Do you ever feel guilty after missing a workout?
If you have ever slept through an early morning alarm and missed a workout, you know the thought is intrusive all day. When you skip a workout, the session isn’t just forgotten. Unfinished tasks weigh on your mind, mentally distracting you with feelings of guilt.
Most of us have experienced this.
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Almost 100 years ago, Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik discovered the brain instinctively holds on to unfinished tasks, causing you to mentally juggle these thoughts of missed actions. Postponing an item on your to-do list, not completing a chore or missing a workout becomes an unresolved issue, or an “open loop,” that creates mental friction.
This is known as the Zeigarnik Effect, and it does not stop with a single skipped workout or missed task. The impact of incomplete actions accumulates over time, with each missed day becoming another open loop.
The exercise you didn’t complete – and the goals you are not achieving – become unresolved problems. These inactions lead to what psychologists describe as “exercise debt,” increasing the wasted thinking process.
This does not occur if there is a planned day off from exercising or an easy day. Adding a day off or at least a mobility day in the middle of the training week may help you negotiate these intrusive thoughts better. Recovery days can help mitigate this effect.
The Zeigarnik Effect and exercise debt are not just about skipping workouts, though. It is everything you put off until another day. Every time you procrastinate from checking a task off on your to-do list is fair game for these constant reminders of unresolved actions. This can become added stress.
The Mounting Effects of Exercise Debt
As exercise debt accumulates in every area of our daily lives, its impact extends beyond just our motivation to get things accomplished. Each missed session, skipped meeting or unpaid bill compounds feelings of stress, gradually increasing the mental challenges associated with continued inactivity. This growing sense of unfinished business makes it increasingly difficult to return to your routine, as the weight of these unresolved problems increases over time.
Eventually, this pattern can trigger consistent procrastination. Instead of feeling motivated to exercise, you may begin to perceive the idea of working out as overwhelming. Doing or even thinking about exercise is now associated with stress and anxiety, not stress-mitigating fun.
Worse, you can quit scheduling workouts altogether to try to avoid the intrusive thoughts and the guilt of skipping. This obviously is not the answer. To break free from the cycle of exercise debt requires closing these mental loops, not ignoring them.
The goal is to take immediate and manageable steps toward completing tasks, thereby lightening the mental load and making it easier to get back on track. It does not have to be a perfect workout. It just needs to get done.
How to Stop the ‘Open Loops’ and Close Them
Start checking off events on that to-do list and schedule as little as 10 minutes to get started. You can close these “open loops” by doing a few minutes of something that you skipped. If you skipped a workout, go for a 10-minute walk and perform squats and push-ups every two minutes.
This can help alleviate or reduce intrusive thoughts about missing workouts. Here are more strategies to “close the loops”:
- The key to overcoming this cycle is to close the open loop as soon as possible and as easily as possible. Do something, even if only for 10 minutes.
- Don’t double up. Attempting to make up for missed workouts by planning larger or more intense sessions only adds more unresolved tasks. Keep it simple.
- Add a floating day off. Somewhere in the middle of the week, make it a rest day, day off or mobility day. This way, you can easily reschedule a skipped workout. Plan five workout days each week – they don’t have to be consecutive – with two flexible days off. Have some schedule flexibility.
Our daily decisions have a profound impact on us mentally and physically. Focus on small, consistent progress rather than perfection. If your workout is scheduled to last 60 minutes but you only have 30 minutes available, do it anyway.
Even though it’s not what you originally planned, your brain will consider it complete. By shifting your perspective and embracing incremental progress, you can reduce the mental barriers that keep you from returning to consistent activities.
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