Your Cells Don’t Feel Inspired
How To Reconnect Your Aspirations With Real Progress
Does this series of steps sound familiar?
See something inspiring and feel a powerful surge of motivation course through your veins.
Immediately go do related activity with full enthusiasm.
During said activity or soon after: Injure yourself/feel immense muscle soreness or discomfort/feel overwhelming frustration at lack of skill, ability or results
Become disappointed, lose motivation
Return to old habits
Rinse and repeat
Unfortunately we’ve all done this, and without conscious intervention, we’ll all keep doing it until the end of our days. I believe one of the main reason for this tragic cycle is the time frame in which your conscious mind changes is virtually instant and your imagination is virtually limitless, while the rate that your physiology changes is slow, and the confines in which it can change, has rigid limitations. Does this mean that you will never reach your goals and should stop trying? YES. Just kidding, of course you can! But it does mean that you need to accept that the time frame in wish you desire to change, is much shorter to the amount of time that it will take to change.
What is Inspiration?
Inspiration can be thought of as a positive emotion that has three main qualities[1]:
Evocation: Feelings are evoqued spontaneously. You can’t will yourself into feeling inspired, you are struck by it.
Transcendence: Inspiration involves a clear awareness of an ideal that goes beyond current limitations
Approach Motivation: Inspiration causes you to want to act to create this new transcendant vision.
Put basically, when we feel inspired, we are driven to feel the need to strive towards a clear new ideal. Inspiration isnt a rational decision we make. Inspiration generates the desire and motivation to change, it is the ignition that gets the gears turning. If inspiration makes us know the direction we want to go, it doesnt tell us how long it will actually take to get there, and it doesnt necessarily guide us there safely.
Understanding Limitations
There is an absolute limit to what we can actually change about ourselves. This limit isnt the same for everyone, and your limitations will shift over time. Different limitations also interact with each othe, some of the limitations that you need to consider when trying to reach a fitness, physique ir health goal include:
Adaptation limitations: Different parts of your body have different potentials to adapt. Once you’ve reached full adulthood, it is very unlikely that your skeleton will grow. Muscle appears to have a rate of diminishing rate of return, the more you gain, the slower you gain it. Some features of us can change quite rapidly to huge magnitudes. All of us have the potential to live at vastly different levels of body fat. Knowing what you’re physically capable of doing will help you temper your goals from unattainable heights to something truly achievable. these adaptation limitations vary between us all, but having a goood guideline of the average helps.
Time-Availability Limitations: If you wanted to master guitar, would this be more likely if you had 1-hour a week to practice, or 1-hour a day to practice? The same goes with fitness, those who can spare a chunk of time every day for focused and committed training will see faster results. I know that there isnt a linear relaton to time invested and speed of improvement, but more exposure is almost always better.
Time-frame Limitations: As stated earlier, biology is a slow process, and if you want big improvements, you’re going to have to understand that the process may take months to years to be finished. This doesn’t mean it will take you months to see any change, but dont expect to wake up after your first week of gym with your body transformed like Tobey McGuire in Spiderman.
Recovery Limitations: If you aren’t giving your body the time and resources to recover, it wont be able to perform to a level that will cause aptations, and it wont be able to respond to the given training. make sure that if you want quicker results and a higher ceilling, that you’re managing your stress and sleep.
Mental Burden Limitiations: Generally, we dont like change and we avoid discomfort. Creating a change in your body requires you change your habits and expose yourself to the uncomfortabe edge of your capabilities. Each of us has a tipping point where we can’t sustain a certain magnitude and pace of change. You may have a lower pain threshhold, you simply might not want it that bad. There’s no shame in either, but you need to accept that the less uncomfortable you’re willing to be, the less likely you will be to do something special.
What to do when you feel inspired?
Dont Act.
Plan.
Inspiration is a wonderful feeling, and being open to inspiration can lead to great things. But when it comes to your body, understand that inspiration and results occur on opposite ends of the timescale. You can’t force yourself to be inspired the whole duration it takes you to reach your goal, you probably won’t even feel motivated for the majority of that time. To take full advantage of your fleeting inspiration, create a detailed plan, create contingency plans if those plans fail, create a proposed schedule of how long it will take to get there. And then promise yourself to follow the plan. You’re not a person who breaks your promises are you?
Inspiration shows you the destination
Knowledge creates the safe path there.
Discipline keeps you on the path.
Yes I know this all sounds like some motivational poster, combined with some tacky graphic. Perhaps the phrase is accompanied by a picture of a lion, or a mountain (or the Wolf of Wall Street for some reason). But it really takes more than simply visualising and wanting something to get it. Good things take time, and no matter how strong your willpower is, your mind will always genuinely struggle to stay focused on the same destination for significant amounts of time. Physiological adaptations take a long-ass time, with a tonne of consistency needed. Use that burst of energy and motivation to do the hard work of figuring out how you’re going to get there, and then identify yourself as a person that gets the job done.
References
[1] Thrash, T. and Elliot, A., 2003. Inspiration as a psychological construct. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84(4), pp.871-889.
