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DREAD YOUR WORKOUTS?

Psychology of Movement

Today we’re going to share some things to think about if you consistently dread your workouts. 


If you find yourself in this position, ask yourself first if it’s worth switching to something different that you don’t dread and therefore participate in and enjoy more. After all, enjoyment is one of the strongest predictors of long-term adherence to exercise and if you’re not getting anything meaningful out of it (e.g. it isn’t part of a bigger endeavour to practise doing things that make you uncomfortable), your efforts may be better directed elsewhere.


But if your answer is along the lines of: “it’s important to me to get this workout in because it is personally meaningful to me in light of my bigger goals” then read on.


By “dread” we mean that sense of uncomfortable apprehension about an upcoming event that creates a pit in your stomach and has you bracing yourself for something aversive. This is not to be confused with anxiety - anxiety is more about “what ifs” and worrying about potential outcomes, whereas dread is the anticipation of something that you feel is inevitable.


When it comes to exercising consistently, dread is unhelpful. One of the trade-offs of having a complex human brain that allows us to internally represent (i.e. imagine) external situations is that we can bring some of the aversive qualities of things that are not immediately happening here into the present. In other words, we feel some of the discomfort we would expect to feel during the actual event we are dreading before it even happens. In doing so we prolong or magnify the negative experience and create a pattern whereby we start to dread the workout each time and it becomes harder to stick to.


But dread has an evolutionary function - it conferred survival advantages to our ancestors, which is why it has remained a part of the spectrum of human emotional experiences. It evolved as a signal to let us know that we are approaching a situation that has similarities with previous situations in which something aversive happened.


To explain this, let’s imagine you have repeated experiences of a particular hill running session where you end up with negative emotions: your quads burn like crazy, you feel annoyed about how quickly you get puffed out, and you feel demoralised about your pace compared to others’. These negative emotions and experiences of pain can “tag” the memories you store of those sessions with negative emotional qualities, meaning you develop negative gut feelings about them. And because our brains allow us to connect memories with other related experiences and concepts, these gut feelings can spread to different situations such as the idea of future runs. 


So in that running scenario, dread is letting you know that you’re about to do something that has involved pain, annoyance and demoralisation in the past. It’s a warning to preferably avoid the situation, and if you can't then to brace yourself for it. So while dread is unhelpful in feeling motivated to exercise, reflecting on its causes can help us to understand where we might benefit from changing our approach to exercise. Of course, some aspects of exercise can be inherently uncomfortable - for example as discussed in our previous post on enjoyment, physical changes in our bodies create painful sensations, and that is certainly the case for hill running sessions. Furthermore, negative emotions are quite natural in this scenario. But a lot of the time these aspects become dread-inducing in part because of the way we handle them. So here are some questions to reflect on if you want to try creating some less dread-full experiences with your workouts. 


  • What is it that you dread specifically, and why? 

  • What kinds of thoughts do you have when you arrive at that dreaded point in the workout? These could be thoughts about yourself, the aspect of the workout that creates dread or something else.

  • How do you attempt to deal with the dreaded situation when it comes up? What is the result of that attempt?

  • How do you react if this dreaded situation impacts your performance or workout in some undesirable way?

  • What could you do differently in terms of what you say to yourself and what you focus on that might make the dreaded aspect of the session easier to manage? Forget how you think you should deal with it for a moment, and focus more on what you think will have the biggest effect. 



Chloe

Psychology of Movement



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