip back into depression frighteningly rapidly. I grow disengaged and apathetic, not only with regards to the exercise and other routines, but with regards to everything.
Some of my worst slides into a depressive episode have occurred because I was leaning too heavily on a routine.
There are More Urgent Things to Do
Of course, exercise is as much a priority as food, and I try to treat it as such. However, when I’m facing some deadline, or swamped with work that I just want to power through, there are times when it’s completely unhelpful to try to back out of that to do exercise.
If I feel the urge, it’s something I try to seize upon. But in the absence of that urge, again, I’ve found that forcing myself away from the seemingly “more urgent” work into exercise doesn’t accomplish much. This generally leaves me a little more tired and annoyed than before.
Not Feeling Like Exercising
Sometimes, for no particular reason—or for paper-thin reasons that feel super important even though I logically know they shouldn’t be—I just don’t feel like exercising. This is grayer ground than the previous two instances. Obviously, it would be ideal if I could create a system: “Oh well, I’ve exercised X many times this week, I guess I don’t have to today” or “Well, I don’t want to, but I’ve only exercised X many times this week so I should do it anyway.”
But that comes too close to a routine, for me. So I play it by ear. This means that there are times when I don’t exercise for weeks at a time.
And that’s okay. I try to keep the no-exercise stretches from becoming too long, but I also don’t try to force myself if I’m struggling to find the will.
If I’m having trouble breaking out of this headspace, it helps me to have a workout buddy (whether in person or remotely) to ensure that the exercise doesn’t completely fall off my list of priorities.
But if I feel too swamped to exercise properly for a week or two, I don’t let myself feel guilty about it. That guilt can become an unshakable tumor that makes it increasingly difficult to find the want to exercise at all. So I see keeping up regular exercise as desirable, but ultimately not worth stressing about.
What is Wanting to Exercise?
For me, it took years to find that nugget of wanting to exercise, and to learn to listen to it.
It’s not like craving a food or a book I love. It’s an ache in my muscles that comes up when they haven’t been stretched sufficiently in awhile; or a heaviness that I feel in my body. Oddly, I’ve found that if I exercise less, I crave sugar more; and as I eat more sugar, I feel heavier and more tired. One round of exercise in the middle of such a cycle can leave me feeling amazingly refreshed and happier than I’ve felt in days or weeks.
In a way, this want is a retroactive one: a thing I don’t necessarily feel so strongly before I exercise, but the moment I do something to break through a behavioral cycle that wasn’t helping me, I feel such joy and relaxation that I’ve come to expect that. And that expectation feeds into the wanting to exercise.
What Do I Do When I Don’t Feel the Want at All?
All of this said, I usually don’t let myself do no exercise at all for weeks on end. Usually, even if I can’t find the urge to exercise properly, I can find the will to do ten minutes of yoga, or five to ten minutes of ab exercises, or maybe even just sixty seconds of planking.
This might not seem like much, but it keeps me from falling completely into a rut that I’d have to struggle to get out of. It keeps my muscles engaged just enough that when I want to go on a proper jog or do a proper round of yoga, my body isn’t that shocked.
This is a series about how I deal with chronic depression through life management. Please click here for more about why I do this series.