"It's not that we don't have enough time; we just have other priorities."
If you ask us why we go to the gym, you’ll definitely get a wide range of answers from different people. Some want to look good; others have a health issue that exercise could help resolve; still others say that the effort makes them feel good. Some work out to achieve a specific athletic goal.
Let me give the example of drinking coffee. On some days, I’ve probably had 99 cups of coffee. I haven’t counted exactly, but there have been a lot—though I believe it’s under a hundred. The first signal in my head that prompts me—and probably many others—to drink coffee is that we’re having breakfast. For many of us, eating breakfast is the signal that automatically sets our feet in motion toward the coffee maker. 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 this desire is to turn on the coffee maker, and we’re willing to put up with any inconveniences that come our way in the name of satisfying that desire.
In his book *Atomic Habits*, James Clear outlines a model that explains our behavior and choices. First, a signal or cue reaches our brain, triggering a craving to do something. If this desire is strong and we have the opportunity (or create one for ourselves), an action (response) follows, which in turn is followed by a reward—the very reason we wanted to perform that action in the first place.
For some reason, whenever I feel like drinking coffee, the coffee machine seems to have a whole list of demands—add water, add beans, change the water filter, clean out the grounds. Since my desire for coffee is so strong, I’m even willing to endure the coffee machine’s 15-minute cleaning cycle. The first sip of a strong cappuccino with delicious milk foam makes me forget all the previous hardships. That little caffeine kick to the brain has become a necessity.
Sounds a bit like a drug addict, doesn’t it? At the same time, at another location, someone wakes up and feels their hands shaking and feeling terrible (hint). They wish their hands wouldn’t shake and they wouldn’t feel so bad anymore; instead, it could feel good (desire). Luckily, they know how to be happy. You have to steal your aunt’s silver brooch or a friend’s laptop, take it to a pawn shop, give the money to a dealer you know, and then, around the corner, shoot up into a vein (the answer), and a pleasant sensation washes over your body (the reward).
In that sense, we’re all a little bit like drug addicts—everything we want to do is driven by that same cycle. Whether it’s eating and drinking, sex, watching TV, or swiping through your Instagram feed. Of course, cultural and physical activities like reading, going to the theater, or working out also fit into this list.
When it comes to working out, however, there’s one major difference. I don’t know anyone who knows anyone who regrets working out after the fact. That said, I also don’t really know anyone who knows anyone for whom working out doesn’t require any effort at all. Unfortunately, exertion is unpleasant. So, in our minds, there’s a constant weighing of the pros and cons before we even get to the gym.
Who still remembers the scales in stores back in the Soviet era? After standing in a long line and finally asking for 300g of Doktorivorst, the clerk would drop two little black “bombs” on one side of the scale —100 and 200 grams—and on the other side, they’d cut a suitable piece from the sausage link. If the clerk was a pro, that piece of sausage would be just about right. Sometimes you’d get a little extra sausage, and to balance the scales, a couple more smaller weights had to be added to the other side. “Can I have 320 g?” was a pretty common question, and of course, 320 g was fine. After all, the store didn’t have sausage every day. The clerk would wrap the sausage in white paper and write “77 kopecks” on it with a pen for the cashier’s reference. At the village store, where the same clerk also worked the register, he would, of course, move the corresponding number of tokens on the counter.
It’s the same story with exercise as it is with sausage. We pile our discomfort onto the scale like weights (it’s raining outside!), along with the enjoyment we’re missing out on despite the reruns of *Sex and the City*, and we think about the sore calves we’ll have tomorrow. Inevitably, we also have to place the time we dedicate to our family and other enjoyable hobbies on that scale. If those “weight bombs” add up to more than a sausage’s worth, then the workout gets skipped yet again.
In November 2017, together with personal trainer Britta Alep and Kristjan Kimmel, then-marketing director at SportID, we conducted a small survey among SportID users, who numbered just over 32,000 at the time (today there are four times as many on Stebby). The results showed that 98% of the 2,700 respondents said they value an active lifestyle. 66% of all respondents acknowledged that, unfortunately, they did not consider themselves active enough. 88% of all respondents said that if they had the opportunity, they would exercise more. We also asked people to list the obstacles they currently face. More than half of the respondents mentioned that their main concern is a lack of time—and we didn’t even offer this as a multiple-choice option; instead, their own fingers typed those three magic letters—A-E-G—into the Google Form field.
Clearly, this isn’t really a lack of time, but rather a matter of setting priorities. Former U.S. President Barack Obama managed to work out for 45 minutes every day. I find it quite hard to imagine that in a small European country called Estonia, 1,500 people happened to respond to our random survey—people whose lives are filled with more and more important tasks, so their schedules are even more packed than Barack Obama’s and they simply don’t have time to exercise.
Back to weighing sausages. Martin Helme has said that he’s fighting to ensure that, in negotiations within the governing coalition, he grabs the longest sausage for himself—and that we can’t end up with the shorter ones. Our task now is to figure out how to ensure that we get more sausage on the scale than those black weight blocks on the other side.
This post is the first chapter of an e-book written by Marti Soosaar titled *A New Beginning*. You’ll definitely be able to read the following chapters here on this blog in the future, but if you can’t wait, you can download the e-book HERE
