The ANATOMY of Laziness.

Hi,

welcome to my blog, sanjuruns. As you can make out, my name, rather nick name is sanju. And I love running. So, I thought, I would keep it simple and write about my running adventures, discoveries and learning, all about them here.

This is the first blog post that I wrote when I started writing it. And as I have completed 3 years of survival on this blog, I am now refurbishing it and making it better.

This blog post is about one of the most common phenomenon that anyone who gets interested to become healthy and fit will find resistance towards – an inertia to action. Tom wants to be fit. Dickens wants to be fit and even Harry wants to be fit. But, they all aren’t.

Can you guess the single most dominant reason for them not making it to the tracks for morning run? Wonder what would be repelling them so much that they are willing to sacrifice their health for! It’s nothing but laziness. Ever wondered about the anatomy of laziness.

Let’s explore the several causes that make up the world of laziness.

Learn the science of action

Living in the world of technology where we believe in only what we see, it is unfortunate that we lack the common knowledge of neuroscience. Our laziness could be the result of years of training our mind to work mindlessly.

I mean we remain ignorant to our own mind and it’s mechanisms. Our mind makes decisions based on the rationales given to it. And something that’s foreign to our lifestyle will remain in the waiting hall forever.

So, the first step towards lifting your laziness is to breed familiarity with the task you don’t want to be lazy about. Here in this case, it means not lazy for a morning run. It’s going to take time to develop the connection with running if you have never run so far in life.

Breed familiarity

Let me give you the solution to your problems here itself. So, if you wish to breed familiarity with running, then spend time with it. I mean don’t run but simply hang around. Get up and go for a walk at least. Every day. Don’t like running, that’s Ok. But tell yourself that you will give time for it.

And go brainless for the next few days. Don’t ask, don’t question, don’t reason and don’t imagine the ifs and buts. Simply get up everyday in the morning and go out and spend time walking, strolling or whatever!

Our problem is we reason too much. And eveytime. So, just don’t do that. Schedule your time for going out and spending time. That’s it. Work mindlessly for the next few days.

As you repeat the same thing over and over again, the mind starts to accept rather than reject. In few days time, your mind will not mind sparing few minutes every day to be out in the morning! This is called taming the mind. Or what I captioned it as: breeding familiarity with the very first element.

Create new circuits in the mind

As you repeat the action, you will be developing what neuroscience calls, the neural pathways in your brain. And these neural pathways are about the maps that your mind will store. These maps are the codes that get stored for running in the morning. And all this is known in the common man’s language as – a habit.

A habit is doing an action with a pre-programmed algorithm. You don’t even think about many actions that you do in a day. For example, brushing your teeth. Or taking shower every morning. All these are habits. Running in the morning or simply running as such can be inculcated into our lifestyle.

Laziness is caused due to lack of clarity.

Laziness is a very frivolous term. It does not have a clear meaning. It is simply a state of indecision. You may look at it as a state in which your mind is not made up to do a certain task. And this could be due to several reasons/factors. The most commonly sighted reason is lack of time.

These days we have a plethora of choices to pick up tasks from. Many of the tasks that we do are part of a mechanical living. And then there are tasks that do require discretion. But, if you don’t distinguish between them then you will fail to prioritize your tasks.

And this could lead to laziness and procrastination. We keep shifting the health and fitness related tasks to a future basket because we are almost always in the firefighting mode of living. Our time is spent in simply completing the tasks that come our way. And this is due to the fact that we have not learned to exercise our discretion.

It took me an awakening in my life to factor in health and fitness related tasks. But, with most of us, we don’t keep it in our essential tasks basket until it turns into an emergency.

we don’t keep it in our essential tasks basket until it turns into an emergency.

Sanjuruns

The awakening process convinced me that my health is my daily responsibility. And once that became clear to me, I pushed it into my emergency and essential tasks basket and ever since then, I have always found time to run in the morning.

Buddy with someone

Here it means that you may choose to associate with a group of like minded people. In my case, I have failed to find the local gang, even remotely interested to run or walk. Because health is not a part of our social culture in our country. Largely NO! Very unfortunate!

So, we turn lazy to go for morning run despite knowing that this is what we need to do. Simply because it is not part of social behavior. So, what I did is that I took on the social media and started to share my ideas and opinions on fitness and running to people in the far corners of the globe who care!

You don’t need a physical buddy. A mental buddy can also be wonderful. So, I went to Instagram, I went to Facebook and I went to my WhatsApp to connect with people. Now, my laziness is deep buried!

I am clear and my mind is fertilized by my time spent of social media browsing through the running stories of my mental buddies.

Laziness is due to lack of energy

Another reason due to which you may face laziness in exercising and running is: lack of energy.

When we are low on energy or have no energy left to lift ourselves up, we prefer to just lie down. Now, this lack of energy could be either of the forms : mental or physical. Lack of physically energy is about exhaustion from work, travel etc. And you might need to eat something to get your cells on fire. So, you can remove the laziness due to lack of physical energy by taking energetic and nutritious diet.

And the lack of mental energy is equally relevant. When you lack that, you won’t be able to perform tasks. Such kind of exhaustion is about mental stress and the fatigue caused due to the stress. The studies have revealed that we are more fatigued mentally than physically. And therefore, we need to energize ourselves by being able to manage our stress.

Running may cause to help you with both: regulation of your physical and mental energy but you do need to pump in some from the outside to Kickstart the process. So, you can derive the mental energy by :

Watching the motivational channels on YouTube

Listening to pep/inspirational talks and stories on various social platforms available these days.

Or simply connect with the like minded people to get the energy flowing.

Conclusion

So, these are some of the mind hacks to overcome the inertia against running and run away from laziness. Do you feel lazy to go for a run or is it something that excites you? Blah, blah… Waiting to know how I ace the laziness?