The Change 

Changing and challenging your body is a task that requires consistency, discipline, and lifestyle changes. These tasks can often be difficult for individuals to manage across their day-to-day lifestyle. Reading long blogs can become a struggle too and that’s why the aim of this post is to stick to the point and make it easy for you to read. 

It is important for you to know; this isn’t to push you into something that you are not ready for or able to do. Our objective is to educate and provide you with the best information and tips from professionals such as Physiotherapy Pain Association, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. Our objective is to educate and provide

Without further due, we’ll cover the following topics:

• Differentiating between minor blips and old habits
• The impact of mindsets on progress
• Recognizing and celebrating small achievements 
• Taking the initial steps to establish a consistent movement habit
• Understanding the importance of appropriate exercise dosage
• Considering how physical activity fits into the broader context of your life
• Preparing for and managing unexpected disruptions in your plans

The Habits 

You started a new habit, it’s going well but then you get stressed, bored, hungry, lonely, tired, are celebrating something, or you’re angry – and then the plans you’ve set out for yourself just don’t have the same appeal anymore. 

Returning to old habits is common and in fact ought to happen when trying to start something new. This can be super frustrating when you know how much you want something in your life to change but doing what needs to be done persistently can sometimes feel impossible. 

The Climb 

Recognizing blips from old habits is an important skill to learn. Working out what they are and why they occur is a strategy to help you stick to your plans. 

Most often the practices that are the best for our mental health and physical health are the first to be thrown out of the window at the slightest slip. Why? 

Whenever we flare up, we get really upset, we think our hard work was for nothing. We failed to realize it was just a pause our body needed to continue climbing back up the mountain. 

Eventually when your body is ready, you can build your way back up to where you were. Your body hasn’t forgotten all the work you have done. All it needed was a break.

Slowing down and adapting to what you could do at any given time. Your body is phenomenal, it already knows the path back to where you stopped at. We just need to give it some patience. 

Learning how to see these pauses as just that, a pause not a backslide plays a huge role in helping confront major barriers to any new habits you started in the past and it helps you to stay motivated. 

The key is to see those inevitable blips to learn how to adopt that habit in a new context, rather than stop the healthy habit entirely until the conditions are “perfect” again. 

The Happiness Trap

You jumped at a new habit, you are excited, you are inviting friends to join but it starts getting tough. You are not following through on it like when you first started, or you completely dropped it. What stopped you? 

New habits like movement and exercise can be particularly challenging when you don’t have access to the adequate care that you need. It can get overwhelming. A good model to use for help is an ACT model (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy). Try Dr Russ Harris worksheet here to help you  understand your barriers to change and processes to overcome them that can be helpful. 

The Thoughts

Let’s first establish that small changes really matter in the long-term and provide us a solid foundation to build from but how we think and feel about ourselves should be the first place to start working on. 

A good place to start is to remind ourselves that we are human beings and sometimes we can mix thoughts, feelings with reality. Our thoughts are not always necessarily true. 

Having core beliefs or fixed thoughts can be the reason for our failures a lot of the time. This can translate to having a fixed perspective to what a diet should be like or what our shape should look or even what we believe movement needs to look or feel like, or about what we believe our body is (or in many cases isn’t) capable of. 

We’re not for a minute saying that you should not have a goal in mind. 

But it is accepted when the usefulness of these goals does not reflect can eventually even stand in the way of us making the progress that our bodies are actually safely capable of.

One way to overcome this is by experimenting with your fixed thoughts. You can start by unlocking your past experiences and beliefs, and from there pin down which experience, or belief did work for you and those that did not. Keep those that work and begin gently shifting to change your thoughts on what did not work for you. 

Setting goals that are extremely difficult to attain are a surefire way of sapping your motivation and willpower. By having huge expectations, you are putting yourself under pressure which is not contributing to anything healthy to your body, so even if you’ve made huge progress, it can be hard to see because you are setting yourself up against an unfair and unreasonable standard.

So basically… maybe don’t just jump straight into trying an Instagram workout! 

Ok? Good!

The Achievements 

Let’s talk about the importance of celebrating small wins. I know, when we are doing so little compared to others, we feel that there is no need to celebrate something so small and that most people take for granted. We may even ask why should I celebrate being able to do something that is a fraction of what I want to be doing? 

A little technique to use for when we’re feeling at our worst and must put a lot on hold while we rest and recover, is – a have done list. Writing down every activity you do, will help you realize that even on your worst days, you may have been able to do something even if in your head, it seems the smallest thing ever to someone else. 

Shift your goals depending on how your body and mental health is feeling on any given day 🙂

The Dose

Movement over exercise? Going for a walk, or a run seems moderate right? Well, the truth is, it is not the same in the context of people who have been dealing with chronic pain for years without proper care. Sure, people who do not feel fatigue, shortness of breath or any difficulties can go for a 6km walk and even have a run for fun. However, we need to start reframing what movement means to us.

If you are someone who spends most of your day in bed, you could start by consciously adding a little more physical effort into activities you are doing anyway. You don’t have to begin hiking the next day or lifting an 8kg dumbbell. 

You must let the movement depend on your energy or how much you can work – because it is easy to get discouraged by pain and not to move for hours. 

The Importance 

Finally, we will discuss why it is such a struggle to achieve our goals. You may have gotten yourself a membership at the gym or paid for a coach because a loved one wants you to, or a healthcare professional told you that it’s important. The problem lies in this, unless the goal connects to something deep inside you, other things will always take priority. People living with chronic illness have quite bloody enough going on, let alone adding in a goal that has little meaning to you personally. 

Focus on your values and not only the pain, but people with chronic illness also tend to go back to old habits when pain is under control.  Rather than shifting all your focus on your energy to control your chronic pain for a period, try focusing on making movement a way of life and a part of your routine but without pushing yourself and your body only to – then crash for months at a time.