Exercise

The 9-Minute Exercise Programme

In summary the “9-Minute Exercise Programme” is about changing a person’s brain and changing how they interact. By using the ‘inside-outside’ metaphor, both at once and not sequentially; putting cessation over action at its conceptual heart. A person changes, a relationship changes, it alters, it turns, when a difference is made on the ‘inside’ and on the ‘outside’. It does not matter if the difference is big or small, the positive end-goal is less important than getting started. It takes about 30-days to get a difference started, a year to make a difference stick, and 2-years to make it permanent; and real change requires the brain and interaction to alter together.  

The “9-Minute Exercise Programme” works the way I have set it up with high levels of constraint and dampening down overblown expectations. 

The “9-Minute Exercise Programme” is an exercise programme that is not really an exercise programme. It is not designed to produce any alterations in an individual person’s physical fitness.  

The “9-Minute Exercise Programme” was originally developed to address the ordinary mood fluctuations experienced by workers in South Australian mining camps and towns, commonly described as depression. Working and living under these circumstances is often quite dislocating and depressing for some people while others thrive under these conditions. These people do not have the city person’s access to services and help for depression and for whom working in remote a location is financially compelling albeit imprisoning.  

 The “9-Minute Exercise Programme” is more about mind or mental fitness rather than physical fitness. 

The “9-Minute Exercise Programme” is premised on the following propositions:  

• Each individual person has an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’; where the ‘inside’ is that individual person’s neurobiology and the neural pathways and loops that are the brain of that person and the ‘outside’ is the socio-relational world of interaction in which that the individual person participates. 

• The ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’ are cognitive; they each think. They think therefore they are (sic); they think individually, and they think collectively, and collective or social cognition precedes over individual cognition, or more accurately social cognition is the context for individual cognition; it shapes individual cognition. 

• The ‘inside’ of each individual person needs to be congruent with the ‘outside’ and vice versa, meaning that the ‘inside’ of the individual person needs to be recognised and legitimised in their immediate ‘outside’ world and that the ‘outside’ needs to support, embrace, constrain, shape, and accommodate the ‘inside’ of that individual person. Each individual person needs to be able to be whoever they are in their immediate socio-relational world and that this must be manifest in the specific interactions each individual person has in their immediate socio-relational world. 

• Genuine, lasting change occurs when the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ both ‘turn’ together, at the same time, in the same broad time frame; concurrently; that the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ ‘turn’ in the same direction; ‘turn’ away from the same situations; ‘turn’ the descriptions, explanations and meanings that have prevailed, together. Genuine, lasting change involves the situation being ‘turned’ around on the ‘inside’ and on the ‘outside’ of the individual person; not just in one location or space; not either the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ but both. 

• Please note that this approach pays very little attention to the distinction between what is on the surface of the individual person, their consciousness, and what is underneath, their unconscious. Very little attention is paid to conscious and unconscious forces and ideas. In this approach such ideas or concepts are secondary and of little immediate relevance or moment. 

• Genuine, lasting change occurs when an individual person (or couple or family) calls a halt to something on the ‘inside’ or the ‘outside’ or both. Most people know what they need to call a halt to and would if they could, but they cannot. That is why some people seek external assistance. What a person needs to call a halt to may be behavioural, emotional, cognitive, interactional or about belief. Knowing what to call a halt to is very difficult to work out, especially if you are the subject. It is this negative construction that is crucial to the success of the “9-Minute Exercise Programme”. Any positive value that comes from doing the “9-Minute Exercise Programme” is purely incidental and a spontaneous and unintended outcome of the programme. Ideas about cessation are at the heart of this approach to change, that version of change that has people turn their personal or relational situation around, turn themselves down the ‘right’ track; steer themselves away from trouble; turn away from difficult od disappointing situations. A lot of this is linked to ordinary human experience in the ‘age of happiness;’ the twentieth century has tended to overemphasise happiness as an internal state in contrast to earlier ages that have tended to focus on happiness derived from living a ‘good’ and ‘right’ life and attending to one’s responsibilities. In the twentieth century there was a shift away from emphasising ‘happiness’ experienced in the front part of the brain (frontal lobes) to an emphasis on the experience of ‘happiness’ in the old reptilian back brain in the amygdala and hippocampus, a shift from the thinking and reasoning part of the brain to ancient back brain emotions. As we have shifted to the amygdala and hippocampus, we have encountered more and more emotional difficulty, we have become increasingly vulnerable to the vicissitudes, emotional ups and downs, turbulence, of this part of the brain. This means that the experience of being frightened, scared, sad, angry, disappointed, and so on become increasingly hard to manage. In this we have wanted to have an intellectual ‘bet each way’ by referring to these experiences through the front brain abstraction of naming i.e., frightened, a genuine and real, immediate, visceral experience that becomes ‘fear’ and then ‘anxiety’ in this naming process. The truth is that, as humans, we become and often stay frightened, sad, etc. So why mention this? Because that which must be called a halt to is often (not always) connected to these emotions that inhabit the old back brain. That is why a lot of people, to alter how they interact with others, their mother, their lover, their partner, their children must call a halt to one or more of these primitive emotions that now have a stranglehold on that individual person; because of circumstances, because this is the way we are psychologically and relationally cut in this world; because we are neuro-biologically and socially arranged this way. If it is good enough for very psychologically unwell people to manage this, then it is good enough for the rest of us to do this, to alter the way we think, what we do and what we feel, to call a halt to things, to give up being frightened, sad or disappointed. No strategies are required, no elaborate reframing, no positive mantra or anything else to hang onto.  

• With the form of depression or anxiety relevant to the “9-Minute Exercise Programme”, the individual person usually feels impotent to change anything. They are paralysed emotionally and affectively, suffering genuine cognitive, physical, and emotional inertia, unable to make any alterations to their internal state or external circumstances, unable to think differently about themselves or their situation. Often the person experiences a growing gulf between their own internal state and the world around them in which they are supposed to participate. 

• The “9-Minute Exercise Programme” is designed to bring a halt to this experience of inertia, of impotence, of being emotionally and behaviourally paralysed. It is not designed to get to the bottom of the problem, to solve or fix the ‘underlying’ issues.  

• It is “seriously superficial,” it celebrates the superficial and immediate, the surface over the deep on both the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside.’ 

• Theoretically, the experience of emotional, cognitive, and behavioural inertia, impotence and paralysis is both temporal and spatial, it is about the individual person’s experience of time (past, present and future) having collapsed into one tense, usually the present; and their ordinary experience of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ space having become quite dissonant. Consequently, they retreat into the present tense inside their head and any attempt to address the issues from this vantage point is doomed to failure. It is recursively redundant, the blind leading the blind. 

• Theoretically, the “9-Minute Exercise Programme” directly challenges prevailing ideas and precepts in the domain of helping and social assistance, in psychiatry, psychology, counselling and psychotherapy.  

• Specifically, it challenges the idea that an individual person must address and turn the key issues to ‘move on.’ The “9-Minute Exercise Programme” suggests the reverse may be equally true, that you may need to ‘move on’ to address and turn the key issues and that these may no longer be key issues once you have moved on, that turning may happen quite simply and naturally without significant effort. The systematic unpacking of issues may be unnecessary. Please note that this is not an argument against insight, understanding and the systematic unpacking of issues, it is just a cautionary note about privileging the systematic unpacking of issues as a way of turning things around and producing change. 

• The “9-Minute Exercise Programme” challenges the value of ‘goal setting’ and ‘hope’ as key drivers of individual change. ‘Goal setting’ and ‘hope’ are good and laudable things, but they are very poor drivers of change, in fact they are more likely to produce disappointment in people who are unable to do anything with such virtuous acts. Please also be clear that the absence of ‘goals’ and ‘hope’ can act as a serious impediment to turning the situation around change. The issue here is not about their undoubted value in the psychological and emotional wellbeing of people but more the spurious link this field has made between ‘goal setting’ and ‘hope’ and change. Very simply, the absence of appropriate goals and hope is a serious impediment to change but their presence does not produce change.  

• The “9-Minute Exercise Programme” is a supremely optimistic and positive programme without directly stating it as such. It privileges that which is spontaneously right and good about people over that which is dark and demeaning and drags that person down. At the very heart of “9-Minute Exercise Programme” is the idea that what is inherently right and good about a person is constrained and limited, corralled, by their own downside characteristics e.g., patterns of excessive accommodation, being perpetually frightened, wounded and hurt, drawing meaning from every event and so on. 

• The “9-Minute Exercise Programme” is premised on a simple and elegant idea; that by managing the downside a person’s upside will take care of itself with little or no assistance; that the goodness and rightness of the upside is ever present but is constrained by the way a person’s downside gets hold of them. 

• The “9-Minute Exercise Programme” is simple and elegant, it aims to help a person manage their immediate downside in the here and now, making psychological, cognitive, emotional, interactional, and relational room for what is good and right about that person. 

• The “9-Minute Exercise Programme” privileges cessation over action and this is even though this looks on the face of it like a positive, action oriented, change programme. 

• Theoretically, the “9-Minute Exercise Programme” is premised upon an idea about the psychological, emotional, and cognitive space on the ‘inside’ of a person and the relational, dialogical, and cognitive space on the ‘outside’ of a person. Simply, cessation, stopping something, anything, creates a space and it is a space on the ‘inside’ of a person and a space on the ‘outside’ of a person. It is into this space that something decent, good, and right can spontaneously occur. Cessation puts a very high value on the ordinary spontaneity that is integral to each person, spontaneity that is crushed or contained by the everyday experience of our own downside. Cessation creates a relational, dialogical, psychological, emotional, and cognitive space across the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside.’ Cessation acts to clear a psychologically and cognitively crowded space; whereas the usual positive ideas and strategies all act to further crowd an already crowded psychological and cognitive space. 

• Theoretically, the “9-Minute Exercise Programme” also reinvents time for a person; it helps re-create the important psychological and cognitive structure of time past, time present and time future out of the ashes of time present; so much for existentialism. 

• Very simply, the “9-Minute Exercise Programme” helps an individual person (or a couple or a family) manage their immediate downside so that what is good and right about that person (or couple or family) on the upside can begin to do its real business. 

• The “9-Minute Exercise Programme” stops the individual person’s immediate experience of emotional, psychological, behavioural, cognitive, and relational paralysis, inertia and impotence and it does so by getting the person to engage in and with 9 minutes of exercise every morning, without fail.  

• Why without fail? Because change, the turning of a situation around, is about altering the neural loops and pathways ‘inside’ the individual person’s brain and it is about altering the ‘outside’ interactional loops the individual person participates in (their immediate attachment world), ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ cognition are altered through the systematic repetition that calls a halt to something. 

• The “9-Minute Exercise Programme” imposes extraordinarily high levels of therapeutic caution and constraint on the practitioner by managing overblown practitioner expectations and inflated client demands. 

• The “9-Minute Exercise Programme” alters the way an individual person thinks by changing the prevailing metaphor that the individual person uses and moving this to the ‘inside–outside’ metaphor. 

• The “9-Minute Exercise Programme” is premised on the idea that a small difference can be turned into a larger system alteration through appropriate persistence and repetition on the ‘inside’ and on the ‘outside’. That a person or relationship changes (i.e. it alters or turns) when a difference is made (on the ‘inside’ or the ‘outside’) and that that difference remains intact and in turn alters by getting bigger and more influential. It does not matter if the difference is big or small but simply that it endures and is not disqualified. 

• Whilst positive end goals or outcomes are important, they are less important than getting the process started. It is the act of finding a point of commencement, a starting point, that is important; and the “9-Minute Exercise Programme” provides an interim, readymade, point of commencement, whilst the next step in this process is considered. This is premised on the idea that once a difference is made and endures it tends to replicate itself and amplify.  

• It takes 30 days of repetitive practice to turn the situation around, to get a difference started; it takes a year of repetitive practice to make that difference really endure and replicate itself and a full 2-years to turn these alterations into a lasting and permanent change.