Treating Exercise Like a Game to Create Wins
One of the best practices for overcoming feelings of defeat is exercise. Exercise can increase your mood, outlook on life, and your general mental wellness and happiness.
If you've ever struggled to exercise, this may seem counterintuitive. Exercise might not be fun for you, and thinking about exercise may make you feel like a failure.
But if you learn how to structure your exercise objectives, exercise is actually a great way for you to build some wins into your life, create a sense of progress, and build agency over the rest of your life.
How Excerise Can Help You Overcome Defeat
There are many physiological benefits to exercise. Exercise:
Helps symptoms of depression
Prevents and mitigates injury
Helps reduce anxiety & stress
Helps you get better sleep
And it's great for self esteem
There are also benefits to your mental state. Some of this is backed by research and some of this I’ve noticed through my own life and observing others.
Create Wins in Your Life
Exercise can improve your mental state by helping you create opportunities to win. You have to come up with these opportunities, however. How can you do this?
Pick an objective that is not too easy and not too hard. If its too easy, victory feels hollow. If its too hard, you end up regressing back into defeat.
Complete that objective.
Track or measure the results so you can celebrate and so that you can recalibrate your objectives if they become too easy or too hard.
Exercise lends itself really well to this structure because it is incredibly quantifiable. There are infinite objectives you can set for yourself.
I was one of those nerdy, out-of-shape guys in high school, and the first structured workout I ever got into was running. When I first started, I couldn’t run a mile, so the first objective I set for myself was:
Run .25 miles without stopping.
After I was able to do that, I gave myself some credit, and I moved on to:
Run .5 miles without stopping.
After I hit a mile, I moved on to a new game of:
Reduce your mile time.
At each step I was giving myself a way to win. Each new distance was a challenge, but that meant that when I completed it, I felt like I had accomplished something meaningful. I felt like a winner.
This practice can apply to anything. Weightlifting, yoga, cycling, swimming. In any exercise, you can find a way to win.
Generate Forward Progress
This ability to create wins and change objectives for yourself means that exercise can help you develop a sense of progress and completion. Progress and completion is something that humans naturally seem to crave. If you’ve ever collected Pokemon or binge watched a Netflix show, you know the feeling. It feels good to fill pretty much any status bar because it helps you feel like you’re moving forward and achieving things.
Exercise lends itself perfectly to this feeling of progress. As you exercise, you make progress on your objectives, see changes in the way your body moves and functions, and improvements your physique. Maybe you get stronger, faster, and lose weight.
That forward momentum feels great, and it can provide an anchor of positivity when other things aren’t going so well. Can't see friends? Your health is still improving. Things tough at work or school? You still made it on that run.
It’s hard to feel defeated when you’re still moving forward and achieving things in an important aspect of life.
Agency
Winning and making progress leads to one more important benefit from exercise: it helps you feel like you have a sense of control.
Agency: The feeling of control over actions and their consequences.
Feeling like you can control one area of your life builds the mentality that you can control other areas in your life. Once you know that you have the willpower to make it to the gym or go on that run, you often feel that you are in charge of other parts of your life.
And that's huge. Believing you can control other areas of your life is the first step in going out and changing them for the better.
When people get on one run of positive changes, they tend to get on another run of positive changes. The person that decides they’re going to start lifting weights every day then feels they can push for a new challenge at work or becomes nicer to their dog.
Defeat: The feeling that accompanies an experience of being thwarted in attaining your goals
In many ways, defeat is coming across a challenge and thinking you have no say in the outcome. So agency is the opposite of defeat.
Give Yourself Credit
There are two important things to keep in mind when using exercise to generate wins.
First, give yourself credit for making the effort. One of the most powerful games you can create and win is the game of “showing up.” Not every day has to have an incredible workout session. There are some days where doing anything is a win.
It might feel like cheating, but showing up is is important and powerful because it replaces unwanted behaviors: 20 minutes spent walking is 20 minutes you didn’t sit on the couch. Instead of feeling like you lost if you don’t always hit each workout hard, you should feel like you won because you didn’t do something that set you back.
Second, if you’re are getting started for the first time, exercise can actually be stressful instead of stress-reducing.
This persists only in the early stages of building exercise habits, but if you feel that exercise is hard, and you make it out anyway, you’re winning twice over: once for showing up, and twice for beating that stressful feeling of difficulty.
Whatever you do, just make sure to celebrate your wins.