You’re Not Lazy: Why Restarting Is Harder Than You Think

Hello and welcome. Today I’m talking about what we can do when we’ve let something slide - a project, a habit, something we really want to continue with but are finding difficult to get back into.

The reason I’ve been thinking about this is personal. If you’ve been following along, you might remember that back in February I came up with a very simple way of tracking my daily activity and exercise - filling the activity rings on my Apple Watch. This worked brilliantly for five months. Every single day I filled those rings. I was upping the goals, feeling really good, noticing improvements in my mood and fitness levels. All was going well.

But then over the summer, my dad was very ill in hospital. He died at the end of August. That period was very stressful and involved a lot of driving to visit him. And the part of my life that I completely abandoned was anything to do with exercise, activity, and moving. There wasn’t a single day over those three months that I filled the activity rings.

Now that’s fine. Life is very lifey. I would not make any decision differently. But what interested me is that right through September and October and most of November, I still hadn’t taken up something that I enjoyed, that I found worked, that was really simple, that I knew helped my mood and fitness.

So I started to look at exactly what was happening.

Why Women Stop (And What We Stop)

The first thing I discovered was that what I did was really common. Women, when faced by some kind of caring or support situation - children, grandchildren, parents, other relatives, community, whatever - are twice as likely to use the time they used to spend on self-care or personal hobbies to support others.

This is clearly a lovely trait. In many ways it’s a privilege to be able to do these things. But what’s interesting is that it’s specifically the time from self-care that has to go. We don’t take time from housework or other things we see as social responsibilities. We take time from things that are almost discretionary - from creativity, from seeing friends, from personal exercise.

The Real Problem: Shame vs Guilt

This leads to why I was finding it so difficult to restart. At the bottom of most of these blockages - this resistance to starting something, this resistance to the energy of creation or activity or living - it’s often shame and guilt.

Here’s the crucial difference:

Guilt is saying, “I didn’t go for a walk today. That was a bad thing.”

Shame is saying, “I didn’t go for a walk today. I am a bad thing. I am a lazy lump that just sits around.”

It is shame, not surprisingly, that is the most appalling corrosive thing in our lives. If I got you to do anything it would be to try and distance yourself from shame as much as possible.

I was clearly feeling shame over not having taken any exercise for three months. And of course that has a lot of history in it for me - I’ve never liked exercise, I was always the last person picked for teams at school. It’s self-fulfilling, these things. So it’s a trigger point for me.

How I Knew It Was Shame

I noticed several things that were indicating I was feeling shame over this. One was the voice in my head. That “lazy lump” quote? That was a voice inside my head. “It’s a late evening. There’s plenty of time to go for a walk and here you are just sitting around like a lazy lump. What is wrong with you?” That’s the kind of thing that had been going through my head.

The second, more visible thing was that I took those activity rings off the front of my watch. Normally they’re behind the clock face so I have a feeling of how much I’d been moving during the day. But I hid them. I hid them because I was ashamed of them. Every time I saw those activity rings not really moving very much, I felt bad. And therefore I distanced myself from it. I distanced myself from the possibility of restarting.

Because the longer that shame goes on, the more difficult it is to go back. It’s often very low-lying and not very obvious. It’s only because I went in there and picked away at it that I could say, “Aha, this is another problem with shame.”

How to Actually Restart

So that actually makes it relatively straightforward to start again. Here’s what I’m doing:

1. Just Say What Happened

The first thing I’m doing is just saying to myself: this is what happened. I did something for five months. Life came along. I stopped doing it. Now I’m in a position to pick it up again. No emotions, no shame. This is what happens. This is what life is like.

2. Start Fresh

Second thing - I am starting fresh. I’m not trying to pick it up where I left off. I’m not going “right, I’m going to get back to my old goals.” Instead, I’m starting fresh with the enthusiasm and energy of a new thing. I’ve reset everything. I brought it back to my watch face. I chose a new watch face. It’s all about saying: right, this is it, we are back to it.

3. Reset Your Goals Really Low

Third, I’ve reset all of my goals. Because for me, the most important thing at the moment is to achieve those daily goals. The actual goals don’t matter - I’m not in training for anything. I just need to be able to tick them off because it’s that ticking off, that completing the rings, that gives me the energy, the boost, the “I have done it” feeling.

If you’re wanting to get back to a creative project, for example, you can just decide you’re doing it for a very small amount of time a day. Set goals that are really small so you’re always going to surpass them, because you can always put them up later. I can always increase my goals later and I’ll feel a bit of patting myself on the back when I do that.

4. Tell Somebody

Next thing: tell somebody. Find a way of involving others. Some things could be very obvious - you might want to exercise with friends, or tell people about something you’re making. You might just want to journal about it. But get it out of your head. Make it something that is not just you in your personal thing.

Even if your friends never mention it again, just you having told somebody that this is your aim - actually, not even an aim, this is what you ARE doing, isn’t this neat, isn’t this wonderful - just the telling of somebody makes it much more likely that you will actually do it.

What I’m Doing Now

So what am I doing? I said: life happened. Wasn’t I lucky to be able to be there with my family? Now I am going to be filling my activity rings. I reset the rings. I put them on the front of my watch. I am celebrating every day that I meet them. I am committing here that this is something I am building into my life.

And what I am protecting around that is the momentum and the energy and the doing - that feeling of keep going forward.

Now, I know that at some other point in the future, life may get in the way again. And really what I’m wanting from this experience is to get my restarting muscles more active so that I don’t feel that if I’ve fallen off whatever it is that I wanted to do - healthy eating, reading more, writing something, anything that requires daily input over a long time - I want to be able to say: right, I stopped that for a while, here I am starting it, without that guilt, without that shame creeping in and making everything so much more difficult.

Over to You

I would love to hear if you have any suggestions on restarting projects, getting back to routines, beginning again. Leave them in the comments.

And me? I’m off for a walk.

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