Episode 651: What If Fun Is a Health Metric?

0:00What if we tracked laughter and play and genuine enjoyment with even a fraction of the enthusiasm we bring to our step counts and protein grams? Personally I think our health would look very different. And honestly, I think it would be a lot easier to sustain. Welcome to your daily hit of Grace and Grit. Our quick dose of inspiration to kickstart your day. I'm Courtney Townley and here is today's hit. If you've been listening to this show for a while, you know that joy and fun have come up before. I've talked about joy span, about creativity, a lot about what puts life into your life. I come back to this territory because I think it's genuinely underweighted in how we think

1:00about health. Sustainability and health practice is almost always tied to enjoyment. Not every moment has to be fun, of course. Not every workout has to feel like a party. But in general, you're going to stay committed far more easily to things you actually enjoy. Then to things you dread. If there are areas of your health practice that you genuinely hate, that is definitely worth paying attention to. So here's where I want to make this really practical because I think we sometimes associate fun with grand gestures or special occasions. But the most sustainable version of fun in a health practice is the kind you weave in to the everyday.

2:02Take cooking, for example. We cook multiple times a day if we are genuinely committed to nourishing ourselves well and our families well. I often joke with my boys. I'm always like, why do you guys have to eat every day? Why can't you just have dinner like two nights a week? But they need to eat every day. I need to eat every day multiple times a day. And cooking is something that can become so routine and so mechanical and so wrapped up in efficiency and getting it done that we lose all the delight in it entirely. I know that's true for me. I definitely go through phases where I'm like, oh, if I never have to cook again, I would be okay with that. But to me, that's always a call to approach it differently. When I lay out the ingredients before I start, I turn on music that I enjoy listening to and bring some real presence to what I'm doing instead of five other things at the same

3:08time or just trying to get on to the next thing. Something shifts. Right? The food tastes different. The experience is different. I brought magic to something that's just really mundane and it cost me nothing but a little attention. You can take that same principle into any area of your health practice, how you exercise, who you exercise with, the music you listen to, the route you take to work, the way you set up your environment. These things are not trivial. They are the difference between a practice you sustain and one you abandon. Here's the question I want you to sit with today. Where in your health practice right now are you experiencing real dread? Not occasional overlectance because that's normal. But genuine dread. The thing that you avoid whenever you can and white knuckle your way through when you cannot.

4:15This is information. It does not necessarily mean you should stop doing it, but it probably means that something needs to change about how you are doing it. This dread is not a sustainable fuel, not for health. Health practices built on dread do not last. I have given examples over the years of so many ways I've had to shake up my own health practices. I've changed gyms. I have not gone to the gym for a period of time. I have changed the way that I eat, how I cook, the attention I put into my winding down routine at night, what I do when I first get up in the morning, because what is fun and what brings me joy or brings me interest is not always the same in every season of my life.

5:16And I am wildly certain that that is also true for you. But fun is fuel for our health practices. Attention is fuel. Presence is fuel. All of those things are sustainability mechanisms. So find it. Protect it. And stop treating presence and enjoyment like things that you'll get around to once everything else is handled. Today I would challenge you just to bring a little bit more magic to something super mundane, something that you do every single day on repeat. Just make it slightly more enjoyable. Just one small thing to make it slightly more enjoyable. That's how practices become more permanent. I share this kind of real-time revelation every Tuesday on Substack in my Live the Code

6:18live series. I go live every day, Tuesday, 8.30 AM mountain time for my paid subscribers. So if you are interested in doing this work alongside of me, you want to get deeper into that work yourselves, check me out on Substack under a little bit of Grayson grit or by my name, Courtney Townley. If this stirred something inside of you, imagine what a whole book of clarity and courage could ignite. The Consistency Code, a midlife woman's guide to deep health and happiness, goes even deeper into the mindset and practices that create real, meaningful change at midlife. Grab your copy today over at theconsistencycode.com and keep the momentum alive.