Build Flexibility into Your Life, Exercise for Wellbeing, You Don’t Have to Choose
Hi Folks! Connor and Nick here from Healthy Living With Nick and Connor. Thanks again for being on our email list, it means a lot, and we are excited to share our weekly email with you. We hope you enjoy it! Here is what we hope you take away from this one:
Create space and flexibility into your life to allow the freedom to do things outside your normal routine.
Don’t set vanity or aesthetic transformation as your goal for exercise, though these are often nice byproducts, set well-being and feeling good as the end goal.
Appreciate the diversity in our society and avoid ‘one or the other’ thinking.
Starter Mindset Tip: Building Flexibility into Your Life
Life is full of unexpected plot twists and opportunities that present themselves when we don’t expect it. Life also seems to get fully booked rather quickly, leaving us little time to stray outside our normal routine. Building flexibility into your schedule means creating mental space and calendar space to allow for doing things outside our ‘normal’ activities. It is essential for managing the unexpected opportunities and challenges and helps maintain balance and growth in our lives. Flexibility allows us to adapt to shifting priorities without feeling overwhelmed or derailed. It can also help to reduce stress, as too rigid of a schedule creates the pressure to adhere to something that is generally self-inflicted. Try to increase how much flexibility is in your life to foster spontaneity, creativity, the feeling that life slows down; all vital components to wellbeing.
Health Recipe: Make the Goal of Exercise Wellbeing
Timing: Daily-weekly
Level of Difficulty: Easy
Serving Size: Small - Medium
Spiciness: Mild
INGREDIENTS
You
REASONING AND BENEFITS
Why do you exercise? Most people would say it is to lose weight, gain muscle, or simply to ‘get in shape’. Good things happen when we shift the goal of exercise from vanity to wellbeing. Prioritizing health, wellbeing and functionality leads to a much more sustainable, meaningful approach that keeps our eye on the big picture - simply feeling better. While aesthetics may provide short-term motivation, a focus on overall wellbeing fosters a positive relationship with exercise that promotes improved fitness, mental balance, stress reduction and longevity. It allows us to have more consistency and self-compassion, rather than making unhealthy comparisons, focusing on temporary results or changes tied solely to appearances which you may not notice or lose interest in.
INSTRUCTIONS
Define a new exercise goal; one that looks at deeper reasons for exercise such as improving your energy levels, reducing stress, boosting mental resilience, enhancing mobility, improving sleep, improving confidence, aging better, and having fun. Keep reminding yourself of these when you exercise, and more importantly when you don’t feel like exercising.
Prioritize exercises you enjoy. This will make it easier to keep up with them and fits better with the goals of improving your sense of wellbeing.
Listen to your body and pay attention to how exercise makes you feel rather than how it makes you look. Celebrate the effects it has on your mood, energy, focus, and sleep.
Incorporate a more mindful connection to the exercises you do by reflecting on all the things that exercise can help you achieve building a stronger connection between exercise and mental and physical wellbeing and allow days for rest to avoid burnout, injury, or excess fatigue.
PRO TIP: Consider tracking non-aesthetic progress by journaling other ways in which exercise has improved your wellbeing.
* This focus tends to allow you a better mix of activities including mobility, strength, cardio and athletics. Don’t be scared to mix it up!
** It will also allow you to better focus on the process over the outcome.
*** Look at exercise as self-care and a recharge; reframing it as a reward instead of a chore.
Dessert Quote:
“I will defend the absolute value of Mozart over Miley Cyrus, of course I will, but we should be wary of false dichotomies. You do not have to choose one or the other. You can have both. The human cultural jungle should be as varied and plural as the Amazonian rainforest. We are all richer for biodiversity. We may decide that a puma is worth more to us than a caterpillar, but surely we can agree that the habitat is all the better for being able to sustain each.” – Stephen Fry
