“It’s not that we don’t have enough time; we simply have other priorities.”
If you ask why we work out, different people are sure to give a wide range of answers. Some want to look good, others have a health concern that exercise could work wonders for, and some say the exertion makes them feel great. Others train to achieve a particular athletic result.
Let me use coffee drinking as an example. On some days, I have probably drunk 99 cups of coffee. I haven’t counted exactly, but there have been a lot of them—though I believe fewer than a hundred. The first cue in my mind that prompts me, and probably many others, to drink coffee is eating breakfast. For many people, breakfast is the cue that makes their feet head towards the coffee machine almost of their own accord. The moment the smell of fried eggs reminded us of coffee, we felt an irresistible urge to grab a hot, steaming cup of cappuccino. In other words, our response to that urge is to switch on the coffee machine, and we are willing to put up with any inconvenience that stands between us and what we want.
In his book “Atomic Habits,” James Clear presents a diagram that explains our behaviour and choices. First, some kind of signal or cue reaches our brain, creating a desire to do something—a craving. If that desire is strong and we have the opportunity, or create one for ourselves, it is followed by an action—the response—which in turn leads to a reward: the reason we wanted to take that action in the first place.
For some reason, whenever I want coffee, the coffee machine suddenly has a whole list of needs: add water, add beans, replace the water filter, clear out the residue. Because my craving for coffee is so strong, I am even willing to endure a 15-minute coffee-machine cleaning cycle. The first sip of strong cappuccino with velvety milk foam makes me forget all the preceding hardship. That little caffeine kick in my brain has become a necessity.
Sounds a bit like a drug addict, doesn’t it? Meanwhile, elsewhere, someone wakes up with shaking hands and feels awful (cue). They want their hands to stop shaking and to stop feeling awful; they want to feel good instead (craving). Fortunately, they know how to make themselves happy. All they need to do is steal an elderly aunt’s silver brooch or a friend’s laptop, take it to a pawnshop, give the money to a dealer they know, then inject a syringe into a vein around the corner (response), and a pleasurable feeling washes over their body (reward).
In that sense, we are all a little like drug addicts: the same cycle drives everything we want to do. Whether it is eating and drinking, sex, watching television or scrolling through our Instagram feeds with our thumbs. Naturally, the list also includes cultural and physical pursuits such as reading, going to the theatre and working out.
There is, however, one major difference when it comes to exercise. I don’t know anyone who knows anyone who has regretted doing a workout once it was over. On the other hand, I barely know anyone who knows anyone for whom working out requires no effort at all. Unfortunately, exertion is unpleasant. So before we make it to a workout, there is a constant sausage-weighing calculation going on in our minds.
Who still remembers the scales used in Soviet-era shops? After standing in a long queue and finally getting to ask for 300 g of Doktor sausage, the shop assistant would place two black weights on one side of the scales—100 and 200 g—and cut a suitable piece from the sausage for the other side. If the assistant was a pro, the piece would be more or less the right weight straight away. Sometimes you got a little extra sausage, and a couple of smaller weights had to be added to the other side to balance the scales. “Is 320 g all right?” was a fairly common question, and of course 320 g was fine. After all, sausage was not available in the shops every day. The assistant could then wrap the sausage in white paper and write “77 kopecks” on it in pen for the cashier. In a rural shop where the same assistant also worked the till, they would naturally move the corresponding number of counters on the abacus.
Working out is much like weighing sausage. We pile our discomfort onto the scales as weights (it’s raining outside!), along with the pleasure we will miss when we skip a repeat episode of “Sex and the City,” and the thought of our aching calves tomorrow. Inevitably, we must also place time with our family and other enjoyable hobbies on those scales. If those weights add up to more than the piece of sausage, the workout is once again left undone.
In November 2017, personal trainer Britta Alep, SportID’s marketing manager at the time Kristjan Kimmel, and I conducted a small survey among SportID users. There were just over 32,000 of them then (today Stebby has four times as many). The results showed that 98% of the 2700 respondents valued an active lifestyle. 66% of all respondents admitted that, in their own opinion, they were unfortunately not active enough. Of all respondents, 88% said they would do more sport if they had the opportunity. We also asked people to list the obstacles currently standing in their way. More than half said their main concern was a lack of time. We did not offer it as a multiple-choice option; their own fingers typed those magical three letters—A-E-G—into a Google Form field.
Clearly, this is not really about a lack of time, but about setting priorities. Barack Obama managed to work out for 45 minutes every day while serving as president of the United States. I find it quite hard to imagine that our random survey in a small European country called Estonia happened to attract 1500 people who have more—and more important—things to do in their lives, making their schedules even busier than Barack Obama’s, and who simply have no time to work out.
Back to weighing sausage. Martin Helme has said that, during negotiations within the governing coalition, he fights to grab the longest sausage for himself—and surely we can do no worse. Our task now is to work out how to get more sausage onto the scales than black weights on the other side.
This post is the first chapter of an e-book written by Marti Soosaar called “A Fresh Start.” You will also be able to read the following chapters here on the blog in the future, but if you can’t wait for them, you can download the e-book HERE
