Pod Insights 10% Happier with Dan Harris Why You Don't Exercise Even Though You Know You Should. And Strategies To Get Over the Hump. | Katy Bowman About this episode A toolkit for bringing more movement into your life.
Katy Bowman https://nutritiousmovement.com/ is a biomechanist who runs a movement education company, called Nutritious Movement https://nutritiousmovement.com/. She's the author of 11 books, and her most recent is I Know I Should Exercise, But...: 44 Reasons We Don't Move and How to Get Over Them https://www.amazon.com/Know-Should-Exercise-But-Reasons/dp/1943370311.
In this episode we talk about:
What a biomechanist does What Katy means by "movement as nutrition" How to determine your "movement diet" The distinction between movement and exercise Why people don't exercise Strategies for consistency The role of values and attention How to move if you don't like sweating How to find time to move The technique of "stacking your life" Overcoming embarrassment and shame related to movement Strengthening your "so what" muscle Getting comfortable with discomfort What to do when you're addicted to your screen And much more
Additional Resources:
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Transcript 14,034 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:05 Dan Harris? This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, hey, everybody. How we doing? One of the biggest problems that many of us face when it comes to our own health and wellness and longevity is that we know exercise is good for us, and yet, we often just don't do it. Maybe we do it in short spurts, maybe we never do it. In any event, it's a huge problem, especially at this time of year, when many of us are making resolutions to exercise more, resolutions that statistically speaking are likely to be broken and abandoned by February.
0:49 Dan Harris? Side note, all of this is also true for plenty of other activities, including meditation. But today, we're really just focusing on exercise. The foundational thing to know is that this really is not about laziness, or lack of understanding, or lack of character, or stick-to-it-iveness. It's really that life is complicated, and habit formation is really hard. So today, we're going to talk to somebody who wrote a whole book with a taxonomy of the many, many reasons we don't exercise, and a bunch of really smart and sometimes rather deep strategies for getting over the reasons we don't get our bodies moving. Katie Bowman is a biomechanist who runs a movement education company called Nutritious Movement.
1:33 Dan Harris? She's the author of 11 books, and her most recent is called "I Know I Should Exercise, But." The subtitle is 44 Reasons We Don't Move and How to Get Over Them. In this conversation, we talk about what a biomechanist does, what Katie means by movement as nutrition, how to determine your own movement diet, the distinction between movement and exercise. We go through many of the reasons why people don't exercise. We talk about strategies for consistency, the role of values and attention, how to move if you don't like to sweat, how to find time to move when you feel like you've got very little time, the technique of stacking your life, overcoming embarrassment and shame
2:14 Dan Harris? related to movement, and strengthening your so-what muscle, getting comfortable with discomfort, what to do when you're addicted to your screens, and much more. Speaking of the new year, our new app is going strong. It's called 10% with Dan Harris, and you can sign up over at danharris.com. There's a 14-day free trial if you want to try before you buy. We've got lots of stuff going on over there. In fact, there's a new meditation that dropped today with our Teacher of the Month, Bart Van Melik, who tailored today's meditation to go along with today's podcast episode. The meditation is called Rewire Your Relationship With Your Body. Also, over in the app, we do weekly live meditation and Q and A sessions. I'll be hosting the next one solo.
2:59 Dan Harris? We do these every Tuesday at 4:00. Okay, enough plugging. We'll get started with Katie Bowman right after this. If you care about supporting independent media, and if you care about being a node of sanity in an insane world, there are a few quick, easy, and free ways that you can support me and my team, which I would be really grateful for. One way to do it is to sign up for my newsletter, which comes out on Monday mornings. It's a little dose of sanity in your inbox at the beginning of a busy week. The second way to do it is to follow and subscribe to the show wherever you're listening or watching right now. That really helps. Three, share your favorite episode with a friend. This is a great and low-stakes way to connect with somebody in your orbit, and not for nothing, it also helps us grow.
3:44 Dan Harris? And all of these things take about 30 seconds, and they really do help. You will be supporting me and my team and our mission, and I, as I said, would be immensely grateful. You can find everything we do at danharris.com. It's all right there. Thank you. I mean that seriously. We'll be right back with more show. If you care about supporting independent media, and if you care about being a node of sanity in an insane world, there are a few quick, easy, and free ways that you can support me and my team, which I would be really grateful for. One way to do it is to sign up for my newsletter, which comes out on Monday mornings. It's a little dose of sanity in your inbox at the beginning of a busy week. The second way to do it is to follow and subscribe to the show wherever you're listening
4:29 Dan Harris? or watching right now. That really helps. Three, share your favorite episode with a friend. This is a great and low stakes way to connect with somebody in your orbit. And not for nothing, it also helps us grow. And all of these things take about 30 seconds and they really do help. You will be supporting me and my team and our mission. And I, as I said, would be immensely grateful. You can find everything we do at danharris.com. It's all right there. Thank you. I mean that seriously. We'll be right back with more show. Katie Bowman, welcome to the show.
5:00 Speaker 01 Thanks for having me.
5:02 Dan Harris? Pleasure to have you. Basic question, what is a biomechanist?
5:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, bio is biology. Mech is mechanics, which is a field of physics, which looks at the influence of forces essentially. So when you put the two together, you get how do biological systems, how are they affected by physical forces like pressure and friction, weight and loads and things like that?
5:26 Dan Harris? How did you get into this?
5:28 Speaker 01 It has to do with movement. I was a physics and math student in college and I was also a very sedentary person. And as I was exploring, becoming more active as an individual, I just found that studying those was very still, but two, just very boring. It was a lot of very theoretical point masses and things like that. So I was thumbing through the college catalog and saw this program biomechanics. And it was those things, physics and math, applied to a moving body. And so I had already completed most of the curriculum as far as math and physics had
6:13 Speaker 01 gone, but I was not necessarily a big biology, physiology student. So I started looking at those types of classes and then it allowed me to explore these curiosities I had around my own body, but through a lens that I was already sort of competent and naturally inclined towards, which was the math and physics sciences.
6:34 Dan Harris? You're a different species than I am. I have no facility for math and science, but I'm glad that you do because I have a lot of questions for you about biomechanics. And one of those questions is about your sort of overall thesis, which is, if I have this correctly, movement as nutrition. Can you unpack that?
6:56 Speaker 01 Right. So on one level, I mean it quite literally. You know, when you think about what are the nutrients that humans need, you would list the nutrients, vitamins and minerals, the macronutrients that are found in food. These are things we have to put into our body to make sure our body works correctly. And then there are also non-dietary nutrients. We need exposure to the sun to be able to have our physiological processes working well. And so what I mean literally on one level is movement is not really an optional input to the human body. It affects us. Actually, quite similarly, when you put in a dietary nutrient into your body, what you're doing is you're putting in a chemical compound in this case, but it affects the way your
7:40 Speaker 01 cells behave. And so sunlight is another compound that when you are exposed to it, it creates cellular behavior. And movement is the same. Like, you're not really putting movement only into the larger tissues, muscles and bones and heart and lungs. You're also putting them into the cells of those tissues. And so in this different pathway, but to a same result, we're being fed the movement that we choose to do. And so in that way, it is a literal nutrient to the body. We'll have predictable physiological issues that arise in the absence. That's what the definition of a nutrient is.
8:25 Speaker 01 And then on the more metaphorical level, it would be more akin to... You know, there are plenty of people who get regular exercise, but will have some small area in their body that doesn't feel good. And you might go to physical therapy and they give you real specific doses of movement to put into your body, sort of like a micronutrient, if you will. And so movement calories, like right now, the discussion, we're sort of living in a movement drought because we're a fairly sedentary culture. So when we talk about getting the regular movement that you need, it's more akin to talking about food in terms of calories. Like, just make sure you eat. It doesn't matter what you eat, just make sure you eat something. And that is true when you don't move at all.
9:09 Speaker 01 And also, it's not just movement calories we need. There's these subcategories. If you think about food again, you have carbohydrates, fat, protein. You have to make sure there's somewhat of a distribution across those categories. It can't only be calories when it comes to what we're eating. So when it comes to movement, you know, you might have heard of general categories, like we need to make sure we're getting cardiovascular exercise. We need strength training. We need mobility work for our joints. So it's this idea that we need to distribute a bit the movement we're doing over these different categories, macros. And then if we look at the micros, you could be, you know, someone who gets regular exercise
9:53 Speaker 01 and you get maybe you in cross train. So you're getting different types of movements, but you have one area of your body that's maybe protesting the movement diet that you're having. It's not working for a particular area. And again, that's when we go into refined things like form and load over a very small area of your body. And we know these things to be true. So I've just organized them into a framework that I think maybe will work for people more in understanding how to troubleshoot their own body, which is you have a movement diet. You don't necessarily have only an exercise practice or not. It might not be that simple. So when we look at what your movement diet is, in the same way a dietary nutritionist would look at,
10:37 Speaker 01 what are you eating over the course of a week or a month? And if you said, well, I really only eat this one food. I only eat three times a week and I really don't eat anything else. Then a nutritionist is going to say, well, we need to... Bring in some other food groups here. You maybe need to eat multiple times a day or not only three times a week. And we need ways for you to feel yourself that aren't an entire meal. But maybe you can slip something into your purse, five minutes here. And because I think we're more familiar with the dietary framework, I'm leveraging that a little bit to help people realize that movement really works in almost exactly the same way.
11:13 Dan Harris? Yes. You do make a distinction between movement and exercise. Can you say a little bit more about that?
11:19 Speaker 01 Yeah, so for a lot of people listening, when I say the word movement, in my head, I have this very large category of things that I put into the movement category. But for many people, when they hear that word, really their only relationship to movement is exercise. And so if we created a diagram, you could create a big circle and write movement on the top of that circle. And anything that goes into that circle is anything that changes the orientation of the body, changes the position, changes the location of the body. Those are movements. Exercise is a subcategory of movement. So all exercise is movement, but not all movement is exercise.
12:03 Speaker 01 So it's a much smaller circle. And exercise clinically defined is about a physical activity that you are doing that is, you've pre-selected a mode, you've pre-selected more or less a duration, an intensity at which you're going to be participating in that movement. And you're really doing it with the intention of making yourself physically better. And it's usually done in exclusion of getting anything else in your life done. It's really just isolated physical activity for health.
12:39 Speaker 01 And then there's a third circle that I like to add into this conversation, which is physical activity. I've mentioned it. So if we had the big diagram, movement inside, that would be a smaller circle, physical activity. And that's any sort of movement that utilizes musculoskeletal system enough to burn calories is the easiest way to say it. And then exercise is a subcategory of physical activity. So we have three nesting circles, movement inside of that physical activity and inside of physical activity is exercise. So physical activity could be raking your leaves, but it wouldn't necessarily fit inside of the exercise category. It's still using your musculoskeletal system. In this case, it's not really in the leisure domain like exercise is.
13:23 Speaker 01 It's in the domain of household chores. It's more in the domain of labor, but it uses your body, your limbs, your muscles, your heart and lungs, just like exercise does. But it's not exclusively done for the purpose of your well being. You know, you might choose to ride your bike to work because that's going to be a mode of transportation that uses less fossil fuel. And these are things you care about. But you're using it more for transportation as in the domain of transportation. It's not only to make yourself better. And for some people, it might not even be to make themselves better. The fact that you get healthier doing it is sort of irrelevant. But that's how you break down these different categories. And when you have a more fluid way of thinking about movement, you'll find more opportunities for movement in life.
14:09 Dan Harris? Right. So that's where the rubber hits the road here. If, if we take a broader view in the manner in which you're describing, we can perhaps have a healthy movement diet, even if we fucking hate exercising.
14:25 Speaker 01 Especially if you do, especially if you hate exercise. Because, you know, there's a whole context around exercise. It's sort of been, yes, it's for our well being, but it's been hijacked with a lot of different messaging for a lot of folks. And then of course, because it fits into that leisure domain, you know, there's these domains in which we live our lives, sleep, leisure, occupation, transportation and home. So even though we have radically different lives, these are sort of the compartments of our life. Even if they're not a location, it's sort of a domain in which you are engaging. And because exercise is by definition leisure time.
15:02 Speaker 01 It requires someone have a leisure time. So that can already be sort of exclusionary to folks who might not have the same degree of freedom when it comes to leisure time. Or, you know, we're trying to get a lot of things done in leisure time as well. So then you have competing things that you are both interested in. Something's always going to lose. So when you have this broader definition, this framework for movement, it fits into a lot more domains in life, not just leisure.
15:29 Dan Harris? Yes. It seems like what your goal is to help us move more, no matter what our life circumstances or psychological attributes or various allergies may be.
15:44 Speaker 01 That's right. Movement is for every body. It's sort of a biological imperative. And so when you have a cultural overlay over this biological need, it gets very tricky to figure out how you're supposed to meet the needs in this more cultural container. And so we have a real strong cultural definition around movement, which is exercise, and it's not really working for most people. And so, yes, I am trying to create more keys for people to unlock this very powerful tool, which is for every body, even if the cultural overlay makes it not seem that at first glance.
16:25 Dan Harris? Right. You've written many books, and there are questions I have based on several. But the book I want to focus on, at least for this portion of our conversation, is the one you co-authored with Diana Hill, who's a psychologist who's been on the show. And the book is called, I Know I Should Exercise But. And in the book, you taxonomize seven
16:48 Dan Harris? areas of resistance to exercise, and then lots of subcategories, 44 of them underneath. I don't know if we'll get to all 44, but we're definitely going to get to all seven. The first bucket of resistance to exercise is, I'm not motivated. Some of the reasons under this banner include, I don't care if it's good for me, I just don't want to do it. I hate to sweat, it's boring. I was pressured as a kid, and I'm still rebelling. I haven't done it in so long, I can't start again. So what's the antidote to this genre of resistance?
17:27 Speaker 01 Well, there's not necessarily an antidote to the bucket. The reason we organize it in buckets is because I think for people picking up this book, they're thinking about like, "My reasons have to do with, you know, like, I just don't want to. I don't feel like it." Or, "My reasons have to do with, I don't have enough time," you know, or, "Everyone else in my family is keeping me from moving." Those are the buckets, and that is a valid way for people to organize it. But ultimately, the psychological tools that we explore in this book, you're gonna see repeated no matter the bucket, in general. So, one of the primary ways to cut through, we'll put it in this bucket for now, but we might see it in other containers, has to do with values.
18:11 Speaker 01 When you are dealing with something that would be considered a motivational issue, motivation, as I've learned from working with Diana Hill, you tend to either be moving away from something, you don't want to have to deal with the way something feels, or you're motivated towards something. And so aversion, some of the reasons within the bucket that you mentioned, like, "I don't want to have to feel the pain of starting exercise over again. I don't like feeling sweaty. Someone else made me do this once, and I don't like that feeling that came with having to do it." So, tuning into your own values is a very important tool here.
18:54 Speaker 01 Trying to do something because someone else told you to do it is not usually a good long-term motivator. So, what we're looking for is first identifying your values, so that you can figure out how your interests, your values, the way you want to show up in your life, actually relate to movement as a way to overcome some of the hurdles of the aversions you have to feeling what movement brings up for you. And then, another tool that will show up in buckets again and again is attention. Learning how to not focus, if your attention is like a flashlight,
19:33 Speaker 01 how to not continue to shine your flashlight on the aspects that you don't like, and instead, take a broader perspective.
19:49 Speaker 01 And see more aspects to ultimately, I think, question some of the unhelpful thoughts that we're having around, should or should I not engage with exercise?
20:03 Dan Harris? Okay, let me get to attention in a second, but I want to stay with values.
20:06 Speaker 01 Okay.
20:07 Dan Harris? I think what you're saying is,
20:10 Dan Harris? if you know you should exercise, I think this is a very common situation. People know that they should exercise or move in order to maintain their health and if not, improve it. I know I should do it, but I just don't want to do it. If that's you, one really helpful thing to do is to step back and do an inventory. Like, what do you actually care about? What matters to you really? And once you have that very firmly articulated and you can hold it up as your north star, well, then, exercise might seem like a non-negotiable. It might seem really obvious. Am I articulating your point correctly?
20:55 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think that's right. And health, you know, exercising for someone's health, you know, the title of the book is sort of tongue in cheek. You know, it's really hard to give an adult a should. We just, I think naturally, sort of as grown up, don't like to be told what to do, and kids for that matter. No one really likes to be told what to do in general. So when you can come up with reasons why you yourself want it, and health is very tricky. It's not working out as a strong motivator for most people. One, it takes a very long time to pay off. I mean, health is such a nebulous concept anyway. That's so far out in the future. It's really hard for you when you are, especially if you're still in the exercise box and you're trying to choose between two things. One has a positive payoff right now, tomorrow, in the next few days.
21:39 Speaker 01 And one has a payoff that you're going to add three years on to your life, 27 years from now. That's a real tricky way of making a decision. But if you've identified, for example, the value of productivity.
21:55 Speaker 01 You like to be productive in life and you have recognized that when I do move my body in some way, it's actually easier for me to show up to be a more productive person at work, more productive person during family time. If you have found that you really like to, you want to be connected with others and that you are way less distracted, you're able to really focus on what your child is bringing to you or your partner is bringing to you. Once you've taken care of this biological need, then the motivation, the payoff is right now. The payoff is today for you. And so, yes, it's healthy for you.
22:40 Speaker 01 We all know it's healthy for us. It's not working out for you. We want to find those values first and then two, figure out a way to connect them either indirectly to movement, which is what I just did, those last two examples. It was the idea of I value being productive. If I exercise, I'm more productive. But sometimes you could do it the other way around. Like say your value is, one of my values is service. I like to be of service, is to actually look for movement opportunities that allow me to act out being of service as I'm doing the physical activities. So I'm going to sign up for beach cleanups. When the school sends out those requests or other organizations sign those up, I'm
23:22 Speaker 01 going to see that as, you know, this allows me to be of service and I'm going to be physically active or be outside. Or I'm going to volunteer to teach PE at my kid's school, be on the recess monitor group, or I will go to the food bank and stack boxes because I can get two of my needs met at once. I can show up as someone in service, take care of that, being of service, but it's doing it in a way that physically moves me too. So I am, I think, increasing the nutrient density of that period of time.
23:56 Dan Harris? Yeah, the way I think about it for myself is, well, I'm a mutant. I'm super annoying and I'll just get this out there because I actually like the feeling of exertion, but like everybody, there are days where I don't really feel like going to the gym. And I have at least two values that I invoke. One is I'm a Buddhist and I really believe in this idea of living your life for the benefit of all beings and I want to be as strong and as happy as possible so that I can make other people strong and happy. And it's very obvious to me that if I'm not exercising, if I'm not moving, I suck. The second thing is I'm 54 and I have a 10-year-old son, so I'm kind of an older dad and I want to be around when he gets married and has kids.
24:39 Dan Harris? And so I'm very much doing it for him. If I invoke that while I'm working out, I'll go a little harder, not in a way hopefully that I hurt myself, but I'll give it a little extra juice. So that's what works for me. Having said that, I admitted that I like exertion. Some people hate sweating. What kind of value salience would get somebody sweating who hates to sweat?
25:08 Speaker 01 That's actually one of the reasons in the book. Like, I don't want to exercise, I hate to sweat. And that would be in a bucket that's more about dealing with discomfort. But one of the solutions I offer right off the bat is, there's a lot of ways to move that don't require that you sweat. So if your definition of exercise is so narrow that, like, movement rules is another tool that we're bringing out quite often and quite early in the book, which is, we have some movement rules that maybe we haven't even really tuned in yet that are real tight boundaries around our thinking about things. And that's when we're choosing between, when we think that exercise equals sweat.
25:50 Speaker 01 That there's no other way that I could move my body in even a vigorous way and have it not be sweaty, then there's nowhere to go. Once that excuse lands, you've defined what you don't want, and this thing that you need has that thing that you don't want, and it's like the end of a conversation, it just shuts it down for you. But I start by listing, like, there's a lot of exercises that don't make you sweat. You know, you can choose different gear, different intensities. You know, do something lower intensity then. Because we have a movement diet that we're looking for, and we are in a drought, it'd be like going to a nutritionist and say, "I don't want any apples." It's like, "Fine, there's a giant buffet of food that could meet your needs without eating apples.
26:33 Speaker 01 So we'll just take sweat off the table, and let's build you a plate of movement that does work for you." And then also, we go on to say, once you've gotten yourself moving in some non-sweaty way, now let's look at your aversion to sweating. So that we don't have to sit and wait until you're comfortable with one small aspect of movement that doesn't have to keep you from all these other types of movement. And then you can start working on your relationship with sweating. And it could be not understanding why you're doing it. Physiologically, lay out what's actually happening, might feel that it adds too much time to your day. You know, when we drill into what is it about sweat that you don't like? And it's like, "Oh, then I have to take a shower."
27:18 Speaker 01 It takes up too much time. Then we could look at, well, let's reorganize the time of day in which you're getting your movement, because then you won't have this big problem associated with sweat that you're perceiving is too big of a hurdle to overcome.
27:35 Dan Harris? So does that bring us back to attention? You were saying something before about how recalibrating how we're using our attention can be really helpful if we have an aversion to exercise?
27:46 Speaker 01 Yeah, I'm trying to think of some of the excuses in the book where that was a tool. One was, you know, I would go out and take a walk, but my neighborhood's so ugly. I don't like the people who live in my neighborhood. Or I would love to be able to take a class, but I'm so embarrassed because I'm the least fit person who's going to be there, or I am so uncoordinated. And so what happens is you get hyper fixated on almost a confirmation bias, right? You cast your attention flashlight at the same small pieces. You're not really taking in a full, clear picture of what's going on around you. And so to have someone in that class situation to say, "Look at how other people are moving."
28:30 Speaker 01 You know, instead of looking at yourself and when you're in class like this and you see yourself as the least coordinated person, you're often hyper fixated on yourself. You just keep looking at yourself and not the bigger picture. So to look around and notice who's enjoying moving to the music here, who slightly moved this way instead of that way, you start to get more data points. And when you have a larger data set than this big conclusion that you had come to about yourself and the appropriateness of you for movement or movement for you, starts to get smaller. It's not that different than like, "Don't believe everything you think." You know, it's this idea of taking a bigger snapshot.
29:14 Speaker 01 You're walking around this neighborhood that you hate that's so ugly. It's like, "Well, could you notice the birds? Could you notice the flowers that are poking through? Oh, yes, you know, look, there's this little free take zucchinis from my garden stand next to someone's house." There's a lending library. And you're starting to tune your attention into the way that I look at it is ways that help you sort of debunk these unhelpful messages that your mind is giving you. You are not listening to, I deem this voice, Bob in our family, in my own mind, this, you know, sort of Muppet Show, negative guys heckling everyone else up in the corner and
29:55 Speaker 01 sort of take the volume down on them and amplify the voices of the other aspects of whatever movement situation you're in.
30:02 Dan Harris? That lands for me.
30:06 Dan Harris? Coming up, Katie talks about the role of joy in movement, how to find time to move if you feel time starved, what movement breaks look like, little quick movement breaks, and the technique of stacking your life.
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31:23 Dan Harris? You mentioned looking around at the dance class, who's enjoying it? Enjoyment seems like a really important thing here. So just to reset, we're mostly, at this point in the conversation, talking about chapter one of this book you wrote with past guest on the show, Diana Hill, called "I Know I Should Exercise But", and chapter one is really about how to manage lack of motivation. One of the reasons that falls in this bucket is that there are people who just feel like exercise is boring and therefore they're not motivated to do it. I would imagine you would argue... You might want to look around to find a kind of movement, whether it's exercise technically or not, that you enjoy.
32:05 Dan Harris? So the exercise is boring excuse gets eviscerated.
32:10 Speaker 01 That's right. I mean, again, that's that really tight box around what counts. Part of the exercises I have people do, you know, after you've found your values, the next bit is, as you were alluding to, why is movement meaningful to you? So for you, it was about being able to connect with your family, not just now, but in the future as well. And then I also help people come up with some movement memories of their own, times when they've used their body in a way that brought them joy or pleasure that didn't necessarily fit in an exercise box. Oftentimes, people have to go back to childhood to find this period of time in which movement felt quite free.
32:53 Speaker 01 And when people start writing their movement memories, you know, they'll be like, I loved swinging on the rope and dropping into the river. They'll come up with all sorts of things. None of them look like the exercise, the chore that we perceive movement to be now. And so when you recognize that, maybe you find gardening meaningful. And it's like, well, let's do some vigorous gardening then. You don't have a space, let's join the community garden and start getting on your hands and knees and digging and carrying things around. So it is really important to tune in with the ways that you would like to use your body. Some of them could be from memory, some could be aspirational.
33:37 Speaker 01 Maybe you would like to take a trip with your family members in the future. And it's not necessarily a hiking or biking trip. But you know, maybe everyone's going to go to Europe and they're going to be trekking through these museums. Maybe you love arts, but you don't think that you could be on your feet for two or three hours. It's this idea of going, okay, well, What's meaningful to me is to be able to visit these spaces, do things with these people. And then you start to find what it is about movement that you do enjoy. Instead of that constant narrative, I don't like any exercise. It's such a blunt tool that we tend to wield against any sort of human movement. And remember, that bubble of movement is giant.
34:21 Speaker 01 Doesn't have to be in the gym, doesn't have to be these small modes that maybe some people really love, but most people don't really find relevant to their lives.
34:29 Dan Harris? My grandfather lived to 90, super healthy, super fit, never exercised ever, but was a really active gardener and not like in a fancy type of thing. I mean, he ultimately did have a very nice garden that people would come visit, but it was started because he needed to feed his family. So this was not a glamorous thing. This is a father of five, was a middle manager at the Yellow Pages. Remember the Yellow Pages, those huge
34:54 Speaker 01 I do.
34:54 Dan Harris? Bibles of phone numbers that used to show up at your door. So Robert Johnson was not even the boss, was like a kind of middle manager at this institution that put out these thick books that showed up at everybody's doorstep and became doorstops and gardened every day until he died while gardening, I believe.
35:13 Speaker 01 Wow.
35:13 Dan Harris? So there are lots of ways to stay fit. We've spent a lot of time in this first chapter around people who are not motivated to exercise, but I think it's the biggie. Well, actually, the first two are really the, I think, probably the biggest. But there's one reason for not being motivated that I do want to get you to talk to, which is I'm great at starting exercise programs, but I never stick with them. How do you work with that issue?
35:40 Speaker 01 Right, well, I mean, that's a tricky thing about, you know, when you have a lot of excitement about starting something new, then it quickly becomes not new anymore. I think the actual asker of that question was really asking about, you know, I'm so good for a 30 day program, but after that 30 day program is done, then I don't really have. Ultimately, space in your life cut out beyond that 30 day program because you know, a 30 day program has the end built into it. We don't really acknowledge that the 30 day program is done in 30 days. So when you're signing up for 30 days, you're also maybe effectively signing up for the end of that program. And so when it's not movement that
36:25 Speaker 01 has become distributed throughout your life very well, it's really easy to then stick something else in that particular slot. So I personally am motivated by fresh starts, but I find myself regularly seeking out fresh starts. And so it's not so much that it has an end for me. It's that it's novel and I have paid enough attention to myself and my reasons for doing things to know that I like a little bit of self mastery. And when I've sort of reached the amount of self mastery that I can get to with something over, you know, a few weeks or, you know, even a couple of years, that I'll be looking for that next
37:09 Speaker 01 thing. That's just me. Someone else will have their own relationship with maybe why they are, for example, someone who likes starting new things. It's like back to school. It's all hopes and possibilities at that point. And I am attracted to that. But I have found that the movement that I tend to stick to the most often is that which is woven. Again, not in that leisure time for me, but it's in the movement habits that I started with my family, the ways that we have decided to be active, the more permanent modifications I've made to my home, for example. I've got rings hanging in my living room because I
37:52 Speaker 01 want movement to be more in the fabric of my daily life. It's in the community that I've established for taking walks in the morning or getting together on the weekends. And those larger structures.
38:10 Speaker 01 What they do is they make you less susceptible to the absolute possibility that something's going to come up and thwart your exercise program.
38:23 Dan Harris? So I think what I hear you say there, I think you said a bunch of things. I want to get back to the rings in your living room, but we'll set that aside. But I think the thrust of your argument there was if you're part of a group, if your movement is deeply intertwined with your social life, that really makes it much stickier. Am I right about that?
38:46 Speaker 01 Yeah, I would say if it's woven through your environment and others, community is a big part of that environment. It's really challenging to get regular movement if you can't meet any other needs during that period of time. But if, again, if you can layer in time with other people and your movement at the same time, it moves it out of that leisure time category in many cases. And then there's a lot more time in which you can be taking care of household tasks. Like, I choose to not outsource a lot of movement as far as chores go, so that it's woven through the day for me. So it's about modifying your environment in some ways. And then again, yes, that's community.
39:29 Speaker 01 And spend a little time to take movement a little deeper. So it's not always on the, I just started this. It's more superficial. It's not even woven through my calendar, really. It's almost too discreet. The volume is low and the distribution is not at all.
39:47 Dan Harris? So this kind of brings us to chapter two, which I think is one of the other huge, quite legitimate issues that people have with exercise, which is I don't have enough time. And so I imagine what we've just been talking about, which is thinking deeply about your environment, both your physical environment and your social environment, and actually even your calendar environment as modalities and mechanisms for boosting your movement quotient.
40:20 Dan Harris? Even if you, you know, feel time starved.
40:23 Speaker 01 Right, so there's the very practical. Try to figure out ways to move. While you're getting other things done. And thus. It's going to be a more concrete in your lives, but. What I learned from Diana writing this book was this concept of time affluence. And that time affluence is even really a perception. That we perceive that we don't have enough time. But one thing that increases your sense of time. Is movement. If you exercise regularly, you're able to. We'll say get more done. But it just feels like you've got more space in your schedule. And then another thing too is recognizing.
41:07 Speaker 01 This goes down to those thoughts that we have. It's an unhelpful thought to think I don't have enough time. Now, there is also the reality, the concrete reality of. Just literally not having enough space in your life to do all the things. That's real. But also, I would say that you have to tune in and become aware of. I would say pseudo-busyness. And I'll just use myself as an example. Like I have regularly caught myself. Feeling overwhelmed. I don't have enough time to do all these things and the sense of overwhelm that I have. It starts out as a thought and then I. Sort of race around, I would say, not really being all that.
41:50 Speaker 01 Functional, that the primary thing I'm doing is sort of lamenting that I don't have enough time, even if I have a big deadline and I'm, you know, doing quite a bit of concrete work. I'll catch myself. Being pseudo-busy, creating almost non-urgent tasks. And when I can tune into that, I can use that as a cue to be like, oh, I'm not actually. Getting any work done right now. This is actually a good time for me to take a movement break. Because I can sense that the overwhelm that I'm having in my mind. About not having enough time to do anything, exercise aside, just even the non-exercise things. Is actually a good communication for my body that I need to move. And then that's a pause for me. And I'll take five minutes to move around. And again, it's not a workout.
42:35 Speaker 01 It's not going to be sweaty. For many people right now, when you have that really tight box, it's not going to count towards the exercise that you need to do for whatever reason you're doing it. But it instantly connects me to my body. Those steps, those minutes of movement absolutely count, just like the 60-minute block does. And I have been able to, this helps with distribution, pepper my day with more movement when I don't believe everything that I think, including I don't have enough time.
43:07 Dan Harris? What do those movement breaks look like if they don't look like what one traditionally might define as exercise?
43:14 Speaker 01 Well, I mean, I think everyone would define them as about a physical activity. You know, I might bend over and touch my toes. I might do a calisthenic stretch. I might put myself into a yoga lunge position and go back and forth from one leg to the other. I might step outside and do a brisk walk around the block. Earlier today, before this interview, I just took 10 minutes to jump in place and touch my toes and stretch my spine and go look at something far away to relax my eyes and then close my eyes for a minute and just stood. How balanced do I feel? Just to check in with myself physically. So I think that all of those pieces by themselves, doing a couple pull-ups on a hanging bar next to my desk,
43:58 Speaker 01 would count as what people think exercise looks like. But exercise for many people is about it being compressed. It's about it being long enough in duration to count. And so people regularly don't think of themselves as exercising because they didn't make it to the place. They didn't get into the outfit. They didn't monitor their heart rate while they were doing it. They didn't lift heavy enough. Those are then those very tight movement rules. So I've given myself a lot of compassion and freedom about not all my movement has to look like that. And in doing so, my volume can come up quite a bit.
44:35 Dan Harris? So let's just be super concrete. Somebody's listening to this. They're in their car on their way to work. They've got two or three jobs. They got a bunch of kids. They just really feel, and I sympathize with this person, that they just don't have time to quote unquote, "get to the gym."
44:54 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
44:54 Dan Harris? Based on everything you just said, how could we devise and design a exercise or movement diet for this person?
45:05 Speaker 01 Well, if you can't, let's just say, going to the gym is not going to happen today. So all movement is not off the table for you. And again, the situation will vary depending on what your exact scenario is. But can you, you know, maybe you had a kid stay home and now it's affecting the course of your day. It's like, well, can you roll out a mat and do something for 15 minutes right there in your living room? And you don't have to change clothes. You don't have to have a shower when you're done. What's the part of your movement diet? You know, when I talked about movement diet that really leapt out at you. It's like, oh, yeah, I need to get more walking. If you're sitting in your car, you know, waiting for a doctor's appointment
45:49 Speaker 01 or you're waiting to pick your kids up, could you get out of the car? You know, instead of just sitting and scrolling, you can use scrolling as a cue to be like, I could change the shape of my body in some way right now. I've got seven minutes. I'm going to get out of my car. I'm going to go walk over for three minutes to this far thing that I see, and I'm going to walk back. Or I'm going to just get out of my car and I'm going to touch my toes and stretch my shoulders because this is a category of movement that we need just as much as other categories. Or maybe you have to do a last minute work project. So you're going to take your laptop to something low and you're going to stretch your legs out and open up your hips and do something that feels good to your body
46:32 Speaker 01 while you're also meeting this other task that needs to be done. It doesn't have to be done in the same rigid container that you're used to doing things in. You know, picking up your kids, if it's like all you can think of is it's just a chair shape and you're not paying attention to the 17 minutes here and there that you had complete freedom to get out and move around and do something else, then that's where you put that flashlight and that awareness. You start catching yourself where you are. Whittling minutes through scrolling or other things that you don't necessarily value and choose something that you do value instead.
47:12 Dan Harris? Speaking of values, what if somebody has the story that exercising or even taking a walk is contrary to their values because it takes them away from their family?
47:24 Speaker 01 I mean, that's a big one. People feel selfish. That's a whole bucket. I feel selfish when I take care of myself. I think we see that come up again and again. And I think exercise can be selfish sometimes, right? If you're regularly ditching out your friends and family to get your workout in, when you've made plans and you're regularly cancelling on them. But once you know what selfish exercise looks like, then you can recognize that there could be something else where this is an act of self-compassion. So you can be compassionate to yourself without actually doing harm to others. And this goes back to the values again. Do you show up as a better parent, or a better partner, or
48:07 Speaker 01 a better employee when you're taking care of your body? Then that's not selfish at all. It's the opposite. It's you not only taking care of your needs, it's you showing up to do these other things that you care about even better because you moved.
48:23 Dan Harris? You've mentioned self-compassion a couple of times in the last couple of minutes. As I understand it, it's a big theme in the book. Can you say a little bit more about why it's so important as it pertains to getting ourselves to move?
48:36 Speaker 01 Well, I don't think we tend to have really great relationships with ourselves. I once heard a psychiatrist say, you're in a relationship with the outside world, you're in a relationship with your physical body, and then you're in a relationship with the parts of you that are not your physical body. And I don't think that our relationship with our physical body is, I'll just use the word, very good. And what I mean by that is, I don't think we understand the signals that our body is giving. It'd be like being in a relationship with someone, but you couldn't communicate very well. You rarely checked in to communicate at all. And when you did, there was a lot of mixed signals, cross signals. And I think that that's a relationship with our body quite often.
49:22 Speaker 01 And a lot of our physical experience has to do with how that relationship is going. And certainly, I think our relationship with our physical self is affected by our relationship with our non-body parts of ourselves and our relationship with others. I think all of the three are affecting each other all of the time. But in, I would say, more behavioral psychology, the idea of having compassionate thoughts to yourself and to recognize when you talk to your mind like you would talk to a good friend or a small child, that that is a helpful thing to do.
50:05 Speaker 01 I think of that same way of behaving and extend it out to taking care of yourself. You know, if you were a puppy, if you were a garden, if you were your own child, what would you want to physically do? You would want to water, you would want to weed, you would want to make sure that the dog got some exercise, that the dog got some petting, you know, like that the child wasn't cooped up inside a chair all day long and that there was someone who brought in this element of play. When you look at your physical body in that way, I think a lot of the communications coming from our physical body is, I have not been well cared for physically. And not that there's not necessarily a reason for it.
50:47 Speaker 01 You know, you've got this schedule, we're living in an arcade essentially. It's quite stressful on ourselves. So the idea of prioritizing self-care physically, to make sure that you're meeting these biological needs, to bring down the noise and all the other relationships, I think is really important to recognize this is care. This is basic care for your body. It's not selfish, it's not excessive, it's the bar.
51:18 Dan Harris? Yeah.
51:18 Speaker 01 You know, we're just trying to get us like, just feeding ourselves, get ourselves out of this drought a bit.
51:22 Dan Harris? Yes, if you, as most of us do, care about being a positive player in the world, you do need to take care of yourself. Let me just ask you some more questions about chapter two, which is around feeling like you don't have enough time to exercise. One of the things you recommend is stacking your life. What does that mean?
51:42 Speaker 01 Well, I've mentioned stacking a couple of times. Stacking is a term that comes from permaculture and approach to agricultural growing, which is if you look at your schedule, our to-do list is a list of discreet things. You know, it's sort of back to these domains. You know, I have to do work right now and then I have to make dinner. You know, I got to get my kid from here to there. I got to make sure my kid is being stimulated, so I got to get him to this class. It's all very discreet and done in series. So we have so many needs. I mean, we're not even to wants yet, we're just to needs, that when you are only fulfilling one need at a time, it fills a lot more time.
52:26 Speaker 01 But when you are able to accomplish multiple needs in the same unit of time, I use this term before, you're increasing the nutrient density of a period of time. So it would be the idea of, an example that I'll use quite often is you have to grocery shop, you got your kids in the car, you know, you have to make this meal, you know you need to move your body, you know they need to move their body, but what do you do? You know, you pull into the first parking lot at the grocery store and then, you know, you give your kid the iPad and so they sit down and they can be quiet while you do your grocery shopping, they get back in your car and do it again. And that all took a certain period of time. Or you could park a couple of blocks away, walk hand in hand, not as quickly as you
53:11 Speaker 01 would have gotten there driving, walk hand in hand to the grocery store, pick up a bag of things, now you're carrying it, you're having conversation with your kid as you're doing that, you're still accomplishing the task of getting what you need for dinner, but you're also having this bit of communication. Both of you are outside, you know, you're looking at the birds, you're talking about the day, debriefing from the day, and you walk back and, and maybe if you compared that to rushing into the grocery store to get the thing, you might have doubled or tripled the time from 15 minutes to 45 minutes.
53:49 Speaker 01 But the nourishment that you get from that 45 minutes is much deeper for everyone involved, and you got other things done besides just going to the grocery store. It's different than multitasking. Multitasking is trying to do many things at the same time. This is about swapping a task, to find a task that meets more of the needs in a unit of time. And so I'm always looking to figure out what's the more dynamic option here, not only just for my own body. I'm usually, like I said, involving other aspects of community, figuring out if I could be of service, you know, whatever these domains you have in your life are.
54:33 Speaker 01 And when you look at it as a much broader picture, you end up with, I wouldn't necessarily, time is fixed. You don't get more time, but you get more, not even more things done, you get more needs met. Because we're getting a lot done, but a lot of the things that we're doing aren't necessarily meeting needs. They're not meeting those deeper needs that we all have in common. So I'm regularly looking for ways to, I call it stack your life, of layering in, and we'll do it on the backbone of movement in this particular case.
55:06 Dan Harris? Coming up, Katie talks about how to overcome embarrassment and shame related to movement, getting comfortable with discomfort, what to do when you're addicted to your screen, and the role of ancestral movements.
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56:21 Dan Harris? Let's keep going through some of the categories of resistance to exercise. Chapter 3 is called "I'm Too Embarrassed" and some of the entries in this bucket are, you know, "I'm ashamed of my jiggly body, people might judge me if I stretch in public spaces, I used to be an athlete, now I feel like a loser, I'm in a larger sized body and I'd be judged by others at yoga, I keep comparing myself to people in my exercise class." What are some of the ways to work with this bucket of resistance?
56:52 Speaker 01 In this bucket, attention was a big one. And then also looking at, I'm just trying to think of some discrepancies, like for the embarrassed of my body, we talked about broadening your perspective, you know, not just hyper focusing on yourself, but looking around and looking around at all the other things that were happening to see aspects, what are some aspects that I do like while I'm here? Also in that section was strengthening your so what muscle. This was about like, you know, you get embarrassed about being the least coordinated person in the room, you know, you are, you got the worst clothes or whatever your story is about why you shouldn't be there. In addition to broadening your perspective, it's also like...
57:38 Speaker 01 So what? What's the big harm here about being the person who's least coordinated? So no one has ever, Diana always says this, no one has ever actually died of embarrassment. But many people will have negative impacts from the things that they're keeping themselves from doing because they're embarrassed. So there is benefit to overcoming, you know, the feelings that make you burn up with shame. And then also there's some, you know, back to the jiggly body is like, just start jiggling your body, you know, just desensitize yourself a little bit to that, you know, get on a trampoline. Just let it bounce around and, and by exposing yourself to that a little bit, you realize you're still here, you didn't die.
58:22 Speaker 01 And then eventually you can get some of the payoff from these other movement things that you would like to do. With the athlete, that's another one that I hear quite often in just my own work where, you know, we tend to be really at our peak physicality, I would say, in our teens and twenties, where we don't have that much responsibility and you can really pursue, you know, just hanging out physically with your friends or athletics. And because that is such an identity for you, that when jobs come up and other relationships that keep you away from the level of training that you used to do, for example, nothing else cuts it, everything else pales in comparison.
59:05 Speaker 01 So for that example specifically is going back to the values a little bit, is a thing that you're struggling with here about you not being at 49 in the same physical shape you were at 24, like, is that a realistic expectation here? Is it about that? Or is it about the fact that you are not even maximizing? What you could be at forty nine. Because sometimes we focus on the thing that you have absolutely no control over. It's my age, I can't do anything about it. So I will therefore continue to do nothing. But if it's a reframe a little bit where it's like, you could actually be doing quite a bit right now. And maybe fitness,
59:48 Speaker 01 for someone who's always participated in sports, is not the right avenue of pursuing movement. So instead of getting yourself to a gym just to try to be generally fit, recognizing in yourself, I actually value competitiveness. I value camaraderie. I value collaboration. And so then you would want to make your movement practice look more like the things that you value if just being generally fit wasn't actually what it was all about for you anyway. And then also there's this also checking in to make sure that you're not just sad about being twenty five years older. And then working through that realization of like, yeah, you might have to grieve.
1:00:29 Speaker 01 You might have to recognize that you are not the same as you were. And then sort of move through that discomfort and then get back to taking care of this vessel.
1:00:40 Dan Harris? I like the so what muscle. I joined an exercise group eighteen months ago where I'm almost always the smallest, oldest and weakest person in the room. And that's just like, I've just gotten used to it. I put out lower weights than the other guys and women. Nobody gives a shit. I mean, I keep thinking about, we haven't used this term, but it's come up obliquely, like the spotlight effect. This is a fallacy that we, many of us live with, that we're in the spotlight somehow. But everybody else is in their own movie. They don't give a shit about you. And so that's been really helpful for me. Okay, chapter four is about another very common beef that people have with, I was going to say meditation,
1:01:23 Dan Harris? but it's actually exercise, although I guess it would apply to both, which is that it's uncomfortable. I've got chronic pain. I've got menopause blues. I'd like to walk outside, but it's too cold. I'm in grief right now. I feel like I'm carrying around a load of bricks. I'm on my feet all day for work. And afterwards, I just want to watch a TV show. So what's your advice for this category of non-exerciser?
1:01:48 Speaker 01 Oh, so many different tools in this particular chapter for the menopause. And this could go for any sort of like, I'm just, I physically, I'm not feeling exercise right now. Again, we got this narrow definition of what it is. And I think this would work for grief as well. Not trying to move away from those feelings. Instead, try to lean into those feelings with movement. So some of the advice in the, you know, when you're going through menopause, for example, or I would say any, I mean, just the changes of getting older in general. It can have a grief that's associated with that as well.
1:02:33 Speaker 01 That's not that different than the transition from adolescence through puberty. So it's like, what were you doing during puberty? Like, how did you deal with all of this physical discomfort? When you were 12 and 13 and 14 and 15 and 16 and 17? Because I don't think you can tell a menopausal person any more than you can tell a teenager what would be really good for them right now and just have them do it. You know, like, oh, you'd feel so much better if you would just go outside and take a run. But during that period of time in my adolescence, like, I recognize when looking back, like, I really leaned into listening to the moodiest music, the more melancholy.
1:03:16 Speaker 01 Give me some Moody Blues and I'm gonna go walk on the beach for hours, you know, just feeling sorry for myself. But I would walk for three hours a day, you know? And then, or maybe you wanted to put on, maybe you were just all about the Rage Metal and just, you wanted to punch things. And you had your boxing gear out and that's what you were doing. So the idea is to consider what, I've been in this space before. I've moved, I've transitioned from one stage to another. How do they deal with it physically? What were some of these pieces? Bring them up and then give them life again. So instead of going, you know, maybe going to the gym and trying to be cheerful in a classes and what you need, maybe you need to get on a surfboard and actually not talk to anyone
1:04:00 Speaker 01 for a full Saturday and to spend all day floating around in the water, being active in that particular way. So it's just not trying to avoid those feelings, but instead leaning into them a little bit. For the grief person who just lost their father, I had dealt with losing my father too, and it was a really hard year for me, but my father was an avid walker. And so I kind of created grief rituals that were based on walking and I felt like I could really connect to him in those periods of time. We even had a walking cemetery visit with all of my siblings. And so it's this idea of honoring either where you were, if we're talking about life
1:04:44 Speaker 01 changes, or if you're doing it for grief's sake, honoring this other person through something physical, pointing people to the fact that, you know, dynamic grief is absolutely a thing. The fact that we are grieving in such a quiet, still way, that's sort of a counter to many cultures historically, how they deal with grief. Here where I live in Washington State, there's an organization, Wild Grief, you know, where they take children who've lost siblings or parents on these nature excursions to really, I would say it's another way of shining the spotlight on something bigger than just
1:05:24 Speaker 01 only feeling isolated or whatever they might be feeling inside, but recognizing the world is out here and it's going on around me and being with other people who have been in a similar space. So these are tools against. Somewhat similar, and then a lot of it is also for physical discomfort. Making sure you're scaffolding for action with small changes. Making sure that you're not trying to make giant changes for the people listening who are like, "I'm in chronic pain right now and I can't imagine becoming an all-day mover peppered throughout the day." It's like, well, we're gonna find something small, doable, appropriate for your ability or your context. And then that social support is really important when it's uncomfortable.
1:06:09 Speaker 01 You know, friends and others can get you over the hump, if only for redirecting your attention while you're with them. A walk that might seem terrible alone, when you pair it with someone else, now you're chatting and you're, and you're working on these other aspects. You've stacked it with other interpersonal connection time, being outside. Maybe you're walking to get something done or to go somewhere. A lot's happening in that period of time and it becomes more doable for you.
1:06:36 Dan Harris? Another thing you talk about in this chapter is getting comfortable with discomfort.
1:06:41 Speaker 01 I mean, that is, talking about earlier, you go into a space and you're, you know, you're the only fill-in-the-blank. And there is that emotional discomfort. That's the so what muscle is tempering it yourself. And then there is the reality of physical discomfort. I mean, exercise, the reason it works is because it is micro-damaged to your, to your body. But sometimes people don't recognize that this is the natural outcome of movement, is that it's going to have some amount of physical discomfort. And some of it is just poor training, poor choices. You're, you are not adding movement in small enough steps. There's an anecdote in the book about, you know, the first exercise class I ever went
1:07:26 Speaker 01 to, I had a very motivating teacher. And this was it back in my I love new things phase and I went to this class on a 6 a.m. morning and she did like a thousand lunges and I just picked up the same weight she did and I couldn't walk for five days after that particular class. If that had been my only exposure to movement, you know, I could have been like, I really hurt myself here. It's just to recognize like sometimes you can overdo it in movement and it's temporary and it passes and you use that information to make a different choice about the movement that you're going to do next time. So it's just learning how to consider broader pieces of data and just not doing the same
1:08:11 Speaker 01 thing over and over again, seeing that the buffet for movement's massive.
1:08:15 Dan Harris? Chapter five is called I'm Stuck to My Screen. So for people who feel like they're addicted to their phone, and I think that's probably most, if not all of us. What's the workaround there?
1:08:28 Speaker 01 Uh, some of it's quite practical, reducing the friction. The questions in there were really around the idea of I reach for my phone to turn the alarm off in the morning and then 70 minutes later, I'm still on it, you know, and that wasn't the intention there. So the very practical is get an alarm clock. Don't use your phone as the first thing you put in your hand. And then there's all the, you know, the very practical advice of take your apps off your phone, noticing those types of things. And then also dopamine's a real, it's a real thing. And, you know, when you're comparing the mundane activity of going to do an exercise
1:09:10 Speaker 01 session over the unlimited stimulation that your body can get from scrolling, you're going to have to have a plan before the morning comes. For me, having people that I meet is really helpful in that regard. This is again, that weaving through of community. Like if you've got an obligation to somebody. If you're motivated more by serving others or doing things in a group, then that's a good way to set yourself up is have someone meet you. Another thing is, again, with the friction, you need some reminder from yourself in the past that the future you wants to do these things. So, you know, if your alarm goes off at 6:00 a.m. and you're still scrolling 15 minutes later, then you need a second alarm that it goes off every single day
1:09:55 Speaker 01 that goes on at 6:10 to say, it's time to turn your phone off. You know, it's just a note from yourself. And you're doing that type of thing. You can also look, it's not only in the morning. It would be the way of, you know, like gyms have had televisions above their equipment for decades. Like, we know that if you can sort of entertain someone, then they're much more likely to engage in moving their body if they can sort of zone out a little bit. So if there's a way to put your phone to good use, part of living in an arcade is your phone can also find any movement game that's available. You can put that into your hands.
1:10:38 Speaker 01 You can put on a five-minute, a 10-minute, and a 15-minute exercise routine, preload that onto your phone. So if you know you get off work and you're just like, I'm so exhausted, I'm just gonna look at my phone for a few minutes, that you have a cue, you develop this. The psychological tool here is a cue to recognize that scrolling for relaxation, there's gonna be a point of diminished return. You know, there's gonna be a point at which scrolling or still being on your phone, you'd be like, ah, I can't believe I'm still here. I feel terrible. You know, I don't feel good emotionally. I don't feel good physically. You're gonna let that be a cue, maybe to put down your phone. Maybe that's too big of a step.
1:11:22 Speaker 01 Maybe it's to click over to that five-minute stretching routine that you preloaded and catching yourself in doom scrolling mode is gonna be the cue to do that five-minute routine. And then you're just drafting off of that little bit of momentum of that. Inertia, you've changed your behavior a little bit and you're gonna keep going with that.
1:11:41 Dan Harris? We don't have time to get to the last two chapters. People should buy the book. This is me being selfish as the interviewer here. There was something you wrote in another book, which is called Move Your DNA, that just caught my attention and I'd be curious to hear you say more about it. You point out that the human body evolved to perform specific movements like walking and squatting and hanging and carrying. And yet, in our convenience-centric culture, we don't do a lot of these movements. So why are these movements important and how do we do them more frequently? And what would the benefits be from doing them?
1:12:22 Speaker 01 If I were to draw a food pyramid, you know, if people can think of their government's food pyramid that has at the bottom of the pyramid, the thing that you need a lot of and then all the different food groups go up to the top to the pyramid, which you need just a little bit of. The way I think about a movement diet is making sure we hit these macronutrient categories. And they are varied. I won't go into what all of them are. You name some of them. Walking and squatting and being able to use your arms somewhat like legs. You know, the idea that you can hang from them or crawl around on your hands it needs to get under your house with relative ease. These are movements taken from human populations that live now that don't really have the conveniences
1:13:06 Speaker 01 that we are sort of used to as a culture. They have to subsist. Their days are full of physical activity and most of it's labor. So you have to, one, modify your environment a little bit, you know? And then the other part is making choices. So using your car less, choosing to walk. Any place that's within a half a mile of my house, then I try to make myself walk those places outside of circumstances where there absolutely, absolutely isn't enough time. We talked about the rings that I have in my house. That's to... Create a little bit of a hanging space because hanging, using your arms well, you know, you think of in a sedentary culture, we don't walk very much.
1:13:50 Speaker 01 But if you are going to get from point A to point B, you're going to use your legs. Well, in a culture that has very little making left, you know, you think of like, what have human arms done for eons? On that movement pyramid, making movements is one of them. You know, the idea of processing, processing and plants and animals into foods, actually quite labor intensive with the arms. Cooking can get us a little bit there. If you play a musical instrument, you might be using your arms more. So it's choosing the more dynamic versions of a lot of things. Like I will choose ingredients or food that requires a lot more chopping. For example, a lot more handwork.
1:14:34 Speaker 01 I won't buy pre-graded things because those things, they're whole foods in terms of the dietary nutrients, but they're not mechanically whole any longer. I mean, now we just have DoorDash, like now it just shows up ready to eat. Not only did you not have to hunt and gather it, you didn't even have to go to the grocery store to get it, you know, you didn't have to grade it or prepare it. Now it can be blunt, you don't have to chew it. So there's been a slow reduction of movement in just our everyday life. So I just choose more of the labor-rich versions of things. I talked about setting up a, you know, a computer to work low on the table to stretch your hips a little bit.
1:15:18 Speaker 01 I might work on getting some of my squatting in. We have some lower tables in our house. I've gotten rid of a lot of the high seats in the house in favor for low, more meditation cushion looking things to not just meditate on, but to play games in the evening with my family. Or if I'm going to watch a movie, like we'll be on something that's lower. And that way I'm getting a lot of the exercises that I might go to a specialized class for, like how to stretch my hips, how to make my legs not so tight and my back not so tight. Instead of carving out time. Additionally, to go get that in an exercise leisure time domain,
1:16:02 Speaker 01 I will fit it into the flow of my day when I'm doing things with other people, getting other things done. And it's not to diminish, you don't even have to reduce the exercise time that you have, but it allows you to expand and use your body more diversely. And you ask why it's important. Your body's like a garden, it's watered and weeded through movement. And a lot of what we do for these exercise modalities is actually quite similar. Even though the modalities will differ, you know, there's not that much difference between running and cycling as far as the hip joint is concerned. It's kind of going through the same range of motion and both of those range of motions are similar to how you sit in a chair.
1:16:48 Speaker 01 So I'm trying to distribute the movement throughout my body, distribute the types of movement throughout my body, including the heart and lungs. And fitting in movement throughout the day, choosing movements that don't necessarily look like our, I guess, commonly agreed on modalities of exercise is a big way to make sure I am taking care of what I call the body politic. Your body is a collection of tissues, just like, you know, any government and some exercises work some areas and some, like you might love swimming. It's really good for your heart and lungs and your arms and legs, but your bones, they're not nourished by that activity. So then your bones would not vote for swimming. So then you have to do something for your bones,
1:17:34 Speaker 01 but maybe your knees don't like it. So you're always navigating the body politic when it comes to movement. And when I talk about these ancestral movements, that's the situation that sort of created the body government. And so the way that I have figured out to keep nourishing all these different parts is to make sure a lot of these ancestral movement patterns and macronutrients are being met in some way, some exercise and some just through the activities of daily living.
1:18:06 Dan Harris? Final two questions I ask habitually. The first is, is there anything you were hoping we would cover that we haven't yet?
1:18:16 Speaker 01 We covered a lot. The one thing I would want to add is calling back to earlier on is this idea of, we won't have much time to talk about it, but I'll put it out there. In the same way, we have learned how our body communicates with us about hunger, dietary hunger, the feeling of just having a stomach that's growling for food. And then we've also maybe diversified or gone beyond that a little bit where you can maybe recognize that being snappy with people that you love could also be a sign of hunger. This emotion that comes up can relate to you not being well-fed.
1:18:57 Speaker 01 You know, feeling tired and blue might relate to what you ate, what you chose to eat. Like, so we're understanding that there's these signals that come from our body that are fairly complex, that relate to nothing more than your nutritional diet. That the same goes for movement. We are just not as fluent in these signals yet. We don't know how our very primitive software communicates to you, "You should go take a walk." And that there's a whole relationship here that you can develop through time when you don't always assume that how you're feeling is about something more than just your relationship
1:19:42 Speaker 01 with your physical body. You know, like, I'll just use crankiness again. It took me a long time to realize that when everyone around me was very annoying and I had no patience for anyone, that that was actually my body's way of letting me know that I was undermoved. Because when I go take a walk, then everyone agrees not to annoy me and then I come back and everyone's better. No, just kidding. So, our signals are going to be different, but that is a form of communication that I don't think as a culture we've really explored at all.
1:20:14 Dan Harris? Totally agree. Last question.
1:20:18 Dan Harris? Can you just remind everybody of the names of your books and anything else you want us to know about?
1:20:24 Speaker 01 The book that we discussed mostly today was I Know I Should Exercise But... dot, dot, dot, 44 Reasons We Don't Move and How to Get Over Them. And we talked a little bit about Move Your DNA. I meant nutritious movement. Nutritious movement is where you can dig a little bit deeper into this analogy and also reality of movement as nutrition.
1:20:47 Dan Harris? Such a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you for your time. Appreciate you.
1:20:50 Speaker 01 Thanks so much for the conversation.
1:20:55 Dan Harris? Thanks again to Katie Bowman. Really great to talk to her. Don't forget to check out what we're doing over on our new app, 10% with Dan Harris. You can sign up at danharris.com. We've got a 14-day free trial. If you sign up for the app, you'll find a guided meditation that comes with today's episode. It's called Rewire Your Relationship with Your Body, something many of us need to do. Finally, thank you to everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.
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