By Richard Waddell

rich@questforendorphins.com

http://www.questforendorphins.com

My motivation for putting up my site, “Quest for Endorphins” was to promote what I’ve come to call “Energy Focused Exercise”. But long before there was Energy Focused Exercise or even an internet there was the concept of internal motivation, at least in my mind.

I’m not sure when I started wondering about the differences between people who seem enthusiastic about working out (internal motivation) and people like me who have to force themselves (external motivation) and spend the rest of their time dreading it. I used to think it was just a matter of persistence until you somehow got into a mental groove that equated to internal motivation, but I never seemed to be able to hold out that long. For instance, motivation to do resistance training. From a few sporadic months in Vince Gironda’s tiny but authentic, non air-conditioned, smelly (I said it was authentic) gym with the all-dirt parking lot on Ventura Blvd in about 1974 to maybe a year off and on at Sports Connection in Santa Monica in the early 80’s

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I saw John Travolta and Jamie Lee Curtis at that Sports Connection when they filmed ‘Perfect’ – he was friendly and disgustingly handsome, she wasn’t. What’s really funny is I remembered him from ‘Welcome Back Kotter’, so I thought he looked good but was pretty much over the hill – being almost my age – ouch, I just checked that and he’s seven years younger.

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to whatever 24 hour fitness was calling itself in Irvine in the late 90’s - I’d make some gains, plateau, nothing would seem to be happening, I’d lose all enthusiasm, and shortly the external motivation was not enough to keep me going. But, I did see Robert Blake and Kent McCord in Vince’s gym. My family was so impressed. And of course I saw Vince himself – he was not friendly – but then, nobody was.

But there was the one case that almost tipped me off about internal motivation. I was working at a place in the San Fernando Valley in about 1976 and I lived in West L.A., so I had to drive “over the hill” every day. Back in my naïve, pre Irvine-to-Santa Monica days, I thought of it as a commute. If I left to arrive on time, I had to leave early enough to allow for traffic. If I left really early, I could beat traffic, but I got to the office long before I could start work.

The company had a small gym with a universal machine, exercise bike, and other workout equipment. My intent was to workout every morning to fill in the time before work, which is what I did. Everyday I dreaded those workouts. I can remember walking into that gym and hating what was before me. But, my motivation to beat traffic put me in a position where I only had two “bad” alternatives. My motivation to not be bored lead to exercising. Of course there was also the motivation to get buff so Kim in Accounting would realize we were meant for each other, because in the 70’s really hot girls with legs up to their necks went for average looking older guys with no money, no accomplishments, and no prospects, if they were only buff. I had all the qualifications except just the one. I guess Kim was sort of an external and internal motivation. I know there was some internal pressure (sigh). Ahh, if I could only be young again and see Kim. What a joke on her that would be. (See, that’s funny because she would be old, and I would be young, but you thought I was going somewhere else, plus I gotta make sure my wife gets it).

But I digress. The really great thing about the morning workouts was how I felt when I got to my desk. I liked my job pretty well anyway. I was in production scheduling so I did a lot of calculations on loading trucks and scheduling batches of cosmetics based on raw materials on hand, forecasts, and other variables, so it was challenging enough to be interesting, but not a grind. Whether or no, it was a job, and at that age I considered 8:00 am early, so generally I wasn’t in a great mood when I arrived at my desk each day.

But after I started working out I was enthusiastically in a good mood when I got to my desk. A fresh cup of coffee on hand, fire up a fresh cigarette

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I know, I know, but the closest thing we had to the patch was Winston Lights, or if you wanted to pretend you were still smoking, Marlboro Lights.

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and my high-tech ten-key printing calculator with LED display and all was well in my world. There may have been a Danish in that picture, good nutrition being unknown at that time. The diet fad of the day

was the liquid diet which I remained on successfully for half of one day or half of one bottle, whichever came first.

So, back to my good mood. It would last well into the day, and so would my energy level – which translated to being able to drink more coffee before it started being counter-productive.

But, after a few months, early on one otherwise normal day, I made a fatal mistake. I slept in. One thing I’m always harping on is not breaking the chain, or thread as I seem to like to call it a lot of the time. This is an absolutely disastrous example of what I mean. Hard as I tried, or so it seemed at the time, I couldn’t get motivated to go forth from my soft, warm, snuggly sleep world into the painfully well-focused and hard-edged world of ‘Root hog, or die’. I might have gone in on the weekends a few times so I could go and have steak and eggs afterwards at the Coco’s next to the Roscoe on ramp to the 405 in Van Nuys.

But, relatively-buff Rich of circa 1976 had risen and fallen. It was a shame too, because he was happy and he knew it. In my experience that’s a rare thing. I look back at times when I was happy and took it for granted, or more likely, I’m forgetting the day-to-day problems. But sometimes, you’re happy and you know it at the time, and now that I think about it, in the short term that’s one of the indicators that you’re experiencing endorphins, and not just after exercise. Anyway, when I say I was happy and I knew it, I remember specifically that I sat at my desk every morning and got my big green-bar computer print-outs and punched away at my ten-key and thoroughly enjoyed myself.

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What’s funny is the next room was full of IBM 360 that could have done my entire job in a couple of seconds; but nobody knew how to program it for even that or it was possible, probably. This was an example of the Zen pizza pie hypothesis – which up to right now I thought was “There are things you know, things you don’t know, and things you don’t know you don’t know”, but I can’t find a reference anywhere, so I guess I made it up (not really). I know those guys didn’t know enough to program me out of a job, so that was good. Yes, I was a luddite, because I did kind of expect they could do that, but I wasn’t going to point it out. Actually though, they couldn’t even print the reports I wanted, so maybe it didn’t matter.

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Why would I give that up? Pretty simple really, the motivation for an extra hour (at the most) of sleep was greater than the motivation to go out into the cold world, drive on the cold freeway, go into the cold gym, change clothes in the cold locker room, start working out on the cold equipment … and finally, after about two hours, feel really great. And the hour of sleep was right there and in front of me. I’m pretty certain I remember feeling guilty at the time, but helpless. The helpless part I’m definitely sure about. God, young people are soft.

Ok, so we have an interim period where they hire new guys to supervise us in production scheduling, and they’re ok, but it’s just not the same. And I was tired of driving over the hill, so I quit and got a job in Santa Monica. It wasn’t a bad job, but there was no air conditioning and no future.

So I got this inspiration to go to computer school, which is a whole other story that I’ll try to milk in another article. The GI bill paid for half and I had to take out a student loan for the rest. Now, as history had shown at that time, I was entirely capable of just bailing on the whole thing even though I would be out the money. But, I was thirty years old and this was my last chance on the GI Bill and to have what you call your career, so amazingly enough, I got serious about it. I read Ayn Rand, ‘The Virtue of Selfishness’ just before – despite what you may think the title means and leaving the politics aside, this and some of her other books are the best self-help books in the world – so maybe that had something to do with it.

Here’s where it gets relevant again. We’re now at the point where my motivation is actually internal, at least somewhat. At first, Ayn Rand had me fired up to be responsible for myself and not depend on others or just drift, and I was gung-ho on everything including the meaningless stuff in the intro class. But I remember how discouraged I was after the first flow-charting class when I had to keep erasing stuff and starting over. But then it really started to be fun, and probably that was when I really became internally motivated.

At this point, everything is great, except for one little thing. Every evening, when I came home from work (did I mention there was no air-conditioning), I would just want to flop down and watch the T.V. or read a book. At some point I would get to studying, but I just didn’t enjoy it as much as it deserveed.

I remembered how much I enjoyed my mornings after working out in the company gym a few years previously, and somehow I had available credit, so I bought an exercise bike. I knew my history, of course, but I thought that my intention of pumping up my energy would make me follow through with no problem.

I don’t remember how long that worked out, but it probably wasn’t more than two or three days until the initial enthusiasm wore off and I started procrastinating. It wasn’t that it didn’t work, it was just that often I couldn’t get myself to actually, physically get ready and ride the bike. There was always something that I didn’t want to interrupt, and just like when I couldn’t get up to go to the gym, I would feel guilty, but not guilty enough.

To make a long story a teeny bit shorter, I came up with a scheme to ride every day, but to commit to only two or three minutes. If I wanted to quit after that and go back to what I was doing, I could. I expected it to take six weeks or so (Psych 101) to establish the habit of being interrupted at that time. Until then I wouldn’t worry that I wasn’t getting much exercise.

Here’s absolutely the most crucial part of the whole story. I resolved that in exchange for making it so easy, and because I was trying to create a habit, I would ride each and every day. Even so, there were days when I almost skipped because I felt like “I just didn’t have it in me” on that day (every day) and what was the point of just going through the motions. Here’s absolutely the most crucial sentence in the most crucial part of the story: I planned ahead of time to belittle myself if I tried to skip a day. At the point when I needed to do that, I would think about just how easy it was to do what I had promised. Or, I could punk out and break my promise and feel guilty and probably end up blowing the whole thing. How pathetic was that. Absolutely the most easy requirement you could imagine, and I wasn’t willing to do it.

So, at that point, you may think the motivation was internal, and it was, but only because I had managed to turn my guilt around on itself. I setup such an easy barrier that the idea of being such a wimp by not overcoming it made me guilty enough to actually do just that.

Here’s the miraculous part. If you’re like me, and a depressingly large number of people are, once you stir up enough energy to actually get ready and get on the bike you’re willing to turn the pedals a few times. It actually feels kind of good because you’re not cold-bloodedly starting out on some mandatory long term physical task. Instead you can just enjoy stretching your legs and getting the circulation and respiration moving a little bit. From there you can decide to go to the next song, then the next one, and so on, until you end up getting in a meaningful workout.

I swear to you this is true. Some of the times when I was most convinced that I just really wasn’t up to riding and intended to only go through the motions were the times when I got the best workouts and felt absolutely elated afterwards. I realized long ago that when you feel like working out the most is when you end up getting the most benefit. So if you use my trick to get you past the natural resistance you feel and keep it up day after day you’ll probably do what I did as fast or faster, which was to become so vividly aware of how much better I felt afterwards that I wasn’t even tempted to delay riding the bike.

At that point my motivation was completely internalized. For years, as long as I worked in an office, the first thing I did was ride the exercise bike as soon as I got home. There was really no point in being off for the evening otherwise. I replaced bikes on the day they wore out. I replaced chains repeatedly and re-started rides on one piece of crap I had for a few months. People, this is not me. I look for excuses to avoid doing things. So I have not doubt I was internally motivated.

Even when I didn’t work in an office I always rode at least once a day, no problem. It was only when I started riding in the middle of the day that I would have trouble deciding when the time was right. It was the same old thing – I’m in the middle of whatever (burned out) or I’m just not up to it today (wrong and burned-out). So I’d fall back on that old commitment (which maybe I had modified to twice a day, but at any rate, I remember that’s what made the difference).

And just like always, the more I’d think I just wanted to go sack out somewhere, the more benefit I would get from the ride and the better I would feel afterwards. Best cure for brain-fog in the world. You just gotta lower that entry bar. Sometimes I would start riding and think “This isn’t so great, maybe I really don’t want to ride today”. But, then I would tell myself, and I swear to you ladies and gentlemen, this worked each and every time, “If you quit now, you’ll feel just as crappy as you did before, so really, what would be the point. If you keep it up just a little while longer, you’ll at least feel better after you finish.” But of course, when I got to that point I would be really warmed up so I would finish the whole half-hour.

Now, of course, I’ve got JumpRock and Heavy Hula Hands, so my motivation is fun and getting better at jumping and heavy hula handing – once muscle memory takes over, jumping to music is more fun than you can possibly imagine. But even so, there was this one time when my old rope broke, and it was worn real thin, so when I used a new one I couldn’t jump as good because of it, and I really tired my legs out trying. So I took a couple of days off, plus I was sulky. On the third day, in the early evening, after putting off jumping all day, I was sitting in front of the computer, having no fun, brain-fogged and thinking, “I’ve waited this long, I can just jump tomorrow”.

Clearly, I had gone insane. Actually, I realized what I was thinking, I immediately went out and jumped for an hour or so, came back in and sat there in the endorphin glow, anticipating a great evening, and being amazed that once again I had almost been distracted by lethargy to the point where I would give up hours of energy.

That’s what I mean by “Internal Motivation”.