Positive Feedback Loops
My sister came over last week because she was a little bit stuck and wanted some help moving forward.
We’ve all been there, when we’ve gotten out of one of our routines and it feels REALLY difficult to get back on track.
Getting started is always the hardest part. Once we get moving toward our desired behaviors, it’s much easier to keep moving forward.
Exercise and eating healthy are two areas where positive feedback loops are really useful and important. When we move more, we feel better, which makes us want to move more. When we eat healthy, we feel good, which (theoretically) makes us want to eat healthier.
For most of us, working out isn’t a fun activity, but we do it anyway because it helps us to be able to do the things that are more fun in our lives.
Some of the positive feedback you can get from exercise includes:
Feeling stronger and more flexible.
Improving your balance and confidence related to movement.
Losing any feelings of being stiff and sore from not moving enough.
Of course there are many other health benefits of exercise, but the ones that keep us going are the ones that tend to directly impact us immediately.
How the feedback loop works:
If you feel good when you’re done exercising,
You start to look forward to that feeling,
You focus on that feeling the next time you have a choice to exercise (or sit on the couch), and
You chose to exercise because you know you’ll feel better when you’re done, which you do and the loop repeats!
Unfortunately, negative feedback loops work in the opposite direction and we tend to make everything way harder than it actually is.
Action Steps:
Wherever you are in your exercise journey, please remember that starting is the hardest part.
Make your starting point easy and commit to doing something for 5 minutes.
Set a timer and let yourself be done when it goes off if you want to. If you’re feeling like you could do more however, stick with it for longer and either way, enjoy the good feeling of success that comes from following through with something you committed to, even for 5 minutes!
