A Realistic Daily Movement Habit for Busy Women

Depending on your season of life (or the season in your hemisphere), getting outside to move your body every day can feel surprisingly hard. Maybe you’re juggling work, caring for children or aging parents, and managing everyday household responsibilities with already limited energy. Who has time to go for a walk?

In this mini episode of the Habits Series, I’m talking about why daily movement matters and how to approach it with grace, and consistency.

I share honestly about why this habit has been challenging for me, especially in winter and midlife, and why movement still plays an important role in supporting our bodies, our focus, and our ability to persevere in a God-given dream. 

You’ll hear about the connection between movement, morning sunlight, and overall well-being, along with simple, doable ways to make this habit easier to keep.

If you’ve struggled to prioritize movement or you’ve assumed it has to look intense to count, this episode will help you rethink what’s possible. I hope you’ll come away encouraged to start small, stay consistent, and see daily movement as one more way to care for yourself as you continue dreaming with God.

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Transcript

Merritt Onsa:
What is something you could do today that would impact your God shaped dream and your ability to persevere in it for the long haul? Hi, I'm Merritt Onsa, your devoted dreamers host, and I am an authority on what it looks like to pursue a God shaped dream. And over the next several mini episodes, I'm going to be talking about building simple, small habits that will build into you confidence and the consistency you need to run your race after the dream God has given you. Let's build some new habits. 

If you could use a tool to make keeping your habits a little bit easier, maybe even a little bit of a game, I've got a free habit tracker for you at Merrittonsa.com/habits. You'll find that link in the show notes. And of course I will mention it again at the end of this episode. 

Okay, today's habit is about daily movement. And as I was getting ready to record this episode and thinking about the fact that it's Saturday today, and I'm not sure I've practiced this habit at all this week, other than the walk I went on this morning for one hour. There's a little bit of hesitation here. Maybe you hear it in my voice that right now in the middle of cold, snowy winter in Colorado, daily movement, other than walking to and from the car to pick up children at school or doing a few errands, daily movement is something that some of you may not think is difficult to prioritize if you work out every day or three to five times a week, maybe it comes easy to you. 

But in the middle of winter, in my middle age, daily movement is a little bit harder than I ever imagined it would be. Now I grew up in a family of runners. My parents would get up at five o'clock in the morning to go run a 10K five days a week. And so it's not that this is not a thing that I understand the value of, but life, parenting, caring for older parents, running a podcast, running a business, all of those things seem to always rise to the top above daily movement. So if you're like me and you find this to be a little bit of a challenge in this season of life or your life is just generally a bit more sedentary, you spend lots of time sitting at a desk or standing at the kitchen counter cooking or preparing meals. Maybe you're doing work around your home and there's a little bit of movement there, but it's not really exercise or maybe you commute to a place of work.

This episode is for you and me. So why is daily movement important? I'm not sure I really need to go into this, but I will tell you this important little bit of information. I actually want to connect this daily habit with another habit of getting outside at the beginning of the day, like in the morning, either just as the sun is coming up or just as you're waking up. And the reason I'm connecting this and the expert I want to refer you to about this is Dr. Andrew Huberman, who is a neuroscience researcher and educator. He's a neuroscience professor at Stanford. I started to follow him on Instagram and every single time I see one of his posts, it's this reminder. Oh my goodness. I need to get outside. I need to get sunlight into my eyes and I need to move my body a little bit. So if you want some science to back up why daily movement is important and you want to know why morning sunlight is crucial.

Honestly, don't listen to me. Go listen or pay attention to Dr. Andrew Huberman. His Instagram is Huberman lab and it appears he also has a podcast under that very same name. He has this recent Instagram post as of the day that I'm recording this about what your body needs in a 24 hour cycle, which goes beyond what this episode today is about, but it's connected. So every 24 hours he says, we need to re-up our sleep, our morning sunlight, exercise, nutrients, and water. And he says the fact that we can survive more than 24 hours without one or several of these is irrelevant. Health flourishes when we make getting all five of these a daily priority. 

So there's my why for this daily movement and getting outside and getting morning sunlight. In all of these episodes, I want to talk about how we can make it easy. And I would love to hear your tricks or hacks for getting daily movement, because this is something that, as I've mentioned, I do struggle with, but to the best of my ability, I want to put this in the category of how we can make it easy, just like any other habit. I would say to try to do it at the same time every day or in the same rhythms every week.

For example, if you have the opportunity to walk your kids to school or home from school, that would be daily movement. In the fall, for example, I would often drop off one of my children at preschool. And then in the neighborhood, just for a change of scenery, I would take a one mile walk. I would turn on a podcast, would turn on my little Strava app, and I would just go for a walk for a mile. Now, one mile isn't quite 20 minutes, which is really my minimum goal that I go for in daily movement, but that's just one example of, I'm already doing this thing and I'm a little bit bored of the trails in my neighborhood, so maybe I'll go walk in the neighborhood where I'm taking my child to school.

Another way, just exercise in general to make it easy is to decide the night before. If I wait until the morning of, I will always find something else better to do. So put out your clothes that you want to wear, the shoes, your socks, all the things that you need, you know, maybe your headphones for, know, listening to whatever podcast or music do that the night before, and then just hop out of bed and go do the movement, first thing. In fact, even writing that down has me thinking this is what I want to do tomorrow morning.

Another way to make it easy or more fun is to do it with a friend or a neighbor. I've got a next door neighbor with a newborn baby. And I just asked her this afternoon, like, Hey, let's walk together. I see you walking. Let's go walk together. And then really make it easy. Keep it small. Start small. You do not have to walk three miles for that daily movement to get to be checked off your list around the block is enough to start with. As I said earlier, shoot for 20 minutes. And if you're taking Dr. Huberman's expertise into consideration, getting morning sunlight into your eyes as soon as you can after waking up. And he says without sunglasses or a windshield that you're looking through that will elevate your morning cortisol, which in turn leads to an elevated mood, immune function and focus all day and better sleep at night. So all the more reason that we should make daily movement and morning sunshine priorities in our day.

I want to leave you with this important note today. You can begin a new habit anytime. And it's important because consistency builds courage and consistency is self-perpetuating. This month, I'm asking you to consider one to two small habits that you could begin today that would give you that practice of building that muscle memory. Pick something simple, pick something that's easy, pick something you want to do and something you can do quickly. Pick a habit that has an outcome you would be excited to achieve, to receive, to see that change in your life. So that even if you don't want to do it in the moment, you might be able to tell yourself, hey, it's only gonna take me a couple of minutes. And this is something I said I wanted to do. And then track yourself. What you don't measure, you cannot improve. And the point is that if you don't have a gauge for how you're doing, how frequently you're doing it, what days you're missing, maybe even what stood in the way of you getting it done that day.

It's impossible to know whether any change or shift has occurred. That's why I'm giving you a free habit tracker to help you monitor your efforts in building new habits. If you're not familiar with what a habit tracker is, it's this simple little one page tool. I'll give it to you in a PDF printable format. If you're a paper girl like I am, you can find the free habit tracker at merrittonsa.com/habits, pick your habit, start tracking it and see what God does with your consistency and perseverance to establish new habits.