Here is the full transcript of Chris Wharton’s talk titled “The Exercise Happiness Paradox” at TEDxSevenoaks conference.
Chris Wharton’s talk, “The Exercise Happiness Paradox,” delves into the complex relationship between physical activity and mental well-being. He challenges the conventional pursuit of exercise solely for aesthetic goals, such as fat loss and muscle definition, arguing these are often not aligned with genuine happiness.
Wharton introduces the concept that exercise, often seen as a miracle medicine for its myriad health benefits, should be appreciated more for its positive impact on mood and mental health rather than just physical appearance. He highlights the societal pressure to achieve an ideal body type and how this can lead to a paradox where exercise might contribute to unhappiness due to constant comparison and unrealistic expectations.
Throughout his talk, Wharton emphasizes the importance of finding joy in physical activity, setting performance-based goals, and cultivating a positive self-image. He advocates for a shift in perspective, urging his audience to value exercise for the strength, confidence, and happiness it brings, rather than for superficial reasons. Ultimately, Wharton’s message is a call to embrace exercise as a path to well-being, urging individuals to break free from the happiness paradox by focusing on the intrinsic benefits of staying active.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
The Miracle Medicine
I want you to imagine a groundbreaking new medicine: a single pill that, taken once a day, would make you live a longer and happier life. Not only that, this pill would make you stronger. It would profoundly increase your energy levels, your mood, your brain function, and your concentration. In fact, this pill would outperform every other known medicine for improving overall markers of health. It would be a groundbreaking revelation. It would change the face of medicine as we know it. Sounds pretty good, right?
Now, luckily for all of us, this miracle medicine already exists, and it’s called exercise. And if it were available in the pill form, it’d be the most prescribed and most valuable medicine on Earth. But there’s a catch. See, for this pill to keep on working, we have to keep taking it. I’ve spent the whole of my career trying to persuade people to do exactly that.
The Exercise Happiness Paradox
Over the past 15 years, I’ve been on tens of thousands of health and fitness journeys, and across all of those ages and demographics, I’ve noticed a worrying and common trend. Whilst exercise can most certainly help us dramatically improve our lives, in many cases, I’ve seen it end up doing the exact opposite. I call this ‘the exercise happiness paradox’.
Now, to unravel the paradox, we must first understand a little bit more about what goes on up here. You see, our mood, our happiness, and our feelings of mental health are almost entirely controlled by our brain chemistry. This complex cocktail of hormones in our head. And whilst we have little to no control over external factors like national lockdowns or other people’s behaviors, this brain chemistry can be manipulated by the foods we eat, by the amount of sleep we get, by how much exercise we take part in. We call these lifestyle modifications, and we can control them.
Brain Chemistry
So a sensible hack for improving our happiness, then, is to attempt to try and manipulate this brain chemistry to try and make us feel optimal. Anyone who’s ever completed a decent workout would have experienced this: that rush, that euphoria, the high we get when we finish. This is down to an increase in the production of endorphins, a type of neurotransmitter responsible for relieving pain and stress.
But exercise also increases serotonin, the same hormone targeted by antidepressants, as well as dopamine and norepinephrine, all of which are responsible for regulating our mood. So put very simply, exercise can immediately and acutely make us feel happier.
But if we’re being completely honest, the way that we feel is very rarely the reason we’re compelled to start exercising in the first place. I know this because the only question I ever get asked is an iteration of this: How do I lose weight? How do I get toned arms? How do I get a six-pack? How do we get a thigh gap? How long will it take to lose a stone? What’s the best exercise for fat loss? How do I get rid of this? Notice how none of these questions have anything to do with the way that you feel and everything to do with the way that we look.
See, whilst our brains are wonderful tools for orchestrating happiness, they’re also prone to self-sabotage and comparison, and never has this been more true than when it comes to the way that we look. And it’s not even our fault. We’ve been led down a skinny little garden path by the multi-billion-pound fat loss industry where sex sells and appearance is everything. We can’t even avoid it.
Every day, we’re bombarded with messages meant to make us feel guilt and shame about the way that we look. All designed to get us to part with our hard-earned cash in return for some revolutionary new diet trend or cutting-edge workout or little fat loss potion sold by super lean Instagram influencer or celebrity that never seems to age.
And herein lies the paradox, you see, when we embark on our health and fitness journeys, we begin to expose ourselves to this world. These images, these articles, and social media highlight reels, and our brains can’t help but stop making comparisons. We begin to cherry-pick the best parts of other people’s bodies and lives and start comparing them to our worst parts. “I wish I had arms like his. I wish I had legs like hers. I wish I could get away with wearing those shorts.” Psychologists call this upward social comparison, and it sets us off on an endless and cyclical pursuit of perfection.
Upward Social Comparison
Because the sad truth is that the pictures we see on the covers of magazines, in the press, and on social media highlight reels aren’t even real.
They are snapshots in time. They are actors who trained for a specific scene. They are cover models whose photos are edited and airbrushed to appear faultless. They are your friends’ best photos at the best angle, with the best lighting. This is not reality. There is a lot of cheating going on, and I know this because I’ve been there myself more than once.
In fact, I want to show you a quick example. This is a picture of me after I took part in a photoshoot a little while back. Now, don’t get me wrong, I trained hard, but I do work in a gym and I did do a lot of cheating. Okay, I manipulated your carbohydrate and water consumption to appear drier, leaner, and more toned than I actually was.
Now I’m not showing you this to massage my ego in any way, because this is not how I look ever. In fact, I didn’t look like this the day after. Here’s a photo of me less than 24 hours later. A huge difference.
The Reality Behind the Images
There is always a huge difference between the photos we are shown and reality. Very few people are walking around like this day-to-day. And for the vast majority of us who work in offices, not gyms, whose careers aren’t dependent on looking a specific way, and who don’t want to spend all of their time counting calories and tracking their food, not only is this unsustainable, it’s also pretty pointless.
See, our bodies have not evolved to look like this. We have not evolved to have skinny thighs or six-pack abs. This topic, along with nutrition, deserves a TED Talk of its own, but very simply, our body’s ability to store fat has helped us survive through millions of years of evolution. We’ve needed it for much of our existence to keep us warm, to shield our vital organs, to nurture our growing brains, and to store energy to survive periods of famine.
Now, luckily for everyone in this room and most people in the developed world, these are no longer threats that we face. There is no famine waiting around the corner. We’re unlikely to freeze to death in our heated homes. And there are no saber-tooth tigers skulking about in our garden hedges waiting for us to go to work.
But our bodies haven’t yet caught up. And sadly, this surreptitious and insidious belief that we should all be lean or should all want to be skinny or toned is robbing people of their happiness. I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve been sat in a room with someone crying their eyes out because they don’t like what they see in the mirror, or they don’t look perfect, or they hate their stretch marks, and it is heartbreaking. And I’ve seen it end tragically more than once.
Now, I’m not suggesting that ambitious fat loss goals are unachievable. Far from it. But they aren’t — they shouldn’t be all-consuming and they are not all-important and we most certainly shouldn’t have to miss out on life to achieve them. As a society, I would love to see us move away from this endless ideal of perfect, whatever that even means. From the idea that that is even good for us, that that will make us happy because, in my experience, it really won’t.
The biggest lesson I’ve learned over the past 15 years is this and is a harsh truth: No one gives a shit what you look like. Seriously. No one cares if you’ve got abs. No one cares if you got skinny thighs or toned arms. And neither should you. Do you know what people do care about? That you don’t get sick. That you are strong and confident and full of energy that you are present.
The Real Priorities
That you jump in every photo with your parents, you jump in every pool with your kids, that you’re strong enough to pick up your grandchildren and carry them on your shoulders, and that you’re still around to watch them grow up. That you capture every moment and take every chance you get to live a happy and fulfilling life.
See, if we’re being completely honest with ourselves, our goal has never been fat loss or to change shape to begin with. Our goal is the happiness that we think these things will bring. And if we’re stuck in this perpetual loop of critiquing the way that we look, counting every calorie that we ate, and comparing ourselves to everyone else, we will never feel truly happy and it will never end.
So what’s the solution? How can we achieve greater levels of health and happiness without falling into the comparison trap? How can we take positive steps towards long-term improvements in our physique without feeling miserable? How can we take the miracle medicine without the side effects? I’ve got four things I want you to try.
Strategies for Well-being
Number one: We have to stop being so hard on ourselves. Social comparison leads to some really toxic self-talk, and we’ve all been there. “I hate my arms, I’m too fat, I’m too old, I’m too poor.” When you catch yourself using this kind of language, I want you to stop and ask yourself, would I speak this way to the people that I care about? Because the answer is a resounding no. We have to change the narrative and start practicing gratitude for the things we do have, rather than the things we think we lack.
This may sound cliché, but a really powerful way of doing this is by using a daily gratitude journal; this genuinely changed my life. It’s very hard, almost impossible to experience negative emotions when we’re feeling grateful for what we have. It takes a few minutes each day, jot down two or three things about your body that you are grateful for, and I guarantee you this positive mindset will begin spilling over into the rest of your life.
Finding Joy in Movement
Step two: Find something you enjoy and do more of it. People that enjoy exercising keep doing it, and those that keep doing it not only reap all of the short-term benefits I mentioned earlier, they tend to be the ones that achieve the greatest long-term improvements in health and their physiques. So I want you to ignore everything you’ve ever been told about what type of exercise you should be doing and pick something you enjoy.
If you like dancing, go dancing; if you like lifting weights, lift weights. Don’t be pigeonholed into doing what everyone else is doing. And don’t be afraid to mix things up either. There’s no right or wrong exercise for your age, gender, body type, or ability. I’ve coached 20-year-olds that loved bows and 80-year-olds who loved boxing. Find something you enjoy and do more of it.
Number three: Measure performance and not your weight, in my humble opinion, and this is just my opinion, the only place a set of scales belongs in your house is deep in the bin. Using weight as a measure of your progress is a terrible idea for many reasons, not least it can ruin your entire mood and mindset in an instant, like an evil little roulette wheel. I don’t want to live in a world where I feel guilty about going for a pint with my dad or eating a bit of cake at my daughter’s birthday party without feeling compelled to run home and jump on the scales and assess the damage.
If we set ourselves small performance goals instead, it can be as simple as increasing the number of press-ups we do each week or hitting a higher daily step count. Learning a new dance move or spending more time gardening. These small, marginal gains can drastically improve our self-efficacy by providing us with small and regular victories. When we keep winning, we keep moving forward.
Making Health a Priority
Lastly, and most importantly, we have to make this time non-negotiable. I’ve seen so many people spend so much of their life worrying, caring for, and providing for everyone else in their life and ignoring their own health. And I’m sure that some of you in the room. This has to stop. It’s so counterproductive.
My challenge for you is to take 20 to 30 minutes to carve out of your diary each day as ‘you time’. Not for your partners, not for your kids, certainly not for your boss, and not to lose weight, but to focus on your well-being. And please don’t use the excuse of not having time. Not only do you deserve this, you owe it to yourself and everyone else in your life to become the best possible version of you.
Now, this doesn’t mean we have to go through some savage gym routine every day. It could mean spending 20 minutes going for a long walk to clear your head. It might mean sitting in a room in the dark, having a stretch. Whatever you do, the important thing is to make this time non-negotiable. It’s a part of your schedule. I guarantee you if you can manage to do this and make it habitual, it will pay huge dividends across every dimension of your life.
Conclusion
Be kinder to yourself. Find something you enjoy. Set small and regular performance goals and carve out time in your life to do more of it. I want to leave you with this. I truly believe that exercise is the single greatest happiness hack that has ever existed. But to really reap the benefits of this miracle medicine, we have to give ourselves permission to fall in love with the way it makes us feel, rather than the way it makes us look.
I know it’s difficult, but please don’t spend one more second of your precious time concerned about not looking perfect because perfect simply does not exist. Bodies come in all shapes and sizes, each one as worthy of happiness as the next. So throw away the scales and wear the damn shorts. Because the only people that care, the only people that matter, don’t care what you look like and don’t care how much you weigh. They care that you are healthy and strong and happy, and so should you.