Raise your hand if you feel guilty when you miss a workout. I blog a lot about missing workouts, scaling back, taking rest days, lowering our expectations, doing less, etc. This is a recurring theme of mine.
If someone “explored” my psychological commitment to that theme, they might uncover something like guilt-avoidance at its root. I want to reassure myself on a regular basis that it is perfectly okay to miss workouts because….drum roll please….I happen to miss a lot of workouts.
For me, finding a balance between rigid adherence to a plan and being totally off my game is a tricky business. Like lately I haven’t been making it to the pool for my 2x a week 6 a.m. swims. It’s so darn early. So. Early.
I used to be good at leaping out of bed and not giving it any thought. Last week I was even thinking maybe I should just quit swimming to alleviate that sense of guilt I experience every time I roll over in the morning and say “I’m going back to sleep for another 90 minutes.” 90 minutes! That’s a lot of sleep. But it’s also a lot of swimming.
If I stopped swimming and let go of my Y membership, I would alleviate the additional guilt of (1) spending money on a membership I hardly use and (2) never making it to spin class.
Dr. Anita Harman (who also contributed an article about guilt and exercise/fitness discourses to our special issue of the International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics) did a study about exercise guilt. She found that:
the grip of exercise-related guilt is not a feature exclusively of those who health promoters and fitness advocates might deem “slackers.” Whatever the activity level or fitness gains my participants had achieved, they felt they should be doing more. There was always some aspect of their health or fitness or body they could point to as not good enough.
I like that I do my best, even if it means repeating myself, to let go of exercise guilt because it doesn’t serve me well. It’s not a great motivator. I mean, it does sometimes get us moving. But it’s not a healthy motivator. In an article about her study, Harman writes:
Although guilt might bring some women to exercise, and thus seem potentially beneficial, psychotherapist Maud Purcell (2012) suggests instead that guilt is a “destroyer of emotional energy,” which “leaves you feeling immobilized in the present by something that has already occurred.” For example, a recurring perception of constantly falling short requires significant amounts of emotional energy that renowned feminist scholar Adrienne Rich (1976) describes as “an undramatic, undramatized suffering” (in Ehrenrich & English, 2005, p. 251).
Yes. That.
I’ve had a few conversations with different women friends lately about how they feel they’re falling short in the exercise department. The language they use is about “should” and “need to” and so forth. There’s lots of eye-rolling directed pejoratively towards their self-perception as falling short. Often the guilt actually tilts into shame–a sense not just that they are doing something wrong in not sticking with a plan, but that there is something wrong with them for their inability to stick to a plan or start a plan. They wonder about their will power. Their self control. Harman found a huge correlation between feelings of guilt and the sense that a regular plan of activity requires discipline.
Often, friends will start this conversation with me because they think that if I’m co-founder of a fitness blog I must be super committed all the time. Okay yes, I get stuff done much of the time. But my level of dedication waxes and wanes. And for the most part, I can roll with that.
But I do need to keep reminding myself that this is okay. And I like to remind others. In fact, I literally said to a friend the other day, during one of these conversations: “You’ve done nothing wrong. You are not a bad person.” That is my expert opinion (as a fitness blogger, right?).
Those were pre-election conversations of course. Post-election it’s all been about shock, weeping, fear, violence, and safety pins.
Anyway, the message: let’s lose the guilt. There are no “shoulds” about it and there is nothing wrong with not sticking 100% to a plan. It is perfectly fine to start, commit, falter, quit, get back to it, get to something else, decide sleep is more important, do something less ambitious and more fulfilling. Yep. That’s all okay.
[Correction: An earlier version of this post wrongly attributed the research in question to Dr. Pirkko Markula. The article under discussion in this post is from Markula’s column, but it was written by guest columnist, Dr. Anita Harman, University of Otago, New Zealand, about her PhD research on guilt and exercise.]
I think October is actually the worst month for exercise motivation and it comes for me also at the busiest time of the academic year. Why October? For most cyclists the big races and rides are over…except for cx…and winter indoor training hasn’t begun. I like the idea of there being periods of intense training and periods of rest and recuperation. For me that’s October. So I try to enjoy it rather than feeling guilty about it.
Yes, October. But now it’s November! I don’t have special times of year where things go sideways. It can happen whenever but yes, more likely at busy times.
I guess I mean in general the end of the race season and the new year not yet in our sights. Hard to be motivated, I find. And sensible psychologically to have regular pauses in training to avoid exhaustion and burn out. I confess I’d find 6 am swimming hard without a race in my sights!
Thank you for this, Tracy! While I empathize with you about the guilt (so much!), I am gratified that my study and findings resonated with you! This was indeed Pirrko Markula’s column, but I guest-wrote the article and the findings are based on my PhD research. You may remember the article that I wrote for the recent issue of IJFAB, which was also based on this same research.
I love your blog and read it regularly; the insights, and the way in which they are articulated, are so helpful and heartwarming!
Anita, I am so sorry for attributing your excellent work to someone else. Thanks for pointing it out and thanks for your research and your willingness to share it with us.
Great. Now I feel guilty about feeling guilty.
Thanks for the reminder! It came at the perfect time! It fits with another thing I think is important–being kind to ourselves.
Reblogged this on FIT IS A FEMINIST ISSUE and commented:
The word “permission” has come up a lot lately in my conversations with friends: permission to do less, to let people down, to get it wrong, to make mistakes,…in a word, permission to be human instead of a perfectly programmed machine. Most of the women in my life struggle with giving themselves this permission. We look around as see that our friends are too hard on themselves and then roll our eyes when they say the same of us. Guilt is the unhappy tag-along that shows up when we don’t allow ourselves the breathing space required to be human. Today’s Throwback Thursday is about exercise guilt and how to lose it. Enjoy!