Discipline
In my post about self care, one of the things I wrote about was how I’ve been exercising five times a week for the past few months. I was starting to feel like my transformation into “a person who exercises five times a week” was complete. Then, last week, it was over 100 degrees out and I decided to skip a day of exercising. The next day was a scheduled off day. The day after that, I found myself thinking “what if I take one more day off?”
One of the things I’m doing in therapy is a sort of daily mental exercise (I plan to write more about this in a future post). I find the same difficulty staying consistent with this when I let myself take a day or two off. I’m actually going to pause writing right now and do my therapy exercise for today that I’ve been putting off for the past few hours!
Can anyone relate to watching a video like this being a therapy exercise?
So, something I need to keep in mind is that perhaps now I am “a person who exercises five times a week” and “a person who does their daily therapy exercise”, but that won’t continue to be true automatically. It took discipline to build these habits, and it will take discipline to maintain them. Being disciplined in this way is not necessarily something that comes naturally to me, so it’s okay for maintaining these habits to feel difficult.
When I was first starting to build these habits, I would often feel overwhelmed by thoughts like “so I have to do this every day for the rest of my life?” This is one of those funny things where the answer seems to be to just not think about it like that, and rather just take it day by day. Well, here I am a year into therapy and a few months into regular physical exercise, and these things are feeling more like simple daily habits rather than a daunting lifelong undertaking.
For me, it’s easy to feel disappointed in myself if I miss a day of exercise (physical or mental). I feel like I need to make it up by doing twice as much the next day. I don’t think that’s actually helpful though. Instead, I can just take the steps necessary to get back into my routine. In fact, I find that it’s helpful for me to do something, as long as it keeps me from taking a day off or keeps my habit intact. This could mean doing a 20 minute walk instead of a full 30, or doing an easier therapy exercise than I typically would do. My therapist’s voice echoes in my mind: “what are you willing to do?”
Instead of feeling disappointed in myself that it feels difficult to maintain a habit, I can be proud that I’m maintaining the habit despite it feeling hard. Instead of feeling like I’m not doing enough if I do an “easier” exercise, I can cheer myself on for doing something rather than nothing. These reframings are me having compassion for myself, which is also something that doesn’t necessarily come naturally to me. But I’m working on it!
The goal is to love myself as much and as unconditionally as this cat loves me