The Way You Think About Exercise May Matter More Than You Realize
Halfway through her shift, a hotel room attendant will have stripped the sheets, scrubbed the tub, and pushed a heavy cart down the hallway, and she will do another dozen rooms before lunch. But if you ask her whether she exercises, there's a good chance she'll say no.
I love data—I my erg splits, my VO2 max, my sleep, and my heart rate variability. But one small study about hotel attendants like the one I described made me wonder if the story I tell myself about my movement matters as much as the number on my wearable. I break it down below, and in the new episode of the mindbodygreen podcast.
Reframing chores as exercise
In this study, Alia Crum, Ph.D.1, and her mentor, Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer, Ph.D., followed 84 female room attendants1 across seven hotels. The women cleaned about 15 rooms a day, which involves real manual labor, but nearly two-thirds said they didn't exercise at all.
The researchers gathered women from four of the hotels and gave them a brief about how their daily work met the Surgeon General's recommendations for an active lifestyle. Researchers explained how many calories the women burned changing linens, vacuuming, and scrubbing a tub, and posted the information where the women would see it. The attendants at the other three hotels got no briefing.
After the briefing, the research team surveyed both the women and their managers to see whether anyone in the informed group started working harder, eating differently, or hitting the gym after hours. Nobody had—the amount of physical work they were doing stayed the same.
But the informed women saw themselves as getting significantly more exercise, and four weeks later, they had also lost about two pounds and their blood pressure dropped by nearly 10%, compared to the controlled group. The women who received the briefing also saw a decrease in body fat percentage and BMI, and their waist-to-hip ratio improved. Same job, same effort, same diet. The only difference was one conversation about what their work meant.
Why your brain plays a role
I understand why someone would pushback on this and say you can't think yourself healthier, but there's a real framework underneath this. It's something we talk about often at mindbodygreen: the placebo effect. When people believe a sugar pill is medicine, their bodies can respond in measurable ways.
In this study, Crum and Langer wanted to see if the same theory applied to movement. If you see your daily activity as healthy exercise, your body may respond differently than if you see that identical work as exhausting labor.
And Crum kept testing the idea. In a later study on how placebo affects nutrition2, she had 46 participants drank the same shake. Some were told it was an indulgent, high-calorie treat, and others were told it was a sensible, low-calorie option. The group who thought they were indulging showed a steeper drop in ghrelin, the hormone that drives hunger, measured in the blood. It was the same shake, but when the participant's beliefs were different, their hormonal response was, too.
These studies suggests your mindset can actually shape what happens in your body.
How much weight can one study carry?
This is a beloved study, for me and many others, but it has it's limitations. It was conducted several years ago, plus it followed just 84 people, for four weeks, in one occupation. As far as I've seen, this study hasn't been repeated in a large, modern trial. The effect is plausible and fits with Crum's later work, but its size shouldn't be oversold. To me, it's a provocative finding, but not settled science.
It's also important to remember that you can't think yourself healthy from the couch. These women were already active, doing hours of hard labor every day, which put them in a position to shift how they view physical activity. Their mindset was able to amplify the benefit of movement they were already getting. It never replaced the movement itself.
Putting your mindset to work
For data nerds like me, there's a humbling lesson here. I get so locked into my splits that I forget that the operator of the machine has a vote. My mindset toward exercise is just as important as the heart rate I'm hitting while on the rower. The best part is, these little shifts in your brain are totally free, and you can start integrating them into your life today.
- Count the movement you already do. The walk from the parking lot, carrying groceries, taking the stairs, playing with your kids, gardening—most of us file that under chores. Crum's work suggests that calling it exercise may help your body treat it that way.
- Drop the all-or-nothing rule. Stop thinking you need 45 minutes in the gym for your movement to count as a workout. That belief is may be costing you the health benefit of all the other activity you do.
- Notice how you talk about hard things. The way you frame a workout, a stressful day, or even a meal is an input. Telling yourself "this hard workout is making me stronger" may actually make you stronger.
The takeaway
I'm not telling you to stop tracking the reps, the macros, or the zone-two minutes—those still matter. But you have to remember that the meaning you assign to what you're doing is another input.
Pick one thing you did that you'd normally dismiss, like a long walk or an afternoon hauling laundry up the stairs, and see what happens when you count it as exercise.
