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You’ll be more motivated to exercise

When you feel good, you’re more pumped to get out and be physically active—and you feel good if you treat yourself with kindness. “If you care about yourself and you don’t want to suffer you’re going to be more motivated to do things like exercise,“ Dr. Neff says. When people exercise because they enjoy it and want to be healthy, it’s more likely to become a life-long habit. “Exercise is much more sustainable if you want to do it—it’s intrinsically more satisfying, as opposed to just trying to look better in your jeans,” she says. And although being kind means going easy on yourself if you skip a day, that doesn’t mean you won’t hold yourself accountable. “People really think self-compassion is going to undermine their motivation or make them flake and not be responsible for their actions, but the opposite is true,” Dr. Neff says. “Shaming and destructive criticism undermines your motivation because you lose faith in yourself and become afraid of failure, so you give up.” She says to think about how you would encourage a child—not by telling them they are a worthless loser, but by saying you believe in them and that they can do it. Here are 14 subtle but powerful health benefits of exercising.