In theory, fitness is supposed to be fun. But while endorphins are great and moving our bodies is a privilege, hearing that you just’re speculated to enjoy something that you just secretly hate isn’t exactly helpful advice. In fact, it will probably make you’re feeling pretty shitty.
This is all too familiar for comedian Hannah Berner, who’s spent the last several years navigating what she calls “a sophisticated relationship with fitness.” After playing competitive tennis through college, she struggled to search out the enjoyment that after got here together with exercise.
“I used to be on a full scholarship and there was quite a lot of pressure and fear around it that made me fall out of affection with understanding,” she says. “I used to be truthfully traumatized from college athletics, but now I’ve gotten this latest relationship with fitness where I’ve realized that it’s an act of self-love that may really help with so many alternative points of my life.”
The trick behind this mindset shift? Stop taking all of it so dang seriously.
Gymtimidation is real
Gyms, by nature, could be stressful spaces. A survey done by UK brand Hunkemoller found that greater than 1 / 4 of ladies take care of anxiety around understanding, and cite a lack of information about form, an overall feeling of discomfort, and a fear of being stared at as the highest explanation why.
“I believe gyms could be so intimidating, especially for girls,” says Berner. ”You sort of feel such as you’re going right into a men’s locker room where everyone’s lifting big weights and taking over space, and also you’re like, do I even belong here? And in the event you don’t really know what you’re doing, you’re feeling judged, and there are such a lot of things that might make you scared to work out, all of that are totally valid.”
But for Berner, realizing just how ridiculous all of it is has helped her fall back in love with fitness, and inspired her latest partnership with OrangeTheory (her go-to studio for joy-inducing workouts) As she puts it, if you’re surrounded by hot personal trainers who you’re trying to not fart in front of, watching people run dozens of miles on human hamster wheels treadmills going nowhere, and getting sprayed with sweat by muscley men who’re grunting as if their lives relied on it, sometimes you’ve just gotta laugh.
“Especially with fitness, if you’re taking it too seriously and being too hard on yourself, it’s hard to have a healthy, long-term relationship with it.”
“Laughter is such a relief… and I believe it’s necessary to not take things too seriously,” says Berner. “Especially with fitness, if you’re taking it too seriously and being too hard on yourself, it’s hard to have a healthy, long-term relationship with it.”
Science agrees: laughing for gym anxiety works
She’s onto something here: According to experts, laughing your way through a workout often is the secret to finding the type of fun in fitness that everybody’s at all times talking about.
“Laughter in itself is a stress release,” says Emma Seppälä, PhD, a happiness expert and the writer of Sovereign: Reclaim Your Freedom, Energy, and Power in a Time of Distraction, Uncertainty, and Chaos. “When we’re stressed, we turn out to be really self-focused and our attention gets really tunnel-visioned, which makes us have more negative emotions. So if you take a step back and alter your perspective—which is what laughter does—it will probably lift you up and out of that narrow-minded place and reduce all of those negative emotions.”
Research has also shown that laughter can boost feel-good hormones like endorphins oxytocin and endorphins, and Seppälä adds that it will probably make it easier to commit a latest skill to memory, which suggests LOLing could be doubly helpful for anyone attempting to learn a fitness modality for the primary time.
Obviously, this isn’t to suggest that you just mock anyone else in a fitness setting, but fairly to encourage you to shift your focus inward and let yourself giggle on the discomfort it’s possible you’ll be feeling.
Part of this, Berner says, requires getting over any concerns you might have about feeling “cringe” or “embarrassing”—especially on the gym.
“If you’re just living in your individual self with all of your imperfections, you possibly can’t go improper,” she says. “Sure, I get nervous about things and need to do things well, but I’m not going to not be myself since it makes other people uncomfortable. The second you care what other persons are pondering of you, they win.”
In fairness, that’s so much more easily said than done, but the hot button is remembering that nobody cares what your workout looks like—for essentially the most part, we’re far too focused on ourselves to fret about what anyone else is doing on the gym. Plus, we’re all in it together: All it takes is for one person to start out letting their freak flag fly a fitness class, and the remaining of the crew will follow suit.
“It’s never embarrassing to try—it’s embarrassing to not try,” says Berner. “I used to be at a fitness class recently, and a few girl was grunting, and truthfully, I respected her a lot. It’s refreshing to see individuals who don’t filter themselves or care how they’re going to be perceived. It’s very confident, and that energy is contagious.”
So do yourself a favor the following time you’re in a gym: Sing along, dance like nobody’s watching, and provides yourself permission to laugh. It might just make fitness fun, in spite of everything.
