Strangling that whiney little voice inside your head

This was my first full week back to work this month since my vacation, and it reminded me a lot of the first "real" week of PCP, or "PCP Proper"--zero to sixty in 5 seconds, seemingly no time for anything, and late for everything else. Including sleep.

So, around Tuesday night, I started hearing that whiny, needy little voice in my head: "You're too tired to do a full work-out!"; "Don't you know you need SLEEP to keep going?! DIAL IT DOWN A NOTCH!!!"; "You've 'hit the wall,' and you're just going to over-exercise & lose muscle!";"Skip the Kung-Fu Sit-ups, then write some clever blog entry about the 'Valley' really being a 'Canyon' to cover your tracks!"; "Blah, blah, blah..."

But you know what? This time, that voice was MUCH easier to ignore. Because it was telling me to NOT do something that I HAVE successfully been doing over the past 2 months.

We humans are terrific at reasoning and rationalizing. The problem is, much of our reasoning, at least as it applies to ourselves, is backward rationalization. We accept the status-quo, then go off looking for perfectly-argued, logical reasons to justify not getting off of our butts to change things for the better. We repeat these arguments to ourselves until they become all but a law of nature; we don't realize that they're simply a repeated series of conscious choices that we allow to become our personal nature.

That voice still hasn't gone away. And it did talk me--at least temporarily--into skipping one of the more inconvenient exercises. But the more I ignore it and go after what I want, despite all of the effort and pain, the easier it becomes.

Don't get me wrong--our environment, especially our culinary/nutritional environment and our physical and social infrastructure--do their part to try to choke us with plate-fulls of unhealthy food-like substances and strangle opportunities for physical activity. But ultimately, we bear the responsibility--to strangle that whiny little voice, and do what it takes to get the bodies--and lives--that we really want.