Your thoughts create your emotions

A short history

image says "shift happens" in scrabble tiles

A key principle of what I am sharing on this website is that our thoughts are a driver of the emotions we feel about exercise. Fighting against your brain and trying to just change your behaviour to regularly do something you hate is difficult.

And it’s also not surprising that you hate exercise if you’re in a larger body.

Humans are a pack species, we absorb the messages and norms we grow up around. We don’t have to be told explicitly that fat people exercising is disgusting, (although many of us are directly told that). But more often its seeing fat people running as the butt of the joke in a hundred movies and TV shows and or seeing characters grossed out by fat sweaty characters.

Those thoughts in turn create feelings of shame, disgust and anxiety about exercise.

And why would you want to jump out of bed and do something disgusting or something you’re ashamed about?

But, the good news is you are 100% responsible for your thoughts, and it’s so much easier to change your thoughts than to bully yourself into an exercise routine you hate.

“Change your thinking” can sound a little woo and maybe too much like an affirmation to work. But I promise its based on a wide range of psychological and sports coaching research. I’m working on a long page with lots of links to journal articles, but in the meantime, here is a short summary of the ways throughout history people have tried to explain how much our thoughts shape our reality.

Managing your thoughts over time

5th Century BCE

“All mental phenomena have mind as their forerunner; they have mind as their chief; they are mind-made.”

— The Budda, Dhammapada Verse 2

1st Century CE – Ancient Greece

“Keep in mind that it isn’t the one who has it in for you and takes a swipe that harms you, but rather the harm comes from your own belief about the abuse. So when someone arouses your anger, know that it’s really your own opinion fueling it.”

— Epictetus, Enchiridion

16th Century CE – the European Reformation

“I knew that I was a substance the whole essence or nature of which was merely to think, and which, in order to exist, needed no place and depended on no material things. Thus this ‘I,’ that is, the soul through which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from the body”

— Descartes’ Discourse on Method part four

1920’s – founding of psychology

“Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations.”

— Alfred Adler

1970’s – sports performance coaching

“If you tell yourself often enough that you are a poor [tennis] server, a kind of hypnotic process takes place….In short, you start to become what you think.”

– W. Timothy Gallwey, the Inner Game of Tennis