Why Is It So Hard to Do the Things You Know Are Good for You?

I love a good question. The one I’ve been considering lately is: Why is it so hard to do the things you know are good for you?

You are not suffering from a lack of information. You know that moving your body is good for you. You know that getting enough sleep matters, that spending time outside can change how you feel, and that you could probably drink more water, eat more vegetables, put down your phone more often and find ways to reduce the stress in your life.

There is no shortage of advice about how to take better care of yourself, and much of it is excellent advice. Yet knowing what is good for you and consistently doing what is good for you are often two very different things.

I am interested in the space between the two, which leads to another good question….

What happens when a good intention meets a real life?

My life and business are centered around walking so I’ll use walking as an example.

You decide you’re going to walk four days this week. Nothing extreme—you’re not training for an event and you’re not trying to reach a certain number of steps per walk. You’re simply going to put on a pair of comfortable shoes, go outside and walk.

You walk on Monday. Tuesday, a meeting runs late and something you need to finish for work lands squarely in the time you had planned to walk. Wednesday works beautifully, and you get your walk in again. On Thursday, your mother calls with something that truly needs your attention versus one of those things where you can say, “I’ll get back to you tomorrow.” Friday arrives after a terrible night’s sleep, the dog has developed a mysterious gastrointestinal situation, someone in your family cannot find something that is apparently visible only to you, and by late afternoon you are done.

You planned four walks and took two.

I’m really curious about what happens next, because the walks are only part of the story. There was also the meeting and the work and your mother and the terrible night’s sleep and the dog and the missing thing that was exactly where you said it was. There was a life. And intentions happen inside a life.

It’s such a simple idea, but I think you may sometimes forget to include life when you’re evaluating whether you fulfilled your intentions or not.

Was it failure—or was it life?

This is a question I wish I had learned to ask myself years ago, because when something I intended to do for myself didn’t happen, I was very good at looking immediately in one direction: at myself.

I needed to be more disciplined, more committed or better organized. I needed to make it a priority. I needed to try harder.

Sometimes, of course, I did. There is nothing inherently wrong with discipline. I love a good plan. Calendars are useful, commitments matter, and sometimes the thing you really need to do requires a bit more effort.

But here’s the thing: using the walking example, do you move from the simple fact that you planned to walk four times and walked twice to an assessment of yourself? Does the voice in your head start in with: “I didn’t stick with it.” “I need to get serious.” “Why can’t I keep this going?” “What is wrong with me?”

What if you slowed that down for a minute?

Consider this: you walked twice during a week in which you also worked, cared for people you love, dealt with the unexpected, became exhausted, changed plans and lived your actual life.

I believe there is something useful in distinguishing what actually happened from the story you tell yourself about what happened.

What do you make it mean?

This is the question underneath all the others. When something you meant to do for yourself doesn’t happen, what do you make that mean?

I became curious enough about this question that I went looking at the research. I wanted to know whether what I had observed in my own life and heard from other women was actually reflected there.

It was.

There is a well-established gap between intending to do something and consistently doing it. Researchers studying women’s physical activity have also documented something you probably don’t need a researcher to tell you: work matters. Caregiving matters. Household responsibilities, fatigue, stress, changing schedules and support all matter. Good intentions don’t exist in laboratory conditions. They live in kitchens and offices and cars and hospitals and grocery-store aisles. They live inside marriages and deadlines and menopause and aging parents and children and friendships and bodies that feel different from one day to the next.

But something else in the research interested me even more. When women don’t sustain a practice, some of us don’t simply register the interruption. We interpret it.

Women in studies have described themselves as lazy or unmotivated. They’ve talked about guilt, disappointment and feeling as though they’ve let themselves down. Some women recognize the very real circumstances that got in the way and still believe they should have figured out how to do it.

I know that one.

Yes, the circumstances were real, but I still should have figured it out.

There is an enormous amount contained in that thought, especially that little word should. It takes the reality of what happened and quietly turns it into evidence about who we are.

Which makes me wonder whether, before deciding you need to become more disciplined, more organized or more determined, there is another question worth asking.

What if trying harder isn’t the solution?

I can see something about myself now that I couldn’t see clearly for a very long time: I have mistaken lack of support for evidence that I needed to try harder.

That realization has changed the questions I ask, but I don’t want to replace one simplistic answer with another. Sometimes trying harder is exactly what is called for. Sometimes you need to put the walk on the calendar and honor the commitment you’ve made to yourself. A plan can help. Discipline can help. So can knowing that a friend will be standing on the corner at 7:30 AM waiting for you—rain or shine.

But sometimes the difficulty may not be that you haven’t tried hard enough. It may be that you’re trying to make something good for you fit into a life without considering what would help make room for it.

That’s why I’ve become interested in the difference between two questions. One is, How do I make myself do this? The other is, What would support me in doing this?

They are not the same question.

Support can look like all kinds of things. It might be asking your husband or partner to handle soccer pickup one afternoon so you can walk with a friend. It might be protecting a lunch hour instead of automatically giving it back to work. It might be asking someone else to make dinner one night so you can finally take the yoga or painting class you keep thinking about. It might be a standing date with a friend or simply having someone in your life who understands that this matters to you and helps you make room for it.

None of those things is particularly dramatic. That’s the point.

You are surrounded by information about what you can do to support your health and well-being. You are not surrounded by information about what would support you in actually doing those things inside the life you are currently living.

The answer to the question I began with—why is it so hard to do the things you know are good for you?—isn’t one answer at all. Knowledge matters. Intention matters. Discipline and planning can matter. But so do work and caregiving and fatigue and relationships and unpredictable Tuesdays. So does the life you are currently living.

The next time something you genuinely want to do for yourself keeps getting crowded out, please don’t immediately ask how you could become better at making yourself do it.

Instead, ask: What would support look like for me here?

Not in an ideal life. Not if everyone stopped needing things from you or you suddenly acquired three extra hours in the day. In the life you are actually living, what might make room for this thing that matters to you? Who could help? What could shift? What would feeling supported in doing it actually look and feel like?

I don’t know your answer.

But I think it’s a very good question.

A little of the research behind this piece

I went looking at the research while I was thinking about these questions. Here are a few of the studies that informed my thinking.

Arigo, D., Hevel, D., Bittel, K., & Maher, J. P. (2022). “Within-person examination of the exercise intention-behavior gap among women in midlife with elevated cardiovascular disease risk.” Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 60, 102138.

Physical activity barriers and facilitators among working mothers and fathers. Research examining the roles of work, family responsibilities, scheduling, guilt and support in physical activity.

Joseph, R. P., Ainsworth, B. E., Keller, C., & Dodgson, J. E. (2015). “Barriers to Physical Activity Among African American Women: An Integrative Review of the Literature.” Women & Health, 55(6), 679–699.

Physical activity correlates in young women with depressive symptoms: a qualitative study. Research exploring women’s own descriptions of motivation, competing responsibilities, guilt and barriers to physical activity.