I often write this Substack on the themes I’m hearing from clients, students in workshops, and colleagues in the fitness and wellness spaces. Over the last few months I’ve been consistently hearing something new ~ and I want to talk about it.
The problem with talking about it?
People don’t want to… but we have to if it’s going to get better.
The More|Better substack is a weekly dose of fitness, wellness, and wellbeing content here to help you make sense of all the nonsense. Written by personal trainer, wellness coach, and positive psychology practitioner Darlene Marshall.
We want to go “back to normal”
A few months ago I started hearing this refrain: “I can’t get myself to do all I did before… you know… the pandemic”
It comes with an eye roll. A shrug. A sigh.
It’s often partnered with counting calories, macros, and a longing for whatever workouts they were doing in “the before times”. They report doing it for a day, maybe a few… but the inevitable backslide to the current status quo.
A desire to bootstrap ourselves to wherever we were this time 4 years ago.
It’s understandable, but unfortunately misguided.
We can’t (because that’s not how people work)
You are in the process of life and living.
And that process only goes one way: forward.
We don’t get to rewind the tapes. Maybe, if we’re lucky, we have the resources and the self awareness to be reflective about what we’ve been through (most people in history haven’t had that luxury, after all). We can look back, journal our way through, and plan ahead for the future.
But that’s not really what we want, is it?
We want to pretend it didn’t happen. That it didn’t make us physically and emotionally (other than the virus). That we didn’t lose friends, jobs, family members… ourselves.
But we can’t.
That’s not how people work.
We need to build something new where we are
When clients and students open up about this it’s coupled with a desire to take all the old structure of their lives from 2020 and try to make it fit in 2024.
The unfortunately truth I’m to tell them: it doesn’t work that way.
What works instead is to own where you are now and make gradual changes that work for this moment, this time, this life.
Is it super fun? No.
But it is far less frustrating than what they’ve been trying.
Think about it like getting dressed. Do you try to put on all of your clothes at once, in one complete gesture? Or do you go one article at a time, layering up?
Building lifestyle habits works the same way - especially after something as disruptive and traumatic as a global pandemic, multiple wars, an unstable economy, and social unrest.
Here are a few resources to get you started if you’re struggling with rebuilding your own sustainable, healthful, positive lifestyle changes: