What Motivates You

We all have preferences—whether for a given food or fad—that are rooted in our personalities and prior experiences.  Motivation is no different.  We are motivated to do some specific things and not to do others.

Since motivation is a very complicated concept that cannot be addressed comprehensively here, I want to introduce only one single idea to help you understand your motivational style.   That way, you will be much better able to make self-selected health-enhancing changes.

Consider interpersonal relationships.  Presume that you want to meet someone new.  Why might you?  What specifically is it that would make that effort worthwhile?  Please be as concrete as possible about plausible advantages of meeting a new person.  It would be particularly helpful for you to write your thoughts on an electronic device or on paper so that you can refer to them later.  After you are done, continue reading this blog.

Okay.  Let’s resume.

Psychologists divide reasons for change motivation into two categories: promotion versus prevention.  Promotion-oriented motivation emphasizes advantages that you would expect from meeting someone new.  You, for instance, might have written that the new person would be an interesting conversation partner or would provide someone attractive to visit.   A prevention orientation emphasizes disadvantages that you would avoid by meeting a new person.  For instance, you might want to establish a new relationship to overcome loneliness or to have an alternative to the undesirable person with whom you presently interact.

Since perceived advantages mostly are subjective, how one frames an event is determinative.  The advantage that you perceive reveals your personality.  If you chose a promotion reason, you are “eager’ about the outcome that you expect will derive from your healthful change.  And if you chose a prevention reason, you are “vigilant’ about the outcome that you fear from not making your healthful change.  Eager anticipation suggests that you have a more hopeful orientation and vigilant anticipation, that you have a more fearful orientation.

Whenever you consider a healthful lifestyle change, evaluate it in terms of prevention-promotion and apply the insight that you achieve from making that promotion-prevention discrimination.  If your motivation for a change is more promotion oriented, think about all the advantages of making your new healthful lifestyle change.  Conversely, if your motivation is more prevention oriented, think about all the disadvantages that you will avoid by making your new healthful lifestyle change. Knowing and applying your motivation style can make the difference between change success and change failure. 

Time and Effort for Establishing Healthful Habits

You want to make a healthful lifestyle change, but question whether you can invest the time and effort necessary to make it happen.

In his book Outliers (2008), Malcom Gladwell—a journalist—glibly advised that masterful performance in certain fields of endeavor, such as chess playing, requires about 10,000 hours of practice.  Many professional and lay people readily accepted his suggestion as gospel until a research review by Princeton psychologist Brooke N. Mac Namara and her colleagues (2014) debunked it.  They showed, for instance, that even 10,000 hours did not guarantee mastery in such diverse areas as game performance, musical instrument expertise, educational achievement, and professional success.  They asserted instead that intra-individual factors were critical, such as when you begin to work on your skill, how well you employ your cognitive capabilities, and how your personality aligns with your goal and goal implementation efforts.

However, the Mac Namara review group did not in any way deny the importance of time on task, only that ten thousand hours, equivalent to three and one-half years of 8 hours days, is not determinative.  Rather, their advice implied that calculating time cannot be divorced from a person’s idiosyncratic characteristics and from the amount of effort that he/she devotes to planning and implementing their change program. 

I too firmly believe that your idiosyncratic characteristics and the amount of effort that you devote to planning and implementation are central.  If you choose your goals wisely and increase them at a reasonable rate, you can achieve incremental mastery that aggregates toward your best possible outcome.  This approach is predicated on an activity orientation.  Recall that an activity is rational, organized, comprehensive, and long-lived.

Suppose you want to get stronger.  A rational plan presumes that you have gathered the necessary information to determine how strength is acquired.  You then study the process and make an informed decision about where you need greater strength and what you need to do to attain it.  Next, you organize your plan, deciding particulars such as the location(s) where you will perform the strengthening.  Third, you ensure that your plan includes all the most critical features of strengthening.  And finally, you establish a schedule to execute your plan.

Once you have accounted for all components of your healthful activity, you will be able to accurately determine the amount of time and the amount of effort required to reach your goal.  It will not be 10,000 hours, that’s for sure.  If you structure your activity properly, you gradually will master your healthful lifestyle change week by week by week—not 10,000 hours at a time.  You will have apportioned your goal so that it is manageable.  You will have proven to yourself that health is not mastered in the same way that bread-making is.  You will accept that health always is a work in progress and find solace in the fact that you continually are putting forth sufficient personal time and effort for you to achieve and maintain as much health as is reasonably possible.

By the way, although there is no substitute for a personalized plan in order accurately to estimate the time and effort needed to develop a salutary exercise habit, you may be comforted to know that faithfully adhering to a five week program has been shown to work very well for most people (Iso-Ahola, 2013).         

Gladwell, M. (2008).  Outliers: The story of success.  New York: Little, Brown.

Mac Namara, B., Hambrick, D., & Oswald, F. (2014).   Deliberate practice and performance in music, games, sports, education, and professions: A meta-analysis.  Psychological Science, 25, 8, 1608-1618.

 

Iso-Ahola, S. (2013).  Exercise: Why it is a challenge for both the nonconscious and conscious mind.  Review of General Psychology, 17, 1, 93-110. 

Healthful Environments: Where Are You and Who Are You With?

Taking a very broad macro-view, I underscore the significance of environments for our health and function by remembering how our species and all species came to be.  The body that we inhabit evolved to take advantage of the extant available environmental resources.  Our organs and physiological systems developed as they did because we needed to access and exploit what the physical environment offered.  We created tools and dwellings from what we found locally or from materials made from what we found locally.  And we organized our interpersonal relationships to capitalize on the adaptive skills and assistance of people around us.    

A more practical, personal, micro-view reveals that, like our prehistoric and historic forbearers, we always are somewhere and most often we are with someone; those facts profoundly influence what we think, feel, and do health-wise.   The three environments—natural, fabricated, and interpersonal—can be facilitating or debilitating.  We must think about them and structure them in order to effect salutary health-oriented changes.

If you want to become more physically fit, for instance, the natural environment can be an ally or an enemy.  Warm and moderate climates provide a comfortable setting for leaving your shelter and being active outdoors.  If your climate is sub-optimal or interfering and you want to be outside, you of course can dress accordingly.  An indoor activity is an obvious alternative venue.

The fabricated environment, spaces created by women and men, includes houses, offices, malls and similar places that we inhabit when going about our activities.  Those environments inhibit or facilitate our action-oriented physical and mental health goals.  It undoubtedly is easier, for instance, to study or relax in a quiet than in a noisy space.

Finally, the world of people—the interpersonal environment—contributes to healthful change promotion or aversion.   That influence sometimes is obvious and sometimes covert.  If you want to become a vegetarian and your family and friends start calling you “rabbit,” even jokingly, you might be dissuaded from changing.  Conversely, if they all encourage your initiative, your change-oriented efforts are buoyed.  Moreover, “social comparison theory” (Festinger L., 1954) suggests that, consciously or unconsciously, you continually compare yourself to those around you.  When surrounded by health-minded others, your explicit or implicit natural social instincts nudge you toward healthful activities, and vice versa.

So, in contemplating healthful lifestyle change, do not plan or initiate a program without considering your environments and without making a vigorous effort to structure them to be as change friendly as possible.  Choose goals that are consistent with your environments or choose environments that are consistent with your goals.  If neither option is possible, change your environments to be goal-consistent.

Festinger L (1954).  A theory of social comparison processes."  Human relations 7, 2, 117–140. doi:10.1177/001872675400700202.

Behavior That Facilitates Healthful Change

To speak of behavior that facilitates healthful change at first seems rather redundant and obvious, since healthful change usually presumes behavior change.  However, focusing on the behavioral aspect of change is worth your consideration.

The rationale for a primary behavior focus, implicit in Nike’s “Just Do It” slogan, is that behavior sometimes steers thought and emotion long enough to make a healthful change happen.  The psychoanalytic notion of “change of function” (Hartmann, 1950) is one of many possible mechanisms.  In change of function, one forces herself to behave in a manner counter to her typical emotions and thoughts.  Imagine, for instance, that you hate (emotion) vegetables, consider them boring “rabbit food” (thought), and consume virtually nothing that has been incapable of independent ambulation.  Then, one day, your relatively young mother suffers a debilitating stroke that shakes you to your core.  Totally out of character, you schedule yourself for a long-delayed complete physical examination that discloses extremely elevated cholesterol and lipid levels.  In her post-labs meeting with you, the physician advises more vegetables and less meat to reduce your stroke risk.

You are not happy.  You try to dismiss the doctor’s recommendations, but the more you study stroke, the more you conclude that the doctor has an important point.  So, you force yourself to eat a few more vegetables and a little less meat.  You read more, converse with more people, and experiment with ways to make vegetables more palatable.  Although you REALLY miss burgers and steaks, you continue to force yourself along a path of reduced meat consumption.  To your surprise, you incrementally acquire a taste for vegetables prepared your way.  In time, you not only lose you excessive meat cravings, but come to prefer some vegetables.  You have undergone a change of function: by behaving in a manner contradictory to your norm, you have changed how you feel and how you think about eating in general and vegetables in particular.  Because your behavior no longer is at odds with your emotions and thoughts, you have developed a powerful pro-health habit that can endure.

Our last three blogs have emphasized how emotion, thought, or behavior can lead us toward physical and mental health.   Because our actions are determined by multiple interacting factors, when it comes to healthful lifestyle change, one cannot merely focus on emotion, or thought, or behavior.  You must consider all three, and integrate them synergistically in ways that facilitate your best intentions.  Sometimes emotion leads, sometimes thought, and sometimes behavior, but eventually all three need to be aligned to produce the healthiest you.  For instance, in our current example in which a vegetable-eating conversion (behavior) led, the individual who eats less meat should find as many ways as possible to enjoy vegetables (emotion) and to reflect, read, and talk about vegetable’s benefits (thought).

Hartmann , H. (1950).  Comments on the psychoanalytic theory of the ego. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 5, 74–96.