This post appears as part of our Healthier 2021 series, following three WebMD team members as they strive to improve their health this year. You can follow their travels here.
From Bill Kimm
Writing this blog in the past 2 months has been a fantastic motivator. Knowing that I had to write about my progress every week forced me to be held accountable. There is no way I would allow myself to fail if I knew I had to admit it here.
But this blog shouldn’t be permanent, and now that we’re relaxing, I need to find other motivators to keep myself focused. And I have to be careful there.
I live with depression. And while treating my depression, I learned that I also struggle with perfectionism (which only leads to more depression). I am my worst critic. I can quickly see where I’ve come up short or where I’ve failed, and in situations like this I find it difficult to see anything positive about myself. As you can imagine, this self-criticism is not very helpful when trying to lose weight and live healthier! That’s why it’s important to me to find the right motivators.
Through therapy, I find that some of the tools I’ve used for motivation in the past may actually have worked against me.
My Apple Watch, my Lose It app – both offer badges, awards, and encouragement to keep me focused and on the right track. They are fun to win, but they can also be addicting (and have been for me in the past). My therapist and I agree that I shouldn’t just focus on these satisfactions. They help, and they’re exciting to reach, but they can all too easily turn into measuring instruments that give my inner critics something to fret about. So I’ve learned that I can enjoy the badges when they show up, but I have to avoid using them as motivation.
Another motivator for me was watching people get healthy, be it on social media or with my friends. There is nothing like seeing the joy of others succeeding in their journey and it gives me so much encouragement and motivation. But I’m also ridiculously competitive. And part of me gets jealous of their success. Theodore Roosevelt is quoted as saying, “Comparison is the thief of joy.” That’s a lot of truth. The only trip comparable to mine is mine. While I am celebrating their successes, I must also be careful that others’s success does not interfere with the way I see how well I am doing.
These two “motivators” can make my depression worse. If I don’t close all three rings on my watch, I’ll beat myself up; When a friend runs further and faster than me, I think that I am a failure and why I don’t care anymore. And this self-criticism feeds my depression. It leads to more laziness, more stress eating, no more caring, and a funk that it’s getting harder and harder to get out of. Luckily I have a great therapist who has helped me overcome these challenges for the past 7 months and I have learned how to manage my thoughts better. I also have an amazing support system in my family, friends and especially my teammates Mark and Laura from Healthier 2021 who taught me so much on our journey together.
Dr. Bruni, Senior Medical Director of WebMD, told me back in January, “You are investing in yourself. This is bigger than weight loss, this is your life! “
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