Your brain does its best to keep you from going to the gym, you know that?

A healthy life is the result of a combination of factors such as balanced diet, good nights sleep, contact with friends, abandoning bad habits and, of course, physical activity. The problem is that, with regard to this last item, we are not always able to take seriously the gym membership or the plan to walk in the park daily.

Before you say you just don't want to exercise, we have news for you: your brain is basically programmed to make the couch look a lot nicer than any other activity-related place.

A recent study on this topic involved 29 volunteers who needed to analyze images in which individuals were exercising and others enjoying boredom. Meanwhile, their brains were monitored and the researchers studied their images of brain activity.

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The volunteers also had access to an avatar of their own on an interactive screen. During the tests, they were driven to move their avatars both toward images of people exercising and toward images of people standing still.

The study's author, Matthieu Boisgontier, noticed that volunteers moved their avatars faster toward images of people not playing sports. Nonetheless, it was noted that the participants' brain activities were more intense as they ran in the opposite direction to the images of those standing still, meaning that the brain works harder to escape the sedentary image.

Rooted sedentary lifestyle

The reason for this behavior may lie in our primitive survival instincts, since keeping our stored energy conserved was useful in times of scarcity, as well as in times of seeking sexual partners and avoiding predators. To Boisgontier, it is as if our brains were actually programmed to make us sedentary.

Before you think about giving up on this healthy living thing once and for all, the trick is to try to trick the brain into making it want to exercise. Like? Making your physical activity routine look more like a joke, something fun, than obligation. The tip is simple, but it really works, and you will only take the nine if you try it for good.

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