It is not uncommon to analyze your day into good and bad decisions. It can feel quite good to look at your day, or your week and say “I made the right choice far more often than the wrong one.”
This is the primary way my mind has operated (particularly regarding my physical health) for the past seven years. At the end of each day, I lie down in my bed and run through the mental checkmarks of success as well as the red x marks designating failure. Over the past three years of working with clients trying to change their lives, I have learned that I am not alone.
Running through a mental checklist of success and failures is not a mere thought exercise, it is a value determination.
The “cancel out mentality,” as I call it, names this self-oppressive belief system. It determines the value of your day based upon task completion, and nothing more. Psychologically, this is how it shows up: “If I go workout today, I can go and drink tonight.” “Well I didn’t workout yesterday, so I probably shouldn’t eat that.” “I went out and ate poorly yesterday, I have to sweat it out.” “I ate well for lunch, so I can splurge on dinner.”
To be clear, I am not critiquing that action of working out and then going out for drinks on the same evening. There is nothing wrong with that. I am critiquing the quid-pro-quo, tit for tat, comprehensive excel spreadsheet inside your mind attempting to make sure your good decisions outweigh the bad ones.
I thought this way for the better half of a decade, and want to articulate what it may feel like for you if you live in this kind of mind:
- Your worth is predicated on how you performed today.
- You live in constant pressure.
- You are incessantly worried about your physical health being up to par.
- You view health primarily as “what to stay away from” (avoidance/restrictive) as opposed to “what to start doing”(encouraging/joyful).
- You constantly question your decisions.
The heart of the “cancel out mentality”
It is a universal human need to be valuable. We all need to feel our value, we need to see it. This desire is surely good, but it goes awry when we try to become the internal arbiter of our value.
We are not impartial judges of ourselves, and yet when we hold the “cancel out mentality,” we act as if we are. Worse than that, we act as if our whole being is summed up only in the things we did and did not do. This is far from healthy.
This mentality is birthed (in the health/fitness space) from the following experience: First, feeling insignificant (out of shape, physically you do not want your own body). Second, seeing progress from your own discipline, and instead of celebrating you begin to tie your worth to progress. Being disciplined and taking steps towards improving your physical health is positive, but not when you conflate it with your own value as a human being. Third, you begin feeling worthless and insignificant all over again because your value was always tied to your progress, which will eventually subside.
Practical steps to break out of the “cancel out mentality:”
- Remind yourself that taking care of yourself is a gift, not an endless path to self improvement. Write this down, say it to yourself, or watch content that affirms this perspective.
- Exercise in a way that respects and nourishes your body; not in a way that exhausts it.
- When you eat, try and think about how it makes you feel as opposed to saying “this is good and this is bad.”
- When you feel like you have failed, when you overeat or skip a workout, remind yourself that it is all a process. You haven’t fallen off the wagon.
One of the main reasons people go hard in health and fitness for a stretch, quit, start again, and quit is because they feel like their “bad” decisions are consistently outweighing their “good” ones. Then it makes logical sense to believe that “I am not the kind of person who can keep this up.” The decision is made easily because the interpretation of their behavior has taught them that they simply cannot keep this up. This is what constant pressure does to people, it’s the end point of the “cancel out mentality.” To take your health seriously for a lifetime demands a perspective shift towards something whole, not “forsaking the bad half of us for the good half.”
Lee Ramsey has a passion for fitness as a way to help people grow and change into more adaptable, capable and resilient versions of themselves. He is owner of Sanctify Fitness in Covington and a regular fitness columnist for the NKyTribune.