What if “because it feels good” was enough?
Why do you practise yoga? Because it feels good.
Why do you run? Because it feels good.
Why do you go to the gym? Because it feels good.
Why do you meditate? Because it feels good.
No mention of mobility, cardiovascular health, strength, stress reduction or improving your brain. Just: because it feels good.
But is that a good enough reason?
So often, we think that in order for an activity to be beneficial and worth our time, it must provide some magical and life-changing solutions. It must heal us from X, Y and Z. It must make us look a certain way. Or it must solve this or that health issue.
But what if the magic was in something as simple as feeling good all along?
And by “feels good,” I don’t necessarily mean that every moment feels easy, comfortable or pleasant. Running can be hard. Yoga can be frustrating. Meditation can feel restless. What I mean is enjoying the practice as a whole—the experience, the challenge, the satisfaction, the way it makes me feel afterwards and the place it has in my life.
Now, don’t get me wrong: exercise, meditation, breathwork and yoga asana all have real benefits for both body and mind, and I’m all for that.
I could geek out on anatomy all day long and never get bored. I love researching how breathing affects the nervous system, how yoga asana improves mobility and flexibility, how meditation affects the brain, and how to improve VO₂ max and HRV. The human body is a fascinating thing. It’s also a mysterious thing, and the fact that we’re all different doesn’t really make things any simpler. We’re complicated beings.
The other day, I was listening to a podcast where the Finnish marathon runner Alisa Vainio was a guest. She was asked what motivates her to run, and the interviewer seemed to suggest that the answer would be money.
But Alisa’s answer? Because she enjoys it. Running brings her joy. It’s part of who she is. It’s her lifestyle. I loved that answer! Of course, as a professional athlete, running is also her job, but I doubt she would be running 100 or more kilometres a week if she did not enjoy it.
In another podcast, I once heard someone say that she did not believe a single person actually enjoys running. According to her, it’s impossible.
I must disagree.
I enjoy running very much. Like, I really, really, really enjoy it. Rare are the days when I have to force myself to go for a run. On the contrary, more often I have to hold myself back so that I don’t run too much.
I know all the benefits running has for cardiovascular health, mental health and so on, but I would have found another hobby if I did not enjoy it.
Yoga comes with a long list of benefits, but I would not have practised yoga for 16 years if I did not enjoy it. And I would not be teaching it if I hated it. I practise yoga because it makes me feel good, and I teach it because it brings me joy and fulfilment.
My own relationship with yoga is not built solely on what it fixes. It is also built on pleasure, fascination, presence, meaning and fulfilment. The experience of practising matters in itself.
I often joke that I started playing tennis for two reasons:
Because I can wear a tennis skirt, which is one of the prettiest pieces of clothing.
Because it keeps my brain young.
Those are both true (and the second one is a great benefit), but do you know what the real reason is?
Because it is a lot of fun. That’s it.
As a yoga teacher navigating this overflow of information and doing my best to stay on top of the social media game, I feel like I should be creating better hooks and more posts with all sorts of claims and benefits.
At the same time, I feel like going back to the basics. To simplify. To appreciate the simple yet powerful fact of doing things because they make us feel good—not only because of the benefits or outcomes they may offer.
But when every activity becomes a tool for improving another metric, we can lose sight of why we chose it in the first place.
A run becomes cardiovascular training. Yoga becomes mobility work or nervous-system regulation. Meditation becomes a method for increasing productivity. Tennis becomes cognitive-health maintenance.
What if enjoyment, meaning and the experience of doing something were enough—without always needing to prove what the activity does for us?
That’s already a lot.
Of course, there is a slightly funny contradiction in all of this: feeling good may itself be good for us. Enjoying an activity makes us more likely to keep doing it, and our psychological well-being is connected to our physical health in many ways.
So “because it feels good” is not a small or insignificant reason.
But I don’t want to turn feeling good into another health metric either. The point is not that we should do things we enjoy because enjoyment will make us healthier, more productive or more likely to live longer. That would bring us straight back to needing another benefit to justify what we do.
Maybe feeling good can simply be valuable because it is part of being alive. A practice does not always need to solve a problem to be worth our time.
