Push Ups for Happiness
Exercise can be a fantastic vehicle for helping you get what you want in life. From health and wellness, to a more attractive body exercise can help you get there. It could even be an effective means to increase your level of happiness.
Unfortunately, it can also be a soul sucking drain on your happiness and quality of life as well. It all depends on your approach.
Here are 3 practical ways to ensure your fitness habits make you happier.
#1 Focus on progress rather than just the goal
Placing all of your hopes of a happier life on achieving a singular goal can be one of the most detrimental habits you can engage in. This is a specially common in the weight loss community, where people believe that they will be happy once they lose the weight or build the body they want.
Such an attitude can be very problematic for several reasons. First, you were deferring your happiness and enjoyment until you arrive at a destination. It may take you months, or even years until you can achieve your goal. Do you really want to wait to be happy?
Second, maintaining the results you’ve achieved is only possible if you can maintain the habits you used to achieve those results. If you were unhappy and struggling to adhere to the habits initially, you’ll continue to struggle indefinitely, or else you will lose what you’ve achieved.
Lastly, many people find that achieving their goal didn’t radically change their quality of life or make them much happier than they anticipated. Their life is just the same but now they have a bit more muscle or can do pull-ups, but everything else is unchanged.
Focusing on making the process enjoyable and appreciating your improvements helps you avoid all of these sources of unhappiness. You engage in habits that make you feel good in the short term, and elevate your quality of life. Plus while making progress is an inherently enjoyable process for human nature.
Much of the happiness, we experience in life comes from improving our lives rather than simply having a better lives and the same goes for fitness. So focus on making the journey fun, and rewarding and not only will you achieve your goal faster but you will also be happier along the way.
#2 Appreciate short-term enjoyment
Don’t get too caught up in suffering and sacrificing now in the hopes that the result will be worthwhile in the future. Engage in exercise that makes you feel alive and brings you at least some degree of joy. One of the reasons why I’ve been able to thrive with calisthenics for nearly 2 decades is because I enjoy the actual activity. I also enjoy the long-term benefits like building muscle and unstoppable resiliency but that’s not what gets me up off the couch and doing push-ups.
It’s the feeling of a good muscle pump and the appreciation of strength that motivates me day after day.
#3 Do things your own way
There’s a type of magic that happens when you make your own decisions and take charge of your own lifestyle habits. I used to dislike exercise because someone else was always telling me to do push-ups or go run laps around the gym. However, I fell in love with physical fitness when I decided to start doing push-ups and eating better on my own.
There’s a sense of pride and ownership that comes with adopting habits on your own. It’s kind of like how you appreciate something you buy with your own money that you worked hard to earn as opposed to something that was simply given to you as a gift.
So don’t be afraid to walk your own path and color outside the lines of conventional thinking when it comes to diet exercise. Chances are, the solutions you create will not only be more effective, but also more rewarding and will make you happier both in the short and long-term.
Remember that fitness habits are not supposed to make you unhappy now for a supposed payoff later on. It should make you happier in the short and long term to elevate your quality of life and not just your physical health.
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