February. The month of shattered dreams and ambitions. Trainers are gathering dust and chocolate bars have replaced protein bars. The enthusiasm with which we attack our New Year’s resolutions is a dim memory.
If your motivation to stick to your resolution to exercise more this year is fading, you’re not alone. It is suggested around 80% of people they will have given up their new year’s resolutions in February.
But the reason why your motivation fades could be because you chose the wrong motives and goals to begin with. And research shows us that choosing the right kind of goal is the key to staying motivated in the long run.
lower the effort
Many of us believe that we need to grimace, squirm, sweat and pant in order to achieve a healthier life. So, in early January, we put in a lot of effort to help us reach our goals.
Unfortunately, our brain encourages us to avoid physical exertion. This is why overexerting yourself while exercising will hurt you in the long run, making you feel less motivated to exercise in late January.
Our brain is constantly monitoring our body for changes in our resting state, which could spell danger to our health. The more physical effort we use, the more a signal kicks in and our brain tells us that the activity is simply not worth the effort and potential risk.
This is why minimizing the effort we have to exert to exercise can better help us stick to our long-term resolutions. For example, if you’re dreading even a fifteen-minute jog, do five minutes instead.
Or if you hate running but enjoy Zumba, do it instead. The rule of thumb is that the activity for which you are trying to motivate yourself it needs to be pleasant. And research shows that we are much more likely to do something if requires less effort – especially when we’re starting new exercise regimens.
The same principle applies to reducing the psychological effort required to exercise, as our brains also encourage us to avoid it – to such an extent that, when given a choice, we often prefer physical pain. He does it because he wants to save psychological effort for times of emergency.
When it comes to starting a new exercise regimen in the new year, things like fitting exercise into your schedule or getting out of bed an hour earlier take psychological effort. To reduce psychological strain, it can help minimize unnecessary decision making.
When it’s time to work out, eliminate decisions like walking or driving to exercise class, or put your sneakers in the same place so you don’t have to search for them.
While these seem like small decisions to make, they can all contribute to making us feel less motivated to exercise when we’re required to do so. Research even shows that when we think our goals require little effort to achieve, we are more likely to achieve them.
Choose short-term goals
Another basic motivational mistake many of us made in January was setting our goals too far in the future. Many people start exercising to lose a few pounds, perhaps to get back into their favorite jeans. But when the outcome is far in the future, our brains don’t associate motivation (fitting in our jeans) with exercise, so we’re less inclined to exercise.
By choosing a goal that has a more immediate result, our brain associate the result positively with exercise because they occur simultaneously. For example, the mood-enhancing benefits of exercise occur faster than changes in physical health, so this may be a best motivator so you can keep working out long after January. In short, make the reason for exercising something immediate that you can achieve, and the long-term benefits will follow.
Focus on ‘being’ instead of ‘having’
The final motivational solution is to change the type of goal you have. The so-called “have” objectives serve small purpose for our motivational brain, which focuses on more important things, like being effective at what we do and building social bonds.
An example of a “have” goal would be to exercise so you can have a better body. This type of goal is seen as less important by our brain because it doesn’t help us achieve the essential goals that help us thrive.
On the other hand, the types of goals that are most likely to keep us motivated are “to be” goals. An example of a goal would be to exercise to be healthy or more athletic. Goals are superior because humans tend to want to bond with other like-minded people based on our identities.
It is believed that this motivation developed in our ancestral past, as bonding helped us survive. So someone may find the exercise easier to follow if they do it as a way to demonstrate their athletic ability, for example. As a result, people do a better job of stick to being goalscompared to other types of goals.
Even if you fell off the wagon a bit at the end of January, that doesn’t mean you have to completely give up on your goals. But making a few adjustments to them, and to your approach to exercise, can help you better meet your goals for the rest of the year.
ian taylorProfessor of Psychology, loughborough university
This article is republished from The conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read the Original article.
