Force of Habit :
Making Health and Fitness a Priority
by Barbara A. Brehm, Ed.D.
If you have difficulty finding time to exercise, you are not alone. A perceived lack of time is one of the most common reasons that people fail to stick to their exercise programs. Even people with the best of intentions find themselves overwhelmed when tugged in too many directions at once. Somehow when others need you, self-care is the thing that gets put on hold.
Many busy people do manage to exercise regularly. How do they do it? By making their health and fitness a priority. One of the qualities that characterizes success in any arena of life is an ability to take a long-range view of things, to see the total picture. Too often, we get caught up in short-term demands, and spend our time putting out fires at the expense of long-range strategic thinking and planning. This applies not only to the development of a healthful and satisfying lifestyle, but to every area of life, such as the development of meaningful careers and well-balanced families. The little things that have to get done somehow do get done, but the larger, really important issues can get put on indefinite hold.
We take our health for granted until we get sick. People who swear they don't have a minute for self-care find themselves hospitalized for bypass surgery and out of commission for weeks. When our bodies force us to stay in bed, we do. We somehow manage to make the time when our health becomes that strong a priority.
But why wait? Think about your future and all that you hope to do, in all the realms of your life. Isn't your health essential for the achievement of those goals? Unless you take care of your health, you cannot take care of business, family and other interests.
If you are too busy to make exercise a priority now, when in the near future will you be less busy? Maybe you are lucky, and things will slow down in the next couple of weeks or months. But when most people ask themselves this question, they see the pace of their lives accelerating, rather than slowing down, at least until retirement, or until the children are grown and out of the house. If you are waiting for a better time to make exercise a priority, you may have to wait too long.
When you look for the benefits of regular physical activity in your dally life, you reinforce the importance of fitness as a high-priority goal. After all, regular exercise Is not only necessary to prevent chronic disease and disability, it boosts your energy and helps you manage stress from day to day.
Enjoy the increased productivity that comes with good health. We're not just referring to the productivity of your work life, but to all parts of your life. When you are healthy and feeling good, you make better decisions and find more creative solutions to problems. You're more fun to be with, and you have more to give to those you care about.
While any exercise is better than none, and it's never too late to benefit from an exercise program, the greatest benefits come from regular, vigorous, lifelong participation in physical activity. Irregular exercisers tend to encounter more frustration because they are constantly "starting over" and feeling out of shape. Since scheduling exercise is not part of their routine, the barriers to participation are greater.
People who manage to exercise regularly employ the force of habit. Exercise is a priority and part of their daily or weekly routine. Think about the busy people you know who still manage to exercise regularly. The people in their lives expect them to be unavailable at certain times and schedule accordingly. The most popular exercise time for the overbooked is first thing in the morning, before the rest of the world tries to derail you.
While your fitness is a priority, interruptions in your exercise routine do occur. Injury, travel and piles of obligations may force you to give up some exercise time. Fortunately, in the context of a lifetime, a week or two with no exercise is no big deal, and you can congratulate yourself for your flexibility. But don't let a week or two off mean you take a year or two to get back to your program and reaffirm your priority to exercise regularly.
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