Stop Hitting the Pause Button on Your Life

Tell me if any of these quotes sound familiar….

• “I’ll start eating healthy again after my vacation.”

• “Once this whole COVID situation blows over, I’ll start working on my fitness and health.”

• “I’ll start again on Monday.”

• “Once January 1st starts, I’ll completely dedicate myself to the gym.”

Did you notice the common theme with those statements? The common theme with all those statements involves getting a “fresh start” i.e. waiting until your current situation is “better” so you can have the “time” to start or keep your healthy habits.

Unfortunately, I see this happen with a lot of my clients. I call this mindset “hitting the pause button” in which clients want to push the pause button on their fitness and health so they can resume (or start over) when life feels easier.

It’s commendable and completely normal that you want to do your best. However, this well-meaning impulse is one of the fastest, surest, most reliable ways to sabotage your plans for improving your nutrition, health, and fitness.

The reason? By constantly embracing the pause button mentality this only builds the skill of pausing - the skill of being stuck.

Don’t get me wrong, it can feel overwhelming to try to improve your eating and exercise habits while you are in the midst of chronic stress/looking for a job/ surviving a global pandemic/starting new jobs/raising children, or whatever the complicated circumstances are.

However, by hitting that Pause Button you don’t build the ability to get fit under real-life conditions.

In most fitness scenarios (i.e. 30 days this or 90 days that programs) you learn how to get fit under tightly controlled, white-knuckled life situations. You learn how to build one, solitary, non-transferable skill - Go pedal to the metal until you run out of gas, and burn out while feeling deprived.

The problem with these intense fitness sprints is that it doesn’t teach you the skill of getting fit (or staying fit) in the midst of a normal, complicated “how it really is” sort of life.

This is why yo-yo-dieting have become such a phenomenon

At the end of the day, It’s not about willpower; it’s about skillpower. 

Skillpower is about developing and maintaining the necessary skills so you can continue to prioritize your fitness during the chaotic aspects of your life, not just the “perfect” times.

Skillpower is important because the honest truth is that there will never be a perfect time.

There’s never going to be a moment when things are magically easier. You cannot escape work, personal life, and family demands. Nor can you escape the need for health and fitness in your life. 

If we had to be honest with ourselves, within this game of life we know we’re not always going to be on our A-game. Sometimes we’re superstars. Sometimes we are doing just enough, and other times we are just doing our best to get through the day.

However, we keep going. We stay with the course and power through those subpar days. So why do we expect it to be any different with fitness?

The point is to keep going. Sometimes awkwardly, sometimes incompetently, sometimes downright half-assed. 

How to Adjust Your Dial To Keep Moving Forward

So how do you continue to maintain your fitness progress during those imperfect, difficult stretches of time?  You need to turn your intensity dial down.

Think of your fitness and nutrition efforts as a dial. There are times when you want to dial your efforts up (i.e. those previously mentioned 30 days this or 90 days that programs) and times when you want to dial them down (i.e. settling into a new home, taking care of a newborn). 

It’s on the more hectic days, you may turn your dial to a 3 or 2. There’s no reason to feel guilty about setting your dial a little lower. What is most important is that your dial is still on and you're consciously making the effort. 

 It’s in these moments you have to realize that something was going to be better than nothing.  We still consciously take action towards prioritizing our health, and fitness.

Here’s what adjusting your exercise, nutrition, and wellness dials can look like.

By learning how to “manually” adjust your dial, you’ll slowly start breaking the dreaded “all or nothing” mentality. That “All or nothing” mentality rarely gets us “all.” Instead, it usually gives us nothing and causes us to self-sabotage. 

The main takeaway and the lesson here is to learn the difference between tuning your dial from a 7 or a 3 or 2 instead of completely turning the whole thing off. 

Once you learn how do-able and effective those 3’s and 2’s are for continuing your healthy habits, you’ll see that there’s never a good reason to pause your fitness or health again. Moving forward, I want you to remember your new mantra…

“There’s always something I can do”

Remember, progress doesn’t happen if you “hit that pause button” and wait for a better time. Instead of hitting that pause button, take that moment to challenge yourself to embrace the imperfection, and do something every day for yourself.

We are all living messy, imperfect lives. We are all humans.

If you can just keep moving forward, no matter what happens in those complicated circumstances, you can win the fitness game and never hit that pause button again.