My best friends from college and I have a whatsapp group where we share a steady stream of personal tidbits, memes and news. Ever since the lockdown started, two of my friends decided to start exercising together over zoom, and used the whatsapp group to schedule their workouts and discuss how each session went. They seemed really happy with their workouts and my interest was piqued. I decided to join them as well and make good use of the extra commute time I saved every day. I started doing the workouts without talking or thinking about it too much so that I didn’t “scare” my inner sloth away from the sessions. Magically, it somehow worked and I went from almost 0 exercise sessions/week to 7 times a week. We used Yoga with Adriene’s 30 day workout series. It was lovely to start each day with a small win – I couldn’t believe I was doing so well.
3 weeks in (after not skipping any session), one of my friends who has a 12-hour timezone difference from me, suggested that we move our sessions by 30 minutes so that she had enough time to complete the workout and then cook dinner. I accepted it as a new challenge and tried to wake up 30mins earlier everyday. While it was very hard, I still managed to make it to the sessions almost everyday.
But as you’ve guessed from the title of the post, the good times didn’t last. I am not sure what triggered the habit to break, but the inner sloth won. It started out with me listening to excuses from myself. I had a big meeting to prepare for and decided that I needed to skip the workout so that I would have more time in the morning. Another instance was me skipping the workout since one of my friends decided to skip.. before I knew it, the habit I had worked hard to setup was completely gone. I felt too guilty thinking about all the lost workouts and decided to not think about it.
This weekend is extra special because it’s a long weekend and I finally had some time to reflect and try to figure out why the habit broke down. I tried again, and today was day 1 of exercise in ~2 weeks. I am hoping that it sticks. But hope isn’t a strategy and I am making some changes to the routine to make it easier to hold on to. I’ve decided to go back to 7am workouts instead of 6.30am and I’m going to try out a new series to keep things interesting. And most importantly, no guilt trips, only calm perseverance. Onwards and upwards!
Shweta Padmanaban 