According to the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada, we only need 150 minutes of moderate exercise each week – yet most of us don’t reach that goal.
Why? Don’t blame yourself – us humans are just hard-wired to be lazy, new research suggests.
In a new study in the journal Neuropsychologia, University of British Columbia postdoctoral researcher Matthieu Boisgontier, PhD, asked 29 study participants to look at images – either ones of physical activity, or inactivity – while connected to electrodes measuring brain activity. They were asked to move their on-screen avatars towards the active pics as quickly as possible in one test, and then the opposite with the inactivity pics in the following one.
Boisgontier and colleagues found that volunteers moved faster toward physically active pictures than toward the inactive images. The participants, however, also used far more brain activity while moving their avatars away from the inactive images than moving toward them.
In other words, the brain had a more difficult time getting away from the sedentary image.
Related: The Best Workouts for Exercise Haters
Why do our brains work harder at the mere thought of exercise? The answer could lie in our basic survival instincts. The conservation of our physical energy “has been essential for humans’ survival, as it allowed us to be more efficient in searching for food and shelter, competing for sexual partners, and avoiding predators,” Boisgontier explained to Medical News Today. “These results suggest that our brain is innately attracted to sedentary behaviors,” he adds.
So if your brain is so resistant to exercise, and you can’t overcome that hurdle, you can just trick your brain into wanting to work out! (No, really.) According to a paper in Current Sports Medicine Reports, author Daniel E. Lieberman, PhD, says that because of our natural inclination to be lazy, telling ourselves to work out isn’t enough – we need some sort of enticement. One common way of doing this is making your exercise feel like play – choose something that doesn’t feel like exercise (maybe you like shooting hoops at the Y, for example) and you’ll find your brain more receptive to the idea.
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