The study involved over half-a-million Canadians who were paid to increase their step count over about six months.
The researchers used some neat tricks to change people’s perception of the task.
The researchers used some neat tricks to change people’s perception of the task.
People start a task sooner when they believe it is part of their present, research finds.
So, the key to avoiding procrastination is moving a task from feeling like part of the future to feeling like part of the present.
In the study, the researchers used some neat tricks to make people think a task was part of the present or part of the future.
In one, they gave some participants an assignment on the 24th of April, giving them five days to complete it.
Other participants were given the same five days to complete it, but were not given it until the 28th of April — so that the deadline fell in May.
People in the first group had the feeling the task was part of their present and so they were more likely to begin it.
Those in the second group felt it was part of May so were less likely to begin.
Remember, both groups had the same time — five days — so it was just the perception that caused some people to drag their feet.
Dr Yanping Tu, the study’s first author, said:
“The key step in getting things done is getting started.
If you never get started, you can’t possibly finish.
But that urgency, that need to actually work on a task, happens when that task is seen as part of a person’s present.”
The trick with starting any new project is to choose the easiest and/or most enjoyable part of it and do that.
Any way you can sucker yourself into starting will drag the task into your present and kick start your motivation.
The study was published in the Journal of Consumer Research (Tu & Soman et al., 2014).
Although positive emotions feel better, negative emotions can be just as vital to our lives.
Using an AI chatbot on a phone is like having a therapist in your pocket, available 24/7.
The mindset is beneficial in areas like education, creativity, long-term planning and behaviour change.
Coaches, psychologists and others in helping professions often use a problem-solving approach — but this has dangers.
It motivated 85 percent to continue with their gym programme when they were failing.
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.
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.
The study was published in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine (Patel et al., 2016).
How to increase goal commitment and performance.
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).
You can get successfully motivated by envy as long as you use the right type of envy.
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.
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.
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.
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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