90- Why You Can't Get Yourself to Work Out When You're Exhausted (The Brain Science Busy Women Need to Know)

In this episode of MilesFromHerView powered by KatFit Strength, host Kat discusses the struggle of making healthy choices when exhausted and overwhelmed. She explains that self-discipline is not about willpower but about practicing the skill of deliberate response over automatic reaction. Kat explores neural pathways, particularly the rage and seeking pathways, and their roles in fitness decisions. She offers practical strategies like humility, asking for help, creating simple routines, distinguishing real fatigue from fake fatigue, and practicing self-compassion to help women strengthen their self-discipline and fitness journey. This episode aims to shift the mindset from all-or-nothing to celebrating small, consistent actions.

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00:00 The Overwhelming Evening Dilemma

01:26 Welcome to MilesFromHerView

02:21 Understanding Self-Discipline

03:51 The Neuroscience of Decision Making

04:46 Challenging Fitness Industry Myths

11:13 Behavioral Activation: Taking Action

12:07 Practical Tactics for Real Life

21:57 The Power of Compassion and Consistency

23:36 Final Thoughts and Encouragement

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Transcript

0:00

it's 6:47 PM on a Tuesday. You've been up since 5:30 AM You've already put in a full day of work, managed three different kid logistics situations, responded to 47 emails, and somehow there's still laundry in the dryer from yesterday. You had every intention of working out today, but you've kept your workout clothes in your bag. And now you're standing in your kitchen and every cell in your body is screaming. Just sit down to pour that glass of wine to scroll on your phone and let yourself finally, finally rest. But there's also the other voice, the one that knows you'll feel better if you move the one that remembers you used to be stronger than this, the one that's tired of starting over and over again every Monday. So you're stuck. Frozen between what you know you should do and whatever fiber in your being wants to do, which is absolutely nothing. If this sounds familiar, if you stood in the exact same spot in your kitchen or in your bedroom or your car caught between action and collapse. This episode is for you because here's what nobody tells you. That moment, that terrible, exhausting moment of decision is actually where everything changes, not because you need more willpower or discipline or motivation, but because of what's happening in your brain that you can't see

Kat: 1:26

welcome to MilesFromHerView, the podcast powered by KatFit Strength, where busy women like you find practical solutions to fuel your fitness journey with authenticity and resilience. I'm Kat, your host, a mom of two active boys, a business owner, and an ultra marathon runner and a strength trainer in her forties with nearly two decades of experience. I'm here to help you cut through the noise of fads, hacks, and quick fixes. This is a space where we celebrate womanhood and motherhood. All while building strength and resilience and reconnecting with you from a place of self-compassion and worthiness. Whether you're lacing up your running shoes to go out for a run, driving your kids to practice or squeezing in a moment for yourself, I'm right here in the trenches with you. Let's dive in.

2:15

Welcome back to MilesFromHerView. I'm Kat your host, and if you're new here, I thank you so much for tuning in. Today we're gonna be talking about self-discipline and not in the way the fitness industry has told you, or maybe how you might think about self-discipline. We're gonna be diving into some of the neuroscience of why it is so hard to take the first step when you're tired, and more importantly, how to make it easier to take that first step. This is something that I hear every day. Well, I know what I'm supposed to do. I have a plan. I can't make myself do it. So we're gonna start by dismantling something that's probably been holding you back for years. Self-discipline is not willpower. It's not some finite resource that you either have or you don't. It's not about being tougher or wanting it more, or having your life together in ways you clearly don't. So if you spent decades believing that successful people, the ones who never miss a workout or who seem to have endless energy, who make it look easy, if you believe that they have something, you don't, I need you to hear this. They absolutely don't. What they have is practiced circuitry. That may seem far out, but I literally mean they have practice circuitry. Self-discipline, is a practice ability to choose response over reaction. It's a skill built in your brain through repetition, not a character trait you are born with or without. Here's the part that changes everything. Neural circuitry associated with responding is like a muscle, so it gets stronger with use. So where today it may be harder to take action when you have so many things piling around you. So every single time you're able to muster that deliberate response in a difficult situation when you're standing in your kitchen exhausted, been up since 5:30 AM solved all these problems, you're able to take just a little minute step. You're literally strengthening that pathway that makes it simpler to respond. The next time, not through some vague concept of building character or a 45 minute routine, but through actual measurable changes in your brain. This is not the story the fitness industry has been telling you. They've been selling you this, like all or nothing principle. The idea that it's six days in a week that you must be working out or it doesn't count. That the transformation requires total commitment, complete overhaul, getting up at 4:00 AM meal prep on Sundays. And if you don't do it all, why bother even doing it? When you inevitably can't sustain that because you have an actual life with actual demand, you've been taught to feel guilty like you failed. You are the problem, but you are not the problem. The model is the problem because self-discipline isn't about forcing yourself into an unsustainable routine, it's about understanding what happening in your brain when you're standing in her kitchen at. 6:47 PM and learning to work with your nervous system instead of against it. So let's dive into what is actually happening in your brain in that moment of decision. So when you're overwhelmed and exhausted, every part of you wants to just collapse on that couch. It's not laziness, and that's not a lack of discipline. That's your amygdala doing exactly what is. Evolve to do. The amygdala is a small almond shape part of your brain that acts as a threat detection system. So, and right now in that moment when you're deciding whether to work out or sit down, the neuroscientist, Jacques Pink Step, Jacques Pang step identified what he called as the rage pathway. It's neural circuitry that. Predictably activates when our sense of self or stability comes under threat. Think about that for a second. So our ancestors faced a predator. This pathway fired. It prepared them to fight, to defend, to protect themselves from a immediate danger. Today, you're not facing a predator. You're facing the gap between who you are right now, exhausted, overwhelmed, barely holding it together and who you want to be. You're facing the mountain of everything you should be doing. You're facing another day of falling short of your own expectations and your amygdala can't tell the difference. A threat is a threat, so the rage pathway activates, so your body floods with the stress hormone, cortisol. Your nervous system shifts into a reactive mode, and the message is clear and urgent. Stop, protect yourself. Rest. Here's the crucial thing to understand. This made perfect sense when threats were immediate and physical. When a lion was chasing you, you didn't need a thoughtful response. You needed a fast reaction. But in today's world, it doesn't work that way. Most of our disruptions. Our challenges, our moments of overwhelm, don't require reaction. They require a response, and that requires a completely different neural pathway. It's called the seeking pathway. When you override that initial reactive pull to collapse and instead choose to move, even if it's. Just for 10 minutes, even if it's just two sets, you're activating what pink CEP called the seeking pathway. This is neural circuitry associated with exploration, problem solving, working deliberately towards a challenge, and it's part of your brain that makes plans, that moves you towards goals that says, I don't feel like it, but I'm going to do it anyway. And this is where it gets really interesting. So every time you activate this pathway, every time you choose a deliberate response, instead of the automatic reaction, your brain releases a spurt of dopamine. Now, you've probably heard of dopamine in the context of addiction or social media or instant gratification, but dopamine isn't just about feeling good in the moment. Dopamine acts as a fuel for the seeking pathway. It makes us feel capable and motivated. It propels us to keep going even when we're walking along a challenging and uncertain path. Think about the last time you did a workout that you didn't want to, have you ever felt? Not physically, but in the sense I did it. I showed up. I'm someone who follows through. That wasn't just pride or accomplishment, that was dopamine flooding your seeking pathway, reinforcing the very circuitry that made that choice possible. The more you fuel the seeking pathway the stronger it becomes, the easier the next choice gets. You may be thinking, okay, well this logically makes sense and I know I'll feel better after. I know it's good for me, so why can't I just do it? This is where something called the lull of effect comes in. The of effect says. That while our thoughts are undoubtedly important, it's predominantly our feelings, our effect that dominates our conscious and directs us this way, or that. We tend to repeat behaviors that make us feel good if working out has become associated with guilt. Falling short with punishing your body for not being enough, your brain will resist it. Not because you're lazy, but because you're wired to avoid things that feel bad. But here is the awesome part. When you deliberately respond to an uncertain situation, you feel good. You get the dopamine hit, you experience yourself as capable. When you feel good, you become more likely to deliberately respond again. So this is an upward spiral. Once you get into a productive groove, your brain is less likely to be hijacked by po hot and potential destructive emotions like the rage pathway quiets and the seeking pathway strengthens not because you forced it, but because you practiced it. So self-discipline is practiced circuitry. If it's about strengthening the seeking pathway and quieting that rage pathway, the obvious question is how do you actually do that? I mean, science behind it is great. It's cool, but. How do we bring this into that Tuesday evening at 6:47 PM when you're exhausted and every part of you wants to sit down, this is where we need to talk about something called behavioral activation. It's going to go against everything the fitness industry has taught you. Behavioral activation is built on a simple but revolutionary premise. We don't wait to feel motivated to take action. We take action and the feeling follows. You've probably experienced this, you don't wanna work out, but you did it anyway. And halfway through you thought, I'm actually glad I'm doing this. That's not an accident. So that's your seeking pathway, activating. That's the dopamine being released. That's your brain learning. That deliberate response feels better than a reactive collapse. But knowing this intellectually, it's not going to make it easier to start. So here are some actual concrete tactics that work with your brain instead of against it. These tactics aren't. What the fitness industry sells you. They aren't about optimizing or complexity or doing more. These are about working with reality, your reality with kids and careers and limited time and a lifetime of guilt you're trying to unlearn. We're gonna take a pause right now from the show. My programs KatFit Strength are online programs that are one-on-one training. A whole program that works with you, meets you where you are, and it isn't another program promising transformation in 12 weeks. This is designed for women who have actual lives, who need programs that work with their schedule and not against it, who are done with the all or nothing and ready for something sustainable. I meet you where you are. Whether you have a full gym or a pair of dumbbells, whether you have an hour or 20 minutes, whether you're coming back from years away from any sort of organized fitness program, or if you've never lifted weights before and you need someone to actually teach you how, because here's what I know. After years of working with women, you don't need more guilt. You don't need another program that makes you feel like you're failing. You need expert guidance that understands your life and builds strength training. And movement into it, not instead of it if you're ready to stop starting over and start building strength at last, head to the show notes, click on the consultation link, and I would be happy to speak with you. Now, let's get back to those tactics. Tactic number one, practice humility and surrender. I'm gonna be really careful with this word surrender because I know what you're thinking. It means giving up. Accepting less, lowering your standards. Now, as someone like myself who is very hard on themselves and holds myself to high standards, surrender in this context means something completely different. Surrender means releasing the need to fix or control the unfixable or uncontrollable situation. It means giving up the fantasy of. Perfect conditions and working with what's actually in front of you. So this has nothing to do with lowering your standards or, throwing away the original goal. It's releasing the need to fix or control the unfixable or uncontrollable situation. So in the. Fitness context this looks like showing up for one or two sets of an exercise when the full workout feels impossible. It looks like shortening your workout instead of skipping it entirely. It looks like acknowledging that right now. You cannot get to the gym. You don't have weights at home, so you pivot to a walking routine or a body weight routine. It looks like only having 20 minutes twice a week because that's what your schedule actually allows. And doing those 20 minutes instead of doing nothing while you wait for life to open up and give you an hour, six days a week, this isn't compromise. This is the only path of growth when life is actually happening because here's what the all or nothing principle has stolen from you. The understanding that something is always better than nothing. Not because something is better than nothing in some resigned defeat but because something activates your seeking pathway, something releases dopamine, something strengthens that neural circuitry of response. Nothing does nothing. Every time you show up, even in that scaled back, imperfect, this is all I've got today. You are practicing the skill of showing up. You are proving to your brain that you are someone who responds instead of reacts, and that practice accumulates. Not literally, obviously, but accumulates, surrender isn't giving up on growth. It's releasing the fantasy that's preventing growth from happening. Task number two, ask for and receive help the right kind. I'm cautioned with this one because we've been conditioned to confuse help with extreme productivity optimization, and complex routines. That's not the help I'm talking about. I'm not talking about adding more to your plate. I'm not talking about biohacking or optimizing every minute and finding ways to fit more in. I'm talking about. Help that removes the friction, help that creates space for the movement you are already trying to do. This might look like asking for childcare so you can actually have 30 uninterrupted minutes. It might look like investing in a coach who understands your life and can put together a plan that serves you. Not some idealized version of you with unlimited time or energy. It might look like hiring an expert who will teach you the skills of strength training so that you can actually use the gym equipment you've already invested in instead of walking past it feeling intimidated and guilty. Here's what I've seen over the years and also myself. I was this individual is you are so used to doing everything yourself, to being the one. Everyone relies on that. Asking for help feels like a failure, but refusing help when it actually serves you isn't strength. It's the all or nothing principle in disguise. You don't have to do this alone. Doing the IT with support isn't cheating or taking the easy way out. It's working smarter with your actual resources instead of harder against your actual constraints. Tactic number three, voluntary simplicity, routines and rituals. This is where you take all that neuroscience that we just went over, the seeking pathway and the dopamine, and make it work in your actual Tuesday evening life. Voluntary simplicity means deliberately choosing simple. Repeatable structures instead of complex, hard to sustain ones. It means blocking out time on your calendar, like actually blocking it out the way you would for a meeting or a doctor's appointment. Treating it like a non-negotiable, it means pairing your movement with another activity, so your brain starts to link them automatically. This is called implementation intentions in the research, but practically it looks like this. After I drop the kids off at practice, I will walk for 15 minutes before I go home. Before I leave my home office for the day, I will do a 20 minute routine. With the resistance bands and the set of dumbbells I keep by my desk while my coffee bruised in the morning. I'm gonna do my mobility routine. I have clients who schedule their training sessions with me before they go home because they know if they go home first, they won't leave again. I have clients who keep dumbbells in their office, whether it's an office out of the house or in the house so they can get their workout done before heading home or opening their home office door. I have clients who work out in their garage the moment they pull in before they go inside because they know when they go inside. They're not going to do it. These aren't elaborate systems. There's simple linkages between something that's already happening and the movement you want to happen. The power is in repetition. Every time you do the thing after the other thing, you're building a ritual. Rituals don't require decision making. They don't require motivation, they just happen. This is how you remove the 6:47 PM decision point. you don't have to decide whether to work out because you already decided when you set up the structure. Tactic four. Separate. Real fatigue from fake fatigue. This is crucial and it's something most people never learn to distinguish. Real fatigue calls for rest. Real fatigue has physical markers, persistent muscle soreness that does not resolve declining performance over time. Mental or physical. Disrupted sleep, getting sick more often. Elevated resting heart rate to name some of these real fatigue. Is your body saying, I need recovery? Fake fatigue is different. Fake fatigue is a resistance. Before you start is the voice that says, I am too tired. That. Evaporates in the first five minutes into a movement practice. Fake fatigue is your rage pathway trying to protect you from the threat that actually isn't there. Here's a practical test. Start commit just for five or 10 minutes, and if after that time you feel worse, if your body is generally just depleted and struggling, it's real. If after five or 10 minutes you feel better, more energized, glad you started, it was fake. That's just your nervous system resisting uncertainty. And here's the thing,. The more you practice nudging yourself past fake fatigue, the better you get at recognizing it, the less power it has over you. So you start to hear that voice, I'm too tired, I should rest. And instead of automatically believing it, you think, let me start. And C, that's not ignoring your body's signals. That's becoming more sophisticated in your own understanding of which signals mean what. Tactic. Number five, let your suffering turn into compassion. When you're struggling to show up, when you are caught in a terrible moment of decision when you feel like everyone else has it figured out and you're the only one who can't seem to get it together. I need you to remember something. Everyone is struggling. Everyone has their version of 6:47 PM on a Tuesday night. Everyone has the gap between who they are and who they want to be. Your struggle isn't evidence. Your struggle isn't evidence that you're failing. It's evidence that you're human. It's evidence that you are trying to grow in a life that doesn't stop making demands long enough to make growth easy. And if you let that soften you, if you meet yourself with compassion instead of judgment, something shifts and instead of thinking, I should be better at this, you might think this is hard and I'm doing it anyway, and that matters. Instead of comparing yourself to some imagined version of yourself who has it all together, you might recognize that showing up imperfectly is the only way anyone ever shows up in compassion for yourself, for the difficulty, for the reality of your life. That compassion does not make you weak. It makes you sustainable. Because shame has never built anything that lasts, but compassion. Compassion builds the kind of relationship with yourself where showing up becomes something you do for yourself, not something you force yourself through. All righted before I say goodbye on this episode. Let me tell you something, the fitness industry will never tell you because it doesn't sell programs. You cannot force growth or meaning. You can't force the breakthrough. You can't force the transformation. You can't force the moment when it all clicks and suddenly everything feels easy and you're the person you've been trying to become. What feels impossible today won't always feel this hard. Not because the situation magically changes, but because you change through the practice of showing up anyway, but you can't force that change. You can only create the conditions for it, and those conditions are simple. Practice humility and surrender. Ask and receive. Help create simple routines and rituals. Learn to distinguish real fatigue from fake fatigue. Meet yourself with compassion. These aren't dramatic. They won't make good before and after photos. They won't give you a story about total transformation in 12 weeks. But they'll give you something better. They'll give you a practice that lasts because here's what I know. After two decades of working in this industry with women just like you, the goal isn't to become someone who never struggles with the decision to work out. The goal is to become someone who struggles and does it anyway. The goal is to strengthen the seeking pathway. One deliberate response at a time until responding becomes more automatic than reacting. The goal is to build a version of yourself. Who knows that two sets count that 20 minutes twice a week counts. That showing up and perfectly counts. Not because you've given up on wanting more, but because you've understood that this right here, right now in your actual life, this. Is where growth happens. So the next time you are standing in your kitchen at 6:47 PM on a Tuesday, exhausted and caught between collapsing and moving, I want you to remember. This moment is not evidence that you're failing. This moment is practice. This moment is where your brain is learning that you are someone who responds instead of reacts. And if you can take that first step, even a small one, even an imperfect one, you are not just working out. You're literally rewiring your brain. You are fueling the seeking pathway. You are releasing dopamine. You are proving to yourself that you're capable of a deliberate response even when everything wants you to react. And that practice repeated over time, changes everything, not overnight, not dramatically, but deeply sustainable in ways that last.

Kat: 27:44

Thank you for tuning in to MilesFromHerView, powered by KatFit Strength. If this podcast inspires you, don't keep it for yourself. Hit follow or subscribe to stay updated on the new episodes, and leave us a review to help more women and moms discover this space. Your feedback fuels this podcast and I'd love to hear what's working for you or what topics you want to dive into Next. You can connect with me on Instagram at KatFit or share this episode. Road with a friend who is ready to embrace her strength. Remember, fitness isn't about perfection. It's about showing up for yourself and finding strength in every step of your journey. Until next time, keep moving forward one mile at a time.