"I'M TOO TIRED"

A common barrier to consistent physical activity is the simple state of feeling tired. We've talked in previous posts about how aspects of physiological status like fatigue contribute to the automatic assessment of how much effort physical activity will involve, influencing our inclination to do it. On a more conscious level we also tend to base our predictions of how activities will feel on how we currently feel, and for many people feeling tired often means concluding that they won't be able to enjoy or make the most of an upcoming workout. This is often the case for those with stressful schedules and poor health, as well as people who generally struggle to be consistent with exercise.

Depending on the extent and causes of your fatigue, sometimes you're better off not exercising and instead allowing yourself to rest or choosing a lower-intensity form of activity. For instance, if your health status is such that physical activity would hamper your recovery or make your condition worse, it's probably best not to do it. The same can go for intense sleep deprivation - for example, new mums up all night every night feeding their new-borns are probably best off doing something low-intensity or resting. In these cases, the body needs the energy required for being physically active to support its recovery processes.

However, a lot of the time when we feel fatigued physical activity can in fact help alleviate fatigue and its causes. And yes, sometimes fatigue means your performance will fluctuate, but the workout you have planned is still worth doing if you can just be a little more flexible about it. So if you find yourself regularly bailing out of workouts because you feel tired or lacking in energy, it's worth looking into what sits underneath this and how to get around it.

The expectations & invisible rules underpinning our WORKOUT DECISIONS

There is a reality that feeling tired (physically or mentally) can make physical activity feel harder and less comfortable, which naturally makes it less appealing. This is particularly the case for more intense forms of activity - lacking the feelings of energy or strength you'd preferably have can make it a bit of a drag, particularly if a key element of enjoyment for you is the feeling of competence that comes from challenging movements. Equally, the feeling of being tired in itself automatically discourages energy expenditure.

However, these things don't directly lead to a decision to abstain from physical activity. It may feel like that, but there is another step in the process that involves developing a rationale or justification for abstaining. It is likely to be relatively unconscious for a lot of people, but it is still a key step in the fatigue-abstention equation: "it will be like this therefore avoidance is best." Below we're going to look into shedding light on this key step so you can start making decisions based more on your goals and values, rather than feeling.

Generally if you find yourself on-and-off with your workouts because you feel tired, without experiencing one of the physical conditions mentioned above, it likely means that one of two (or both!) things are happening: a) your expectations of what the activity will be like are overly coloured by your current physical and emotional state, or b) you have an implicit rule about the activity having to feel or go a certain way for it to be worth doing.

As I said above, we tend to automatically make predictions about how an activity will feel or go based on our current psychological and physical status. The most impactful aspect of this is the narrowing of our views. Our expectations become disproportionately negative in line with how we feel, so that other information is left out. Thus what we anticipate the experience to be like is probably somewhat inaccurate, meaning we are making a decision based on incomplete information.

You can test this out for yourself by exploring your expectations. It's easiest to do this when you are actively having that experience of "I can't be bothered/I'm too tired", but you can also explore it by imagining a recent time when you have had that feeling and bringing it to mind. The first step is to focus on the idea of doing the workout and identify the key elements of this mental representation of it. I have emphasised that what you imagine is a mental representation, because whilst it feels prophetic and convincing, it is worth remembering that it is not the same thing as the reality of the actual workout.

Then notice what you are imagining about the activity in question and any thoughts and feelings that are coming up. It might be that you picture a particular exercise and imagine it involving a lot of strain to complete each rep, or maybe you imagine just generally feeling lethargic, heavy and uncomfortable. Perhaps you experience a feeling of dread or thoughts about your potential performance. Sit with this image or idea for a bit, imagining doing the activity in your fatigued state, and notice what comes up.

Then you can compare those expectations of the activity to your real life experience. Are they reflective of that? Is there anything missing? Is it quite so black and white? You may not perform as well and it may not be as pleasant as usual, but is the entire activity really a total write-off, are there not still worthwhile aspects to it?

If this kind of reflection is enough to help you change your tune, it's likely your perception just gets coloured by your current mood and energy levels. However, if you find yourself going "yes, the experience really is that globally negative when I'm tired" or "it's still not worth doing, even with the good bits" there are a few things to check out further.

First, look back on previous workout sessions where you've had a negative experience because you were tired. If possible, try to remember how you reacted when you noticed feelings of fatigue and discomfort or performance decrements throughout the session. What kind of thoughts did you engage in, and what were the consequences of those? Did you enter the workout itself with a different attitude to usual? How did all of that impact your behaviour? What I'm encouraging you to do is reflect on how you may be inadvertently magnifying the negative aspects of the experience and thus contributing to the fatigue = "no point" equation.

To illustrate, imagine that someone notices they can't lift as much when tired and things just feel that bit harder. They might have feelings of frustration and thoughts like "this is a lot of hard work for little reward", which means during rest periods they are more likely to think of other frustrating things (e.g. life hassles that demand unwanted amounts of effort). So not only are feelings of achievement impacted but they also don't get to "unwind" from their day as they usually would during the workout. This is an example of how our reactions to discomfort or undesirable experiences can cause a proliferation of negativity that taints the entire activity.

But often what these negative reactions come down to is actually the invisible rules we hold about the activity, and we can find out what these rules are with some good old-fashioned Socratic enquiry, which means exploring how we have arrived at our conclusions about an upcoming workout.

So the next step is to reflect on the following:

• Why do I not want to experience/engage in those features of the activity?

• What makes me want to avoid it?

• How do I get to the conclusion of thinking the activity isn't justified?

• What makes a workout worthwhile to me?

  
  

I'll offer some practical examples here to bring this to life a bit. Let's imagine someone anticipates feeling lethargic and struggling to perform as well as usual. In asking themselves the above questions they might identify that feeling lethargic makes them feel weak which triggers self-criticism, and that they find performance decrements disappointing because their aim is to do better than last time. Then in asking the 3rd and 4th questions they establish that the activity doesn't feel worth doing if they don't perform well and that the whole experience is made overtly negative by self-criticism. They might then ask themselves what it means that they don't want to engage in the activity when it feels like that - perhaps that they want to feel competent and good about themselves, and to feel the opposite is somewhat threatening. Thus there are rules there like "I have to perform better than last time and feel competent for this to be worth doing."

You can take this one step further and reflect on how the rules that underpin your decisions contribute to further yo-yo inconsistency and hence maintain themselves. For example, in being inconsistent because of these rules, we inhibit progress and therefore guarantee less frequent improvement and more frequent performance decrements. This means plateaus and decrements feel like they last a long time, which is probably true, and thus they become more threatening and hence our ability to tolerate them goes down. We then get more self-critical and more likely to bail on workouts that don't feel right, etcetera. This is a classic example of how rigid rules about performance paradoxically lead to worse performance over time - often we guarantee failure through being unwilling to tolerate failure.

Or perhaps in asking themselves the above questions, someone simply identifies that the physical feelings of being lethargic are unpleasant and therefore enjoyment is impacted. Let's imagine that they don't necessarily magnify this through negative responses, but it's just overall a worse experience and that is enough to deter them from doing it. In this case, we can establish that there is a rule around the workout having to feel a certain way to be worth doing, and that enjoyment is based on an overly narrow foundation of factors.

STRENGTHENING THE MAGNET

Through processes like the above, some people may well establish that actually the activity they are doing doesn't do as much for them as they thought, so they may opt for something more enjoyable or more suited to their lifestyle. However, others will want to look at improving the experience and becoming more consistent. In that case, the next question is: how do we make our activities feel worth doing even when we lack energy and performance might suffer?

I like to think of exercise motives like magnets that have a pull - when you're within range and there is nothing standing between you and the magnet, you'll be drawn to it without actively forcing yourself towards it. However, we will always have other motives going on that compete with those that get us to our workouts, and thus block us from experiencing the pull of our exercise motives, or even pull us actively in the other direction. So the key is to increase the potency of your exercise motives to increase the chance they will regularly win out and draw you to the activity, even in the presence of interfering forces. Below are a few pointers to reflect on that target factors that can amplify or block the pull of your exercise motives.

Widen your base

We have talked many times on this blog about how enjoyment is a key factor in consistent physical activity, whether you are looking at the good old-fashioned "fun" kind of enjoyment or the more "this is extremely meaningful and engaging for me" enjoyment. However if the stars have to align for that to happen, or enjoyment is based on one very specific factor, it's tenuous. So it may be that you need to consider recruiting more factors into the "meaning and enjoyment" equation.

Reconsider your ruleS

We all have rules that we implicitly arrive at when it comes to physical activity, but we don't have to be limited by those.

So you can ask "are the rules doing what I want?" What would you prefer your rules to be? What factors do you want to feed into your decision to workout or not? Are the rules you have been operating under reasonable or even possible? Do they make the activity appealing, or again do the stars have to align?

This isn't about actively trying to get rid of the pre-existing rules, by the way (which is a waste of time because that isn't how beliefs and thoughts work - a story for another day). We can actually let those rules continue to exist whilst introducing new ones, and then get into the practise of making different decisions. For instance, let's imagine the old rule is "I must perform at least as well if not better than last time" and the new rule is "the workout is worth doing if I can focus on quality movement and muscle contraction." You aren't just going to stop feeling pressure to perform better than last time, but you can choose to make something else beyond performance outcomes (e.g. weight lifted, pace run) important too - in this case, the processes involved in moving, which will ultimately lead to better performance outcomes in the long-run anyway regardless of your performance today.

Or if your old rule was "I need to feel physically good for it to be worth doing", then perhaps you can create a rule around "I will listen to my body and adapt what I'm doing to match my energy levels." Often the problem with our pre-existing rules is not just the content of them, but how rigid they are, so making them a little more flexible can sometimes do the trick.

Another common hidden gremlin here is having overly narrow or misinformed rules about how to approach to your goals. Often people who have rules like the above about having to perform to a certain standard have a very narrow view of what is necessary for them to make concrete progress towards their goals. There is an all-or-nothing idea of "progressing depends on seeing performance numbers go up/down each time", but that simply isn't the case. Stimulating our muscles, cardiovascular systems, coordination, mind-muscle connection and proprioception all still contribute to progress in other ways, even if you are performing worse than usual in terms of numbers. And actually that's preferable to doing perfect workouts inconsistently.

STATED VERSUS REVEALED PREFERENCES

This isn't an agreeable thing to think about for most people, but sometimes it's worth considering if we genuinely want what we are pursuing. We may consciously feel convinced that we care about XYZ and want to do ABC, but what we consciously think isn't always reflective of what we really think and feel deep down. This is a phenomenon called "stated versus revealed preferences" - our patterns of behaviour can reveal far more about what we want than our conscious intentions. We hold intellectual beliefs about what we want and care about, but sometimes those were constructed on a tenuous basis - to address an inadequacy, to please someone else, to give off a particular image or maintain an identity, to do what the "right thing" is according to some arbitrary sense of morality that isn't quite yours, to fend off some bad consequence that actually isn't as dramatic as it seems on the surface.

This happens to all of us, and the process of finding out what we really want is not something that can simply be taught within a blog post - indeed, it's not always possible to ever know for sure you have the answer. It involves taking time to reflect on why we started the activity in the first place and what we based that decision on. We can consider whether it feels like a pressure-inducing sense of "I have to or [insert bad outcome] will happen", or perhaps something that offers a benefit we genuinely care about but has limited impact on our broader life.

We can also think about whether we like the idea of the outcomes and the image of the activity but not the processes involved. I deliberated for a long while in the last couple of years about whether to get back into competitive running. I work frequently with endurance athletes and hearing about their training and racing activities gets me excited - I LOVE the idea of the buzz from smashing out fast track sessions, racing and seeing how far I can push my PBs, and that is a very convincing feeling because that's how it used to be for me... but the reality is I'm just not prepared to engage in what is necessary to achieve that now alongside the other activities I am doing.

Not an easy question to answer, but one worth considering if you are consistently and easily put off by feeling tired and sluggish.

A PRACTICAL SUGGESTION

I'll finish off with a practical suggestion - consider what you've been doing before your usual physical activities and where that leaves you psychologically and physically. If it's possible, sometimes it's worth making a tweak to timings or how you prepare for the activities in question to put yourself in a better position to feel up to doing it. For instance, it's always going to feel hard to move straight from sitting staring at a screen for hours on end into an energetic activity. Sometimes a bit of buffer space is needed, or a gentle transition of sorts. Or alternatively, we may consider moving the activity to a different time of day to align more with our natural rhythms - for instance, some people are morning people whilst others are evening people.

There are many other possibilities to consider but it's best to start with the low-hanging fruit, some of which is above, before digging deeper and looking at more peripheral factors.

Chloe

Psychology of Movement