Figuring out when to fit in a workout between your job, family, friends, chores, or whatever other things you have going on in your life undoubtedly takes some planning and mental heavy lifting. Those runs, spin classes, hikes or strength training sessions don’t just happen without a little forethought!
But have you ever stopped to wonder how much time you spend thinking about exercise—and if those thoughts could be having a negative affect on your wellbeing?
With the advent of GLP-1 receptor agonist medications (like Ozempic), a new term, “food noise,” has emerged. Food noise refers to frequent or even constant and intrusive thoughts about food, including ruminating on what you’ve eaten and planning what and when you’ll eat next. The drugs supposedly “quiet” the food noise, which some describe as a godsend from an obsessive thought pattern that persists whether or not a person is hungry.
However, some believe food noise comes about from food restriction, and that “quieting food noise” is just the more culturally acceptable, diet industry-sanitized way of describing appetite suppression.
Either way, the popularization of the term “food noise” has brought attention to the din of obsessive thoughts that can accompany a person’s pursuit of health (and often, thinness). So, might some people experience a similar thought pattern for fitness?
If you have running thoughts in your head about how much you’ve exercised, what your next workout will be, whether that workout was really “enough” exertion, or other brain space-taking thoughts about fitness, it could actually be “exercise noise.”
While ‘food noise’ refers to the constant mental chatter or obsession about food, diet, and eating, ‘exercise noise’ would encompass the continuous thoughts, worries, and pressures surrounding physical activity, exercise routines and bodily appearance.
So, what exactly is exercise noise?
Spending mental energy figuring out when you’re going to exercise and what kind of exercise you’re going to do is probably necessary and normal if exercising is a priority to you. It’s even a part of an intuitive movement practice, which is about tuning into the needs of your body to move in a way that makes you feel good.
However, thinking about exercise could cross over into exercise noise when the thoughts become obsessive, intrusive, punitive, critical, and a source of stress.
Exercise noise and compulsive exercise might have some overlap, and could even be a risk factor for exercise addiction. Below are 12 ways exercise noise might manifest.
- Constantly thinking about your next workout
- Obsessing over exercise schedules and fitting in exercise sessions
- Feeling guilty about missing a workout
- Anxiety over not meeting fitness goals or comparing oneself to others
- Being overwhelmed by fitness influencers and the pressure to adhere to popular exercise trends
- Comparing personal progress with others’ curated, often idealized, fitness journeys
- Worrying excessively about body image and fitness levels
- Stress about achieving a particular physique or performance benchmark
- Compulsion to exercise excessively, even when it leads to injury, pain, stress or burnout
- Prioritizing exercise over other important aspects of life, like socializing, resting, or work
- Feeling pressured by friends, family, or society to maintain a certain level of physical activity
- Constantly seeking validation through exercise achievements
Sometimes, the amount of exercising one is doing might have looked healthy from the outside, but the intensity required of oneself, and the worry whether one was exercising enough, probably crossed over into a disordered thought pattern of exercise noise. Digging into the anxiety around exercise, and reasons for that stress and obsession, can help you identify if exercise thoughts are really unproductive and harmful exercise noise—and a symptom of a larger anxiety around your health and body.
When thoughts turn to “noise”
Figuring out whether you’re experiencing exercise noise might be able to help you ultimately form a better relationship with exercise, and your body image overall. But to understand why, we have to think a bit more about food noise.
Thinking about food is a very normal part of the human experience, and is in fact one of the ways your body sends a signal that you’re hungry. When the term food noise is used to describe something you want to eliminate on the path to thinness, it becomes more coded diet industry speak. But if we can understand food noise as something that’s symptomatic of the diet industry itself, identifying thoughts as “noise” can actually help us tune into our body’s needs and the harmful societal pressures that could be shaping our self-talk. The same thing goes for exercise noise.
The concepts of ‘food noise’ and ‘exercise noise’ can indeed be seen as two sides of the same coin, especially when preoccupation with weight, appearance, or an exercise addiction or eating disorder drives these noises. Food noise as well as exercise noise can have significant impacts on mental health, contributing to anxiety, stress, and obsessive-compulsive behaviors. Often, the roots are similar, including societal pressures, body image issues, and personal insecurities.
How to turn down the volume on exercise noise
Here are some strategies to turn exercise noise into movement music.
1. Eat. Yes, really!
A lot of times, the obsessive exercise is really tied into being malnourished. When the person is more nourished, not for everyone obviously, but for a lot of people, some of that really obsessive inability to sit or constantly exercising, thinking about exercise, or feeling like you have to, all of that kind of alleviates and gets quieter.
2. Strive for exercise balance
We’re not conditioned to think about our relationship with exercise critically because exercise is considered virtuous. But if you find that exercise itself is causing harm, changing your routine could help with exercise noise too.
A healthy exercise balance may be difficult to find because we’ve learned that exercise is healthy—and more exercise is even healthier. Exercise addiction is not defined by the amount of weekly exercise, and the optimal exercise behavior is individual. Exercise becomes a problem when the negative consequences are bigger than the positive health outcomes. A person may enjoy daily exercise routines, but if they lead to overuse injuries, social isolation, and obsessive thoughts about exercise, this person may need some changes.
3. Ask yourself who’s talking when the voice of exercise noise speaks
Is the voice telling you to exercise punishing, harsh, or critical? Is it the way you would speak to a friend? If it’s not, that’s not a voice you have to listen to.
It’s an inner critic versus an inner kind, loving person. When that voice starts to be mean and judgmental and aggressive and icky, then we’ve pushed too far and we need to pull back and get to that space of love and compassion and kindness.
4. Let the thoughts come—and then let them go
As in mindfulness, we want to control our reaction to our thoughts, not the thoughts themselves. So when you experience exercise noise, have a dialogue with yourself.
You can say, ‘I no longer subscribe to the idea that I have to sweat in order to have a good workout. So, no thank you for that thought.’ You may go a step further and say, ‘I believe that all movement matters, and even a brisk walk, where I barely sweat or it’s only five minutes, is still good for my body.’ And so sometimes it’s actively stopping and verbalizing these things out loud because what we think, what we say, what we see, what we repeat becomes sort of the diagram of who we are and what we actually believe and what we lean into.
Just as with food noise, the goal would be to cultivate a mindful, positive, and sustainable attitude toward exercise, focusing on enjoyment, health, and well-being rather than compulsion, anxiety and body perfection.
source: https://www.wellandgood.com/
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