Psychological Strategies To Help You Keep Running

Smart sport watch

Before running,you can wear a BP doctor watch to help you measure your blood pressure,heart rate,temperature,etc.

Running is hard. There's no way around it: Putting one foot in front of the other and doing it quickly isn't as easy as it sounds. The first is the struggle to "get out of the house." A lot of people claim this is the hardest part, but there are ways to fool yourself, like agreeing to run with a friend or adopting a dog that needs a lot of exercise.

But then came the struggles of running itself. Unless you're one of the fittest runners, even then it's going to start hurting at some point. Your legs will burn, your lungs will be squeezed, and your brain will ask you to stop immediately.

99.9% of the time, this mental stupidity will happen before you've walked any of the distance you set yourself up for. Maybe you plan to run three miles and you only have one, or maybe you plan to run twenty-two and you have fifteen miles. How do you tell your lungs, muscles, and most importantly, your brain: "No, you can't decide. I want to finish this run"?

Incentive method
There are basically two important ways to convince your brain — which is your body — to shut up and move on: motivation or distraction. Both methods of persuasion are better than the other, so let's start with the motivating method, aligning your brain and keeping your legs moving.

Imagine a goal. If you hit the sidewalk outside, you're doing it for a reason. However, when your brain starts to panic because of a physical injury, the reason may seem "dumb". The competition you signed up for? madness. Do you want to lose weight? madness. The bet you want to win? Really, really stupid.

To get back that feeling of motivation, which is why you started this run in the first place, imagine achieving your goals, and then imagine every nifty Instagram filter you could put on it. What does it look like when you cross the finish line at 5k? Who will hug you at the end of the marathon? What do you think of those awesome jeans you've been staring at? The more clearly you can visualize your goal and the more detail you can imagine, the more effective this method will be.

Run in blocks. This method is all about creating a small "win" in the run. Say you're going to run three miles, and the longest distance you've ever run is two and a half miles. Three miles seems really far! But if you break it up into segments and just focus on each segment, the distance doesn't seem to be that big. Breaking your run into chunks can help you identify work that's been done instead of focusing on how much you have left and guessing what? This sense of accomplishment helps motivate you to keep going. If you used the half mile segment in this example, you would have reached the mental "finish line" six times!

dispersion method
Another way to get your brain to cooperate is to try to distract it away from that feeling that you want to stop panting and my legs are going to fall off. There are various ways to do this. Here are a few examples:

Play some tunes. Listening to music while running can actually motivate and distract people. As sports psychologist Dr. Costas Karageorghis put it in the debate on Runner's World's Running with Music, "Music promotes positive aspects of emotion, such as excitement and joy." If not excitement and joy, what is the motivation?

Meanwhile, Karachoggis believes that music can also be a distraction. "External stimuli like music can actually block some of the internal stimuli that try to reach the brain -- like fatigue-related messages from muscles and organs. When those messages are blocked, it reduces the runner's perception of effort, so you feel like you can Run farther and faster."

Repeat a spell. As professional runner and podcast host Tina Muir suggests, repeating a mantra or taking a bottle of "spirit" can serve two purposes, maybe even three. First, it interrupts and eventually masks the negative self-talk that we can have when we get tired during a run.

If you choose "I am strong" or "You can do it", it can also be used as a source of motivation. (Interestingly, talking to yourself in the second person—saying "you" instead of "me"—has proven more effective.) Or, if you choose a mantra like "relax" or "run high," it Can serve as body cues to help with your running form.