Slay Your Inner Quitter

She’s the reason you hit snooze, flake from fitness plans and give up on that diet three days in. She’s your inner quitter – and she’s lazy AF. Especially as winter draws nearer. Here’s how to keep yours quiet

- Laura Potter

Somewhere deep inside your brain, down a neural pathway or two, nestled behind some grey matter, is a little cluster of cells. They might look innocent enough, but their motives are sinister. They collude to create your inner quitter and that crafty bitch is only interested in one thing: railroading you away from healthy intentions and out of the good-for-you things pencilled into your schedule. She’s the reason you take your freshly washed gym kit to work only to bring it home again still clean; it’s her fault that you buy a week’s worth of healthy fresh groceries and then order a takeaway come Wednesday; in fact, she’s at her happiest when you’re horizontal on the sofa cramming Smarties into your mouth, all mindful intentions of doing a little at-home yoga forgotten.

“As our brains have evolved over millions of years, new ways of thinking can interfere with old and vice versa,” explains Dr Simon Marshall, sport psychologist and co-author of The Brave Athlete: Calm The F*ck Down And Rise To The Occasion. “At first, they just had to keep us alive with simple powers like fight or flight. That’s the limbic system and we call it the ‘chimp brain’ because it can’t think rationally or logically. As we started to walk upright, forage and make shelter, we developed the ability to think in abstract terms. That happens in the frontal cortex, which is your ‘professor brain’ and is perfectly rational and logical. Any mental anguish is a fight between these two brains.”