Reverse Engineer Your Way To Life Success!

I am constantly asked for advice, or to act as a sounding board, by friends dissatisfied with the way they see their health going. It is frustrating to me, not only because I want to see them succeed and live a healthier life but also because of their inability to determine what the actual root cause problems are.

The reason so many people have trouble getting a handle on their routines/motivations/weight/etc… is because they haven’t embraced their inner Sherlock Holmes and deduced the actual issue at hand!

As anyone who programs code or participates in engineering knows, when you encounter a problem with an expected result you can’t just look at the closest and most immediate piece of code or mechanism and truly solve the problem. It takes a lot of sleuthing to truly perform a root cause analysis and then fix whatever it is that is really the issue.

In a lot of ways, when you find yourself in a rut or having a problem, it is very similar to playing a video game and dying in the same spot over and over. How frustrating and demoralizing it that?!? The question is though, is it really that you aren’t figuring out the perfect combination of button mashing to carry you through and beating your pixelated nemsis? Perhaps you need to backtrack a bit and level up more, get some better gear or find that particular item that will help you exploit that bosses weakness?

Let me give you my favorite example here:

How many people feel like a zombie before they get their morning coffee? I know soooo many people who complain about this! The reality is though that the human body doesn’t need anything external to “get moving“. So is the zombie feeling really due to a lack of coffee? Of course not, no matter what Folger’s will try and tell you. The real first level cause to feeling out of it in the morning is lack of restful sleep. Based on that you need to go back and figure out why you aren’t getting what you need. The first step would be to examine your bedtime, then look at your pre-bedtime routine. Are you structuring your life in such a way where you can get to bed at a time that is reasonable based on when your alarm clock goes off in the morning? If you are obtaining a solid night’s sleep and still do not feel rested then you look at your bed. Is it an issue with the mattress or your pillows that is making your sleep less than restful? Maybe it is something a little less obvious? Perhaps you grind your teeth heavily in the night or it is due to the air in your home being overly dry causing your evening’s respite to be less than satisfying.

So if you are tired of feeling that way in the morning, the answer to this problem is not caffeine; it is how to organize life so you get enough restful sleep.

So how does that relate to achieving a healthy and active lifestyle you ask? Well let me explain! Let’s say you are unable to motivate yourself for your workouts, and therefore are missing them more often than not.  So when you reverse engineer this we need to look at the contributing factors and figure out what is driving them.

Are you tired? Maybe you need to look at your sleep habits as in the coffee-zombie example above…

Do you feel weak? Maybe you need to examine your diet…

Do you feel rushed or inconvenienced by your workout? Perhaps you are trying to schedule your workouts at a non-optimal time… (check out this article on how to schedule your workouts for some Jerdtastic advice!)

Are you stressed or depressed? Often your mind being distracted by other things in your life can drain your willpower…

See, when people tell me they are unmotivated for their workout I don’t believe it is truly a lack of motivation that is the problem; and just trying different ways to pump themselves up to power through isn’t really going to fix anything long-term for them either. I think it is a compounded effect from many other small things going on in their life that induce that feeling of laziness or failure. Trace back to root cause, and then the root cause of that too. The further you dig and the deeper you fixes, the greater the overall change to your life that will occur!

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