THE WILL TO BEGIN
In Get It Done: Surprising Lessons from the Science of Motivation, author Professor Ayelet Fishbach wrote that, although she loves her job, there are times when she finds it hard to stay motivated.
“How do you motivate yourself? The short answer is by changing your circumstances,” she says.
Every item on our daily to-do lists can be categorised as something we are intrinsically motivated to do, or extrinsically motivated to do. If we’re intrinsically motivated, it means we want to do it for its own sake. It’s enjoyable and pleasurable. A task driven by extrinsic motivation is something we must do to achieve another goal. For example, we are intrinsically motivated to start the day with a berry smoothie because it’s refreshing and delicious. We are extrinsically motivated to add a spoonful of chia seeds because it helps us achieve our goal of having a healthy breakfast.
Ayelet and other behavioural scientists have measured and confirmed what we all know to be true: Tasks we enjoy are easier to do.
“Take exercising,” she says. “Is it a chore? Is it a game? When kids exercise, it’s a game. They play soccer or basketball. They run outside. We adults often define exercise as something that we need to do for that many number of minutes for that week, with an elevated heart rate. We frame it as a chore and the framing makes it harder to do.”
The solution is to turn something you have to do into something you want to do. Instead of jumping on an exercise bike, invite a friend for a hit of tennis. Take a dance class instead of a high-intensity interval training class. This might seem obvious, but when we’re working towards a goal, we often pick a task we think will be effective over one we think will be fun. Ayelet suggests we reverse this thinking.
In a study of 40 gym-goers, Ayelet found “that those selecting the exercise they enjoyed more completed around 50 percent more repetitions of their workout than those who selected the exercise they believed to be most effective. This group persisted longer, even though they chose similarly difficult workouts as the other group.”
We all know the victorious glow that follows a tough gym workout. Yet the promise of that endorphin hit is often not enough to muster the willpower to lace up our runners. Here’s why:
“Our physiology is such that we tend to rest. We prefer not to move. Our evolution as a species was about saving energy and not about spending energy. Spending energy is always going to be, on some level, hard,” she says. And our physiology has not caught up with our modern lives.