Being bored is one of the many reasons people give up on their diet and exercise routines. Have you ever given up due to boredom?
Trying to motivate yourself to do something boring is definitely difficult – but, there are plenty of things in life that we find boring but do anyway. Yet, it seems more difficult to do something we find boring when it is entirely for ourselves.
I’m afraid that I don’t have any life-changing advice for you here which is going to magically make every workout and every meal rivetingly exciting.
But, there are a few different ways we can think about boredom.
The first is that we don’t need to be entertained all the time. It is perfectly acceptable to just go through the motions of something without feeling excited about it. This might sound obvious, but our thought process around diet and exercise seems to work differently to the way it works with other things.
What I’m describing here is discipline. This is the idea that even though we’re not in the mood to do something, we do it anyway because it is what we have committed to do.
Whatever you choose to do, there will be times you don’t want to do it.
This leads me on to my second thought, and that is that at the beginning of our health and fitness journey, we are often going from a situation where we won’t really give much thought to what we’re eating or whether we’re moving. The things you’ve been doing up to now are things which just happen without a lot of consideration.
So, when we start to look at the way we eat and the exercise we do, we are making a commitment to consciously think about and plan these things.
And, following through with a conscious plan requires discipline.
My next thought is about your mindset.
If you feel that eating well and exercising is simply a means to an end, it is going to be a hard slog.
But, if you can make the diet or the exercise a skill to master, it becomes something you focus on in its own right. It still requires discipline, of course, but by aiming to perfect a skill, it helps you enjoy the process more.
This links in to a post I made on the Facebook group recently about having behaviour based goals rather than outcome based goals. If you haven’t already, go and read it.