The Will and the Way. A Hacker’s Guide to Behavioural Change
If you’re still struggling to reach your fitness goals, maybe it’s not your willpower or something “defective” about you (that’s a story anyway), but perhaps a perspective that needs restructuring. You’ve likely heard the phrase, “fake it until you make it”. But before you roll your eyes and abandon this read, what if there was a scientific workaround for this that worked? There is an effective way to manifest your future goals.
A protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) plays a critical role in memory consolidation and in maintaining new behaviours after engaging in them. The dopaminergic reward system plays an evolutionary role in the reinforcement learning cycle. Basically, we generally avoid what feels bad and are drawn to stimuli that feel good.
If we compare the goals to a transactional mindset where you spend X amount and receive Y reward, then we are limited by how much we “spend” or “invest”. But we are also limited by other competing goals we see as rewards. The thing we want in the future (fitness) is competing with the thing/s we want now (popcorn and Netflix). Habits, on the other hand, are more relational. Habits depend on breaking down large goals or objectives into smaller, tangible behaviours that, compounded, lead to something greater. Habits also depend on repetition. Using the same example of future health and well-being, but looking at it from a relational or transformational mindset, you can begin to visualize and experience how you want to feel in the future or how you see yourself becoming, essentially opening a psychological repetitive conditioning and reward loop. You are bringing the future reality of being fit into your present-day experience when you implement step-by-step behaviours of someone fit. Not convinced?
According to research published in the Consulting Psychology Journal, advice about behaviour change that relies on executive function, “The will” or forcing oneself to take on a new goal, feels hard. We evolved to be highly sensitive to receive rewards and to ensure the continued success of deeply ingrained patterns that continue those patterns. Key impediments to behaviour change: old behaviour has been rewarded (this is also part of the limbic brain/old neural pathways), the new behaviour has not. Learning something new which has never been repeated to change some of these patterns means ‘working against this powerful [neurological] system’. The sense of effort that accompanies executive function signals the brain that working on a difficult task implicitly means losing out on other opportunities. The amount of effort has a predictive opportunity cost. Effort signals one’s internal priorities; the more important the alternatives are, the harder a focal task (a new goal) will feel. But the inverse is also true: a given task will feel relatively easy when it is more important to a person than the alternative choices.
To use a common example, if you struggle with good sleep hygiene and are trying to adopt a new habit of sleeping 8 hours, hyper-focusing on the subjective intrinsic experience of having more energy, stamina and looking and feeling refreshed and alert will be more effective than using a pro/cons list or reasoning the benefits alone because you haven’t dealt with the sense that going to bed early will cost you evening enjoyment. Staying up late, in this example, not only needs to be downplayed; it needs to represent losing out on all the benefits that sleep provides. A new habit of going to bed earlier can feel more aligned with a shift in one’s priorities. This alignment reinforces repetition, which underscores habit formation. Repeated behaviours that are experienced as reward are likely to be repeated in the future. Reward is linked to the dopaminergic system in the brain, which is why addiction is so difficult to break. A behaviour will hold greater subjective value to the degree that it is related to one’s core values and sense of self. So, by shifting the reward system to something that amplifies and aligns with the value of the new “goal,” you reshape and recreate new neural pathways.
Recreating the neural pathways using meditation techniques, visualization and nervous system regulation to “feel” that new positively reinforced reality repeatedly is akin to launching a new reward learning and consolidation cycle. Mindfully re-organizing your nervous system response to a new habit can have a positive effect on the likelihood of success. Self-Determination Theory points to self-affirmations and identifying one’s core values as “predictive [of] the eventual degree of healthy behaviour change.” But finding ways to ‘increase the subjective value of new behaviour’ seems to be the key to new habit adoption. The subjective value of your goal creates the groundwork for success.
Singular goals alone don’t work, and the reason they don’t work is that most of us are not naturally wired to “suffer” the inconvenient reality that must take shape to attain those “goals”. With intrinsically motivated habits, there is no single endpoint to be reached. There is no grappling with the “suffering” of will/power. The only endpoint of a habit is that it’s part of a larger narrative. With goals, every day you go to bed early or back to the gym feels harder, like a chore that must be done, a step you must battle and win psychologically. With ingrained habits, not engaging in that behaviour or activity will feel like a loss of something valuable. A former chore, now turned pleasurable. When you become identified with the habit, the goal you are wanting to achieve becomes less of a hurdle; it’s part of the present-future you are designing, a lived experience you are literally engaged with, your new culture. Identify the value-linked identity associated with your new habit. Then sit with those feelings and the intrinsic value that comes with that association. This way, you are effectively finding ways to increase motivation through internalizing the value and, therefore, pleasure, of this new habit.
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Source: The Neuroscience of Goals and Behavior Change by Elliot T. Berkman via NCBI/PubMed Central.
