What if we thought about exercise and mindfulness the same way?

Imagine if you lived in a world where exercise wasn’t really a thing. Sure, maybe somewhere, up in the mountains of Tibet, serene looking monks spent their days doing pull-ups and burpees, by generally speaking, nobody bothered.

Imagine there were no gyms, no televised sporting events, nobody ever gave any thought to eating a healthy diet, there were no athletes or body builders. Instead, people thought of these things as vague, poorly understood practices for people with too much time on their hands.

In this imaginary world people are, unsurprisingly, in pretty bad shape. Chronic obesity is common (yes I am still talking about an imaginary world), people’s immune systems barely function, it’s almost unheard of to eat a vegetable or drink something without sugar in it, ordinary daily tasks like walking up a flight of stairs are exhausting…you get the idea.

Now imagine that you meet somebody who tells you that if you were to perform a few repetitive movements 3 times a week, and eat certain things not for their taste but for the good they could do for your health, you would experience benefits you could barely imagine. Benefits that would impact almost every aspect of your life. But there’s a catch. In order to reap these benefits, you might have to maintain these practices for weeks or…