Injuries and exercise

Hello – I’m frustrated at my continuing inability to feel acceptance and compassion towards myself when I pick up a sports injury. I have a history of anorexia and have had problems with overexercise in the past. I’m still quite dependent on it and my relationship with exercise is definitely a work in progress. Often I have an intuitive sense that I get injuries when I’m overdoing things and, although part of me is relieved to have a reason to rest, I get caught in thought spirals of blame, shame and anxiety at having an injury and not being able to follow my normal routine.

My goal is to get to a place where I can allow myself more flexibility in relation to my exercise patterns and what I’ve planned to do, especially if I’m feeling tired and/or am in my autumn or winter. I’ve done some thought work around this issue and am struggling a bit with finding thoughts to lead to feelings of self-compassion and acceptance. I think I also tend to trick myself a bit out of significant progress in this area because of the associated discomfort. Would be very grateful for some help.

Answer:

When it’s hard to land on what would create the feeling that we ultimately want to embody and experience when we are doing The Darn Thing, there are several other things we can do to help us get there. One of them is imagining what someone else would think about themselves that would create that self-compassion or acceptance.
“If someone else with an identical background could think __________, maybe it’s possible for me too.” You can start to imagine what they’d need to feel before they landed in self-compassion and acceptance too (because very rarely does a person wake up from largely feeling blame, shame, and anxiety in that loving space without doing work in between). What emotions were they willing to experience to get there? What did they tell themselves in those spaces? What wisdom that you can pull from this exercise and apply to yourself? Come back to us with what you discover in a follow up submission titled, “Injuries and exercise pt. 2”.