You work out on, at worst, a semi-regular basis. You make smart eating choices, the occasional late-night food-truck indulgence notwithstanding. You are, generally speaking, a fitness-conscious person, and barring an unfortunate calamity brought about by someone clumsily attempting to install a window A/C unit in their third-story apartment, you can reasonably expect to live a long, healthy life. And yet! According to a baffling-but-fascinating new study, all that rigorous effort and uncompromising discipline could still be for naught, it turns out, unless you believe in yourself, too.

What is all this vaguely Successories-esque nonsense, and why is it following me into the gym? you may be asking with immediate and entirely reasonable suspicion. A team of researchers at Stanford University recently analyzed the relationships between people's perceptions of how much exercise they get and their actual health outcomes, and their findings are, to use a technical term, pretty weird: People who believe that they're getting less exercise than average have a mortality rate that is a whopping 71 percent higher than their more self-assured counterparts. Of course, if someone thinks this because the only forms of exercise they do are the movements required to consume their diet of Mountain Dew and pork rinds, that's one thing. However, the researchers observed the same effect when controlling for things like income, disease or disability, and—most importantly—actual levels of activity.

In other words, even among people whose life choices of choice are, objectively speaking, pretty solid, those who nonetheless lie awake at night worrying about being outworked are significantly more likely to...well, die.

Please understand that this probably doesn't mean that you can just shut your eyes tightly and visualize your way to a leaner, fitter, more underwear model–esque self. (Ditching your gym membership in lieu of a meditation coach, to the best of my knowledge, does not appear on any list of widely accepted best practices within the medical community.) However, although the researchers are careful to note that they can't make any life-changing causal claims like that, their findings do indicate that keeping your fitness regimen in context is important. If you miss a gym day, don't despair, friend! Did you walk to work, or mow the lawn, or stand at your desk, or take the stairs, or do anything else to avoid a totally sedentary lifestyle? Those are all forms of exercise, and you should think of them as such. The fact that you don't necessarily do those things while clothed from head to toe in expensive performance fabrics doesn't change the fact that each one of them helps make you a fitter, healthier person.

Relatedly, the authors also issue a gentle reminder that you should be selecting a realistic reference point for evaluating yourself on the global continuum of exercise enthusiasts. If you're one of those nutjobs who insists on comparing yourself to the likes of James Harrison, a man who wears sweatsuits as a precautionary measure to prevent lesser mortals from being disturbed by the size of his arms, you might not feel a particular sense of pride after, say, making it to Spin class four times in one week. But if you can find a way to be comfortable with achieving a meaningful level of fitness that, at the same time, doesn't require you to hurl giant medicine balls over a volleyball net for sport, the barriers to feeling confident, accomplished, and happy—all of which are good things—will suddenly become much less imposing.

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You can still try Hooverball if you want, though. It looks like a hell of a workout.

Watch Now:John Cena: Undercover OnlineJay Willis is a staff writer at GQ covering news, law, and politics. Previously, he was an associate at law firms in Washington, D.C. and Seattle, where his practice focused on consumer financial services and environmental cleanup litigation. He studied social welfare at Berkeley and graduated from Harvard Law School... Read more