So You’ve Fallen Off the Wagon? How to Get Started Again
An SPA Community Post for paid subscribers who want to enjoy Sustaining Physical Activity
Today has been labelled ‘Quitters’ Day’ by the exercise app Strava, because the second Friday in January is when people’s adherence to New Year’s exercise resolutions starts to seriously falter. But stopping a ‘streak’ or new exercise regime isn’t necessarily a cause for concern - as long as you’ve learned how to be comfortable with starting up again.
New Year’s Resolutions, or any new health and fitness regimes, often take the form of extreme overhauls of entire lifestyles. Having not been very active at all through December, we might plan to begin a six-day-per-week exercise programme in January, or a ‘Run Every Day’ streak, and/or a dramatic dietary change. But when we’ve stuck at this new way of life for a week or so, and we’re started to become tired and hungry, we might be tempted to skip a scheduled workout - and then what addiction therapists call ‘the Abstinence Violation Effect’ kicks in. This is the attitude that, if we fall off the wagon once, then all our hard work’s gone to waste and we’ve sullied our new perfect bodies so we might as well give up entirely.
But there are practical, physical and psychological ways to counter this tendency, and, in this post, I’m going to talk about how we can get started again after faltering with an exercise resolution.
