non compos mentis

Everyone tells you that you should exercise. Exercise makes you feel better, exercise sets you off on the road to recovery, exercise is the key.

But no one tells you how to motivate yourself to exercise. No one acknowledges that a seemingly simple task like joining a gym is beyond an anxious paranoid brain like mine. It involves going in and speaking to someone. If that hurdle is surmounted, it involves being in exercise clothes in front of people, sweating and red in the face, ashamed of being so unfit. Joining a class would be out of the question.

Swimming would throw up similar obstacles. Running is never something I’ve been good at or enjoyed. I would try but am paranoid about being out at night and could never expose my purple sweating face during daylight hours. Plus it’s cold out. I’ve tried walking and sometimes it works; I try to do it as much as I can. But sometimes this mind that walking is supposed to be soothing and healing plays tricks and, starved of TV/internet/book/ work distractions, starts its monologue: imsolonelyeveryonehatesmeimwrongimeveilimlonelyihavenofriends… and on and on. Frankly, self-hatred ruins a nice walk.

I’ve tried exercising at home but can’t keep it up longer than a few days. Excuses are too easy. Giving up is always the final solution.

And so to the basic problem: motivation. There are days when I can’t even get out of bed. For a while now I have forced myself to at least get up and shower every day and am trying to insist that I leave the house even for five minutes at least once a day. But it’s still tough some days so how I’m supposed to get up, put on exercise gear, go for a run… I wish all these websites and people extoling the virtues of exercise on the diseased mind would tell me how to get past the barrier of complete and total lack of motivation.