Category: Motivation

It motivated 85 percent to continue with their gym programme when they were failing.

Fear can be used as an excellent motivator for exercise, research finds.

When people imagine themselves getting fat and unattractive, they are more motivated to work out.

The results come from a study where half of 281 gym goers were asked to imagine an unattractive version of themselves they feared becoming.

Fear motivated 85 percent to continue with their gym programme when they were failing.

This is in comparison to only 65 percent pushing on when they were already succeeding.

Obviously success is one of the best motivators to continue, but when failing, fear can be a useful way of getting back on track.

Professor Brett Martin, study co-author, said:

“How consumers see themselves in the future has a strong effect on how motivated they are to keep using a product or service.

When people dwell on a negative future, fear motivates them, yet as they move away from their feared state – a flabby body, or a wrinkled skin – they become less motivated.

At that point, marketers should take advantage of another insight of our study – that of motivating people with a more positive outlook.”

The study also found that thinking positive worked best when people were already succeeding.

But, when people were falling short of their goals in the gym, thinking positive worked less well.

Professor Martin said:

“Once someone moves away from their “feared self” – in this case an unattractive body – because they are successful in the gym, they lose motivation, so highlighting thoughts of being unattractive is unlikely to work.

But at that point, as they become more positive in their outlook, good marketing will build on this and suggest they can do even better.

That type of motivation works for those with a positive outlook.

However marketers should also be aware that those who are thinking positively will become discouraged if they don’t see success.”

The study was published in the journal ACR (Sobh & Martin, 2007).

A simple motivational tip that helps you reach exercise goals.

People focusing on losing a reward rather than gaining it are more motivated to exercise, a study finds.

The research shows that exactly the same financial rewards can produce markedly different levels of motivation when framed in different ways.

Professor Kevin G. Volpp, one of the study’s authors, said:

“Our findings demonstrate that the potential of losing a reward is a more powerful motivator and adds important knowledge to our understanding of how to use financial incentives to encourage employee participation in wellness programs.”

The study compared workplace rewards for physical activity.

Some people in the program were given $42 and then had $1.40 taken away for each day they didn’t exercise.

Others were told they would simply receive $1.40 for each day they exercised.

Both of these were compared with a control group.

Financially, it amounted to exactly the same thing, but the first framing emphasises a loss of money and the second framing emphasises the reward.

Fascinatingly, the reward-framing had no effect over and above offering no reward for exercise.

However, the loss-framed incentive increased by 50% the amount of times people reached their exercising goals compared with the control group and the reward-framed incentive.

→ Try PsyBlog’s motivation ebook: “Spark: 17 Steps That Will Boost Your Motivation For Anything”

The study was published in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine (Patel et al., 2016).

How to increase goal commitment and performance.

To motivate yourself to achieve a goal, tell someone about it whose opinion you value, research suggests.

People who share their goal with someone they respect have higher goal commitment and performance.

The reason is that we don’t want to let that person down, or feel we have disappointed them.

In contrast, telling someone of lower status, or keeping a goal secret was not as effective.

Professor Howard Klein, the study’s first author, said:

“Contrary to what you may have heard, in most cases you get more benefit from sharing your goal than if you don’t — as long as you share it with someone whose opinion you value.

You don’t want them to think less of you because you didn’t attain your goal.”

The conclusions come from a series of studies that tested the effect on motivation of revealing goals to others.

They repeatedly showed that it really matters who we share our goals with.

The more people cared about the opinion of the person they shared their goal with, the more motivation they demonstrated.

Professor Klein explained:

“If you don’t care about the opinion of whom you tell, it doesn’t affect your desire to persist — which is really what goal commitment is all about.

You want to be dedicated and unwilling to give up on your goal, which is more likely when you share that goal with someone you look up to.”

Of course, it is always possible to put too much pressure on yourself, Professor Klein said:

“We didn’t find it in this study, but it is possible that you may create so much anxiety in trying to impress someone that it could interfere with your performance.”

The study was published in the Journal of Applied Psychology (Klein et al., 2019).

The reason that many of people’s plans fail.

The secret to achieving goals is understanding both the psychology of decision-making and the psychology of implementing our plans.

When people make decisions, they tend to focus on rewards beyond all other considerations.

This is a problem.

A simple example: someone might make a plan to get up earlier in order to leave more time for eating a healthy breakfast before going to work.

However, when it comes to actually getting up early, most prefer ten more minutes in bed.

This is why so many plans fail: people focus on rewards when planning, instead of the barriers they will face.

This pattern of human behaviour was demonstrated in a study in which participants were given both physical and mental tests of effort.

They were told they would be paid varying amounts, depending on the task.

The results showed that, unsurprisingly, people chose tasks that paid more.

Oddly, though, they did not put in that much more effort when the job paid more.

It was the effort required that predicted how well people would do on the mental and physical tasks.

In other words, people dislike doing things that require more effort, even when the reward is proportionately greater.

Dr Agata Ludwiczak, the study’s first author, said:

“Common sense suggests the amount of effort we put into a task directly relates to the level of reward we expect in return.

However, building psychological and economic evidence indicates that often high rewards are not enough to ensure people put in the effort they need to achieve their targets.

We have found that there isn’t a direct relationship between the amount of reward that is at stake and the amount of effort people actually put in.

This is because when we make choices about what effort to put in, we are motivated by the rewards we expect to get back.

But at the point at which we come to actually do what we had said we would do, we focus on the level of effort we have to actually put in rather than the rewards we hoped we would get.”

The study found that the same was true for both mental and physical tasks.

Dr Magda Osman, study co-author, said:

“If we aren’t careful our plans can be informed by unrealistic expectations because we pay too much attention to the rewards.

Then when we face the reality of our choices, we realise the effort is too much and give up.

For example, getting up early to exercise for a new healthy lifestyle might seem like a good choice when we decide on our new year’s resolutions, but once your alarm goes off on a cold January morning, the rewards aren’t enough to get you up and out of bed.”

→ There are many effective strategies for achieving goals in PsyBlog’s motivation ebook: “Spark: 17 Steps That Will Boost Your Motivation For Anything”

The study was published in the journal Behavioural Brain Research (Ludwiczak et al., 2020).

Motivation can stay at maximum all day long, research finds.

The key to keeping your motivation at maximum is switching tasks, research finds.

Most people’s motivation and performance starts to dip after doing a difficult task for around 30 minutes.

As people get closer to one hour on a task, there is very noticeable drop in performance.

However, if people switch tasks, their self-control is less limited than many believe.

Dr Dan Randles, the study’s first author, said:

“While people get tired doing one specific task over a period of time, we found no evidence that they had less motivation or ability to complete tasks throughout the day.”

Self-control means doing a task that doesn’t reward you immediately, Dr Randles said:

“It’s doing something not because you enjoy it, but because it’s connected to a larger goal and you want to see it through.”

The conclusions come from a study in which over 16,000 people were given a difficult memory task to do at different times of day.

The results showed that people had the same motivation throughout the day.

Psychologists have generally thought that motivation decreases over the day as people’s self-control wears down or is exhausted.

Dr Randles said:

“This doesn’t mean all studies on self-control are wrong, but at least for that one, attempts to replicate it have found no evidence for the effect.

Our results are consistent with theories showing that people lose motivation within a specific task, but at odds with theories that argue self-control is general resource that can be exhausted.”

Dr Iain Harlow, study co-author, thinks the research shows why short, effortful bursts can be so effective in cementing learning:

“This finding is especially important for intellectually demanding tasks like learning.

It fits with research showing that you remember more of what you learn when you review it frequently but in short bursts.”

Dr Randles concluded:

“The fact participants got worse at a single task speaks to how effortful they found it, and despite the difficulty, we found no evidence whatsoever that their ability or motivation decreased up until the point they got tired late at night.”

→ Try Dr Jeremy Dean’s motivation ebook: “Spark: 17 Steps That Will Boost Your Motivation For Anything”

The study was published in the journal PLOS ONE (Randles et al., 2017).

You can get successfully motivated by envy as long as you use the right type of envy.

I’ve recently written about two really important aspects of mental life: how to reach goals and how to control yourself.

You won’t need telling that both of these are easier said than done.

Part of the reason it’s so difficult to reach long-term goals is because there always seem to be more reasons to give up than there are to go on: fear of failure, lack of time or money and so on.

When you hear successful people talking about their early days there’s one element of their story that’s usually the same.

I heard Renzo Rosso, the founder of the fashion label Diesel, talking about it the other day.

But it could just as easily have been any other business owner, artist or scientist.

What Rosso talked about was how difficult it was in the early days and how many times he cried when things went against him.

And yet he carried on building up a business which is now worth billions.

It isn’t really news that things were difficult in the early days—all new enterprises are like that—what we really want to know is why did he carry on?

How is it that the successful motivate themselves to keep at it when others fall by the wayside?

Talent, skill and luck play a part, but there is more.

Motivated by envy

One story that’s often told is about heroes.

The successful say they were inspired by the achievements of others.

Rosso, for example, talks about his admiration for Armani.

Apparently it’s admiration that drives people through the many dark nights of the soul that come before success.

There’s an element of truth to this but it’s not the whole truth.

According to the philosopher Kierkegaard, admiration for someone is like admitting defeat.

When you truly admire what someone has created, you implicitly admit that you will never be able to reach that standard yourself.

This might sound nonsensical but there’s some psychological validity to it, as explained in a new paper by van de Ven et al. (2011).

They argue that being envious of another’s achievements is painful.

To avoid that pain we translate envy into admiration. In other words: we admit defeat.

The other person’s achievements are beyond us; we must resign ourselves to being inferior.

Unfortunately once we’ve translated envy into admiration, we lose the motivational power of that envy.

Of course there’s a good reason to defuse envy: it’s destructive; it can both make people unhappy in themselves and it can drive them to destroy the object of their envy.

Malicious envy and benign envy

This leaves us with a problem.

The first choice is to give in but feel good.

The second choice is not to give in but to have the emotion eat us up inside and perhaps inspire us to destructive actions.

Is there a third choice? Perhaps there is.

Psychologists have suggested there are two types of envy: malicious envy and benign envy (van den Ven et al., 2009).

We tend to feel malicious envy towards another person if we think their success is undeserved.

This is the type that makes us want to strike out at the other person and bring them down a peg or two.

However when another’s success feels deserved to us, we tend to feel a benign envy: one that isn’t destructive but instead motivates.

It was these two types of envy that were experimentally tested by van de Ven et al. (2011).

They found that benign envy was a powerful motivating force.

Benign envy encouraged people to perform better on measures of intelligence and creativity, when compared with both admiration and malicious envy.

So it seems there is a way out of the envy dilemma.

When we feel benign envy towards another, this social comparison can provide a motivating force, pulling us on.

Our heroes may well motivate us, then, as long as we don’t just admire them but are benignly envious.

Choose the right hero

There is another little twist to the story, though, and it’s a crucial one.

Quite often the heroes or role-models that people choose are way out of their league.

They choose people whose achievements are so great that they’re almost impossible to emulate, like Albert Einstein or Martin Luther King.

The problem is that when we feel someone else’s accomplishments are out of our league, it can be demotivating.

Van de Ven et al. found that people who felt they had little control over their ability to improve resorted to admiration.

On the other hand, those who thought they could improve experienced benign envy and were motivated to work harder.

It’s the feeling of control that motivates.

At the heart of this whole discussion are social comparisons.

When we see someone who is richer, better looking, more intelligent or more successful than us it provokes a whole series of emotions.

Seeing as there’s always someone who fits this description, how we deal with these emotions is vital.

Admiration, though, while a laudable reaction, is less likely to spur us on than a solid dose of benign envy.

Of course most people aren’t going to admit they use envy to motivate themselves, after all, it’s one of the seven deadly sins.

Nevertheless this research suggests that benign envy, if used in the right way, can be a powerful motivating force.

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Types of motivation, how to stay motivated and the biggest myth about motivation.

Motivation is what causes animals to start or stop doing something.

People generally use the term motivation to describe ‘why’ people do things.

However, people have all sorts of motivational states in their minds — many of which are not put into action.

For most people, the things we are motivated to do, but resist, probably far outweigh the things we end up doing.

So, motivation is not just about action or inaction, it is also about competing mental states.

Psychologists have put forward all sorts of theories about why people do things, including drive theory, instinct theory and humanistic theory.

The truth, though, is that people’s motivation is difficult to assess, partly because so much of it is unconscious.

→ Try PsyBlog’s motivation ebook: “Spark: 17 Steps That Will Boost Your Motivation For Anything”

Types of motivation

One useful distinction, though, in motivation, is between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.

For human beings, roughly speaking there are only two reasons to do anything in life:

1. Because you want to: known to psychologists as intrinsic motivation.
2. Because someone else wants you to: what psychologists call extrinsic motivation.

The first category of internally motivated activities might include things like eating, socialising, hobbies and going on holiday.

The second category of externally motivated activities might include working a job, studying, or loading the dishwasher.

The reason I say ‘roughly speaking’ and ‘might include’ is because the two types of motivation can be difficult to disentangle.

Yes, you enjoy your work, but would you do it for less money or for free?

Maybe, maybe not.

Yes, my wife wants me to load the dishwasher, but maybe I’d do it anyway.

Or maybe not.

Turning work into play

One type of motivation can slowly morph into another over time.

For example, things originally we did for their own sake can become a chore once we are paid for them.

More hearteningly, sometimes things we once did just for the money can become intrinsically motivated.

This latter, magical transformation is most fascinating and probably happens because the activity satisfies one or all of three basic human needs.

As the eminent motivation researchers, Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci, say, it’s these three factors that are at the core of intrinsic motivation (Ryan & Deci, 2000):

1. Competence. We want to be good at something. Things that are too easy, though, don’t give us a sense of competence; it has to be just hard enough.
2. Autonomy. We want to be free and dislike being controlled. When people have some freedom—even within certain non-negotiable boundaries—they are more likely to thrive.
3. Relatedness. As social animals we want to feel connected to other people.

Look for these in any activity if you want to harness the power of self-guiding, internal motivation.

How to stay motivated

Completing a long-term project takes different types of motivation as time passes.

Studies find that people motivate themselves in different ways depending on where they are in pursuing a goal (Bullard & Manchanda, 2017).

At the start, people motivate themselves with hopes and dreams of reaching their goal.

For example, someone wanting to lose weight might think about the clothes they will be able to wear.

Psychologists call this ‘promotion motivation’ as the study’s authors explain:

“Promotion motivation encourages people to focus on hopes and aspirations, it makes people think of their goals in terms of attainment of something positive, and it leads individuals to favor approach-oriented “eager” strategies in goal pursuit.”

Some tips to help you get motivated at the start of a project include:

• Reward yourself for taking the first steps.
• Note some positive things you will gain from completing the project.

However, as people get closer to their goal, they get more defensive.

Psychologically, it becomes less about the benefits and more about avoiding a slip-up:

“…prevention motivation encourages people to focus on responsibilities and duties, it makes people think of their goals in terms of avoiding something negative, and it leads individuals to favor avoidance-oriented “vigilant” strategies in goal pursuit.”

Some tips to help you get motivated as the end of the project nears:

• List problems to avoid.
• Write down the barriers to completing the goal.
• Give yourself a break if things get too hard.
• Focus on your duty to finish the project and why it is so important.

Tips for increasing motivation

Many people are looking for ways to increase their motivation and psychologists have done a lot of research in this area.

Here are some common ways studies have found motivation can be boosted.

1. Use the stick for motivation

To change people’s behaviour, the stick beats the carrot, but it only needs to be a small stick, research finds (Kubanek et al., 2015).

The study compared the effects of punishments (stick) with rewards (carrot) to see which worked best.

The psychologists found the influence of punishments outweighed rewards by two or three times.

Bear in mind, though, that continuous negative feedback has all sorts of other effects so it should be used sparingly.

2. Switch tasks to recover motivation

Most people’s motivation and performance starts to dip after doing a difficult task for around 30 minutes (Randles et al., 2017).

As people get closer to one hour on a task, there is very noticeable drop in performance.

However, if people switch tasks, their self-control is less limited than many believe.

This is why short, effortful bursts can be so effective.

3. Use self-talk for motivation

Thinking “I can do better” really can help improve performance (Lane et al., 2016).

Self-talk like this increases the intensity of effort people make and even makes them feel happier as well.

The study compared the motivational power of self-talk, such as “I will do better” with imagery and if-then planning.

Imagery involved imagining doing better and if-then planning is making a plan to act in a certain way.

All three techniques improved performance, but self-talk was consistently the most powerful.

4. Create backup plans

Backup plans are a useful way of driving you forward at the precarious early stages of a project.

That’s because our motivation to succeed is heavily tied in with our expectations of success.

No one drives to a shop that they are pretty sure is closed.

What feeds our motivation is knowing that we have a good chance of achieving the goal.

A little more time spent thinking about a backup plan or alternative ways to get where you’re going will help you, even if you never have to actually use them (Huang & Zhang, 2013).

However, backup plans do not work as well when a project is well underway.

Towards the end, backup plans should be reduced to avoid distraction.

5. Use fear

Fear can be used as an excellent motivator for exercise, research finds (Sobh & Martin, 2007).

When people imagine themselves getting fat and unattractive, they are more motivated to work out.

Fear seems to work particularly well when people are failing at their goals.

In the study, fear motivated 85 percent to continue with their gym programme when they were failing.

The biggest myth about motivation

One of the single biggest myths about motivation that most people firmly believe is that cash incentives increase motivation.

If you want the job done well, offer a bonus — or so the common belief goes.

In fact, psychological research often shows the opposite (Murayama et al., 2016).

When psychologists test the effects of using rewards, they find something strange.

People are indeed motivated by rewards in the short-term.

But, in the long-term rewards actually undermine motivation.

Dr Kou Murayama, first author of a study, said:

“Society has a deep-rooted misunderstanding of how motivation works, and employers are repeatedly shooting themselves in the foot with the frequent use of rewards to encourage certain behaviours or increase effort.

Our work shows we need to correct our strong misbelief in a carrot and stick approach to achieve sustained motivation among workers.”

The study involved people playing a game — some were offered rewards to play again, others not.

Almost two-thirds of people agreed that incentives would motivate people.

Actually the reverse was true: rewards demotivated people.

The reasons seemed to be that:

• People’s autonomy is undermined by rewards. In other words they think if they are being paid to do something, they don’t really want to do it for its own sake.
• People focus more on the reward than actually doing the job.

Instead of rewards, it is better to focus on internal motivation and people’s personal autonomy should be respected.

→ Try PsyBlog’s motivation ebook: “Spark: 17 Steps That Will Boost Your Motivation For Anything”

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