You know exercise is one of the best things you can do for your health, so you do so more days than not.

But what do you do when that less-than-holy wintertime trinity — lack of sunlight, slippery roads, and bitter cold — forces all your workouts to be done indoors day after day after day, and your desire to exercise flies so far south it’s surrounded by a flock of Arctic Terns?

While you may not know Arctic Terns are migratory birds that breed in the place for which they are named and fly straight past Guatemala, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Argentina to inhabit ice slabs floating around Antarctica when it turns cold, psychologists do indeed know what’s happening to you. It’s called “decisional conflict” and is defined as “the struggle between continuing toward a goal or disengaging.”

Disengaging, my friend, is simply shrink-speak for quitting. If decisional conflict persists and intensifies, it leads to even more shrink-speak, an “action crisis,” which can make quitting seem to be the only solution to the conflict and stress you’re experiencing.

Fortunately, there’s a shrink out there who’s done a study that could be a real boon if that aforementioned unholy trinity creates an exercise action crisis in you. Dr. Patrick Carroll, professor of psychology at The Ohio State University at Lima, who authored a study published online in the journal Self and Identity last December about what can keep an action crisis from sabotaging any goal.

The gist of which can be summarized this way if you’re keen on repetitive word play. That it’s actually good for people to have doubts if those doubts are doubts about their doubts.

Now whether such witticism tickles your fancy or not, here’s what the doc had 267 people do: respond to statements found in what shrinks call an action crisis scale, with the key question being, “I doubt whether I should continue striving for my goal or disengage from it.”

Then the doc played dirty for the greater good of science. He lied to the participants.

He claimed to be involved in a second unrelated study and asked half to write about a specific situation in their lives when they felt confidence in their thinking. The other half were asked to write about a specific situation when they experienced doubt in their thinking.

Carroll lied because he didn’t want the participants reflecting on their most personal goal until after the writing assignment. At which time the participants were asked how committed they actually were to it, with response options ranging from “very” to “not at all.”

What Carroll discovered was that the participants who had written about a time they felt confidence in their thinking and were doubtful according to the action crisis scale were less committed to achieving their most personal goal when compared to participants who had had written about a time when they experienced doubt in their thinking and were also doubtful according to the action crisis scale.

What this tells Carroll is what he told Jeff Grabmeier in a university press release about the study: “inducing doubts in one’s doubts can provide a formula for confidence.” To help engender some of that good stuff, let’s go back and embellish the opening scenario.

Let’s say that you really have no aversion to exercising indoors at the gym — except when you’re forced to do so day after day after day because of bad weather. Then a less-than-holy health club trinity begins to eat at you.

The equipment hogging, the savage grunting, and especially the less-than-aromatic intermingling of industrial cleaners, air fresheners, and body odors that seems the worst around the water cooler.

So after a designated day off, you take another. When you still can’t bear the thought of going back to the gym, you take a third, and now, my friend, a full-blown action crisis is underway.

And now you’re doubting that you’ll ever go back to the gym again.

One of the ways I keep such a thought from ever occurring (even though there are many mornings getting my workout started is a major undertaking) is by paging through past workout journals. I search for entries that begin with doubts about trying to exercise hard that day —or even exercise at all — but then end with a red-ink addendum that despite that feeling, the workout went better than I could’ve ever imagined.

I’ve logged dozens of entries like that throughout the years, rest assured.

But if journal reminiscing is not for you, simply give yourself a good talking to.

Remind yourself of something I’m sure at least occasionally happens to you.

It’s a feeling really, that all-is-right-with-the-world feeling, that comes soon after just the right dose of successful exercise. And as a result, your thoughts now seem clearer, your meals seem tastier, and tasks easier.

No doubt, recalling the exercise afterglow will end any sort of exercising doubts in you.