The new year has begun. Resolutions have been made. Holiday guests have already come and gone, and here I am left to follow through with my profound, (I think), New Year’s Resolution to lose weight, refrain from eating carbs, call my mom every day, and write in my business blog Body Talk at least once a month.
Two out of four ain’t bad. Right? I have been consistently calling my 87-year-old mother on a daily basis to check in with her about the Florida weather and her upcoming hip replacement surgery. And here I am working on January’s installment of Body Talk. Meanwhile, I continue to sit at home snacking on Cheez-Its, delicious bread, and those amazingly addictive Mexican Pecan Wedding cookies, my husband started making during the recent holiday season. This means I am not doing anything toward my resolutions to lose weight or refrain from eating those carbs. What I am doing is procrastinating.
Yup, procrastinating, breaking my New Year’s resolutions, and being human. Psychologytoday.com reports that “Procrastination is a self-defeating behavior pattern, but it can be seen as serving a psychological purpose, especially for people with perfectionist tendencies, by protecting the individual against the fear of failure, judgment by others, and self-condemnation.” If you are like me, intentions are good, yet I knew I was not going to stop eating the carbs that are so delicious and contribute to my lack of losing weight. Many of us are no different when we are living with physical pain.
We oftentimes go to work to spite the pain. “Work through the pain”, and “No pain, no gain”, we tell ourselves. The challenging part about this kind of thinking is it is counterintuitive. If we have dysfunctional muscles and choose to work through the pain, we are going to strengthen those muscles. Really, the only thing we are doing is strengthening the dysfunction of the muscles. We wonder why the pain is still there and what can we do to stop it.
Here at The Massage Garage, we teach our clients how to treat their trigger points (aka muscle knots). We warm up first, re-educate, and re-align muscle fibers to return to their normal resting length, second, stretch third, and then strengthen last. In that order. We, as human beings, didn’t get the memo on how to get and stay out of pain. Without the pain, we can do those things we have to do (like work) and the things that we want to do (like eat carbs).
So, we can give ourselves a break from the pressures of following through with our New Year’s resolutions. We can acknowledge that we are human, and give our bodies the tune-up they deserve. Okay! Don’t mind if I eat that last Gluten-free Mexican Wedding Cookie.
- 2 Weeks Down; Only 50 More to Go! - January 30, 2023
- When Pain Talks, Do You Listen? - March 19, 2014
- No Pain, No Gain? - January 9, 2014