How Action Toward Your Goals Can Help Change Your Mood
The data on our chances of keeping New Year’s resolutions is depressing.
According to a recent study by the University of Scranton, 91% of people fail to stick to their new goals for a full year. But the weakness in willpower over the short-term is even more sobering. They found 27% of people couldn’t keep their resolutions through the first week.1
And while technology hasn’t been able to guarantee success in this area, it has been able to measure our failures more accurately. The creators of the fitness app Strava analyzed more than 98 million uploaded fitness activities and discovered that there’s a day on which people are most likely quit their healthier behavior: January 19. The company now identifies this specific day as ‘Quitter’s Day’ in hopes their users can be aware of it and push through it successfully.
91% of people fail to stick to their new goals for a full year.
Gareth Mills of Strava explained, “Millions of us start the new year with the best of intentions, and by crunching the data from Strava’s community we hope more of us can get past the motivational hurdles we face in January.”2
But focusing on motivation might be the problem in the first place.
Conventional wisdom holds that motivation leads to action. The better you feel and the more energized you are, the more likely you are to take your desired step. But ultra-endurance athlete and self-improvement guru Rich Roll told Outside Magazine that this kind of thinking is backwards.
Take morning exercise, for example. You may feel motivated to get up early and do this for a while. But pretty soon you find you’re no longer motivated or energized by the idea. When that happens, you are more likely to give in to the temptation to forego the workout and sleep in.
“Mood follows action,” explained Roll. “If I’m in a rut, I force myself to move my body, even if
only a little bit. This helps shift my perspective and reset my operating system—and more often than not, the sun starts shining again.”
In other words, if you want to feel motivated to go running, just start running.
The key is to set up your desired behavior as a routine. And then simply go through the steps regardless how motivated you feel. For example, lay out your running clothes the night before. In the morning it will take little willpower to put them. And since you have them on, you might as well warm up. Before you know it, you’ll be regularly running.
This works with other behaviors as well such as healthier eating, tracking your spending through a budget or even staying disciplined with your long-term investment strategy.
You’ll find that as you do these things, even when you don’t feel like doing them, your motivation to continue doing them can increase. And over time, what once seemed to take all your willpower will become a comfortable routine. Something you may actually look forward to doing.
Sources:
1. https://www.outsideonline.com/2274776/forget-motivation-and-focus-action
2. https://www.mirror.co.uk/science/day-people-most-likely-give-21199904
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