Christie Aschwanden
If you have a job that makes you sit at a desk most of the time, by the end of the workday you might feel stiff and exhausted.
At that point, “it might seem overwhelming to drum up the energy to then go work out,” says Danielle Boles, a behavioral psychologist who studies the impact of mindset on behaviour. But what if you could flip that state of mind around?
“The other mindset would be, ‘I’ve been sitting all day, I cannot wait to move,’” Boles says. In both cases, she adds, the situation is the same – only the framing is different.
The mindset you bring to exercise really matters. Simply adjusting yours can be an important step toward turning yourself into a consistent exerciser.
In a study published in 2021, Boles found that people starting an exercise class who were told to focus on fun, relaxation and social connection were less likely to skip class than those who were instead given general information about public health recommendations related to exercise.
Other research has shown that giving yourself credit for exercise can help you build good habits. For a study published in 2023, Octavia Hedwig Zahrt, a Stanford University doctoral student, recruited 162 moderately active adults who were not tracking their physical activity and gave them watches to monitor their steps. It’s a common experimental design, but this one had a twist: some participants received step-trackers that gave accurate step counts; others received trackers rigged to either overcount or undercount steps by 40 per cent.
After five weeks, members of the group given deflated step counts not only reported reduced self-esteem and mental health, but also found that their blood pressure and heart rate increased, and their diets deteriorated from eating more high fat foods and less produce.
Psychologists sometimes call this the “what the hell effect,” says Zahrt, now a behavioral scientist at the European Central Bank. “If I’m already failing in one domain, then, what the hell, I’m not even going to try in another domain.”
In contrast, the people given accurate step counts, as well as those who got overcounts, perceived their activity levels as more adequate and healthy after the five weeks and adopted a healthier diet, improved their aerobic capacity and experienced better mental health, Zahrt says. In other words, there was something in their perceptions about their exercise that was influencing their improvements.
“The adequate mindset made them feel healthier,” Zahrt says, “and that could have fed into some sort of more healthy identity. Which would have facilitated also other types of health behaviours.”
Adopting a new mindset is not as easy as just deciding to become someone who is active – the identity needs to feel appropriate, says Paul Estabrooks, director of the Mountain West Prevention Research Centre at the University of Utah. One way to foster this is to surround yourself with other people like you who are physically active.
Whether it’s joining a pickup basketball team or meeting up with friends to walk on a regular basis, the social support can be motivating, Estabrooks says.
The relationship between identity and exercise works in both directions, says Bas Verplanken, a social psychologist at the University of Bath. Exercising regularly may gradually shape your identity, and that identity as an exerciser can also motivate you to keep doing it. If you join a soccer club, for instance, you may start to think of yourself as a soccer player, which can in turn motivate you to keep playing and to train more for the sport.
You also want to build an “action-oriented mindset,” Verplanken says. The trick, he adds, is to deliberately create the conditions that make exercise feel automatic.
The simplest example is to set out your workout clothes the night before. But you can also change your route home from work so that you go by the gym, or get a dog who will look up at you every morning, excited for a walk. Or, you could make standing plans with a neighbour to come by your house at a set time to go for a walk after dinner.
Zahrt says she had changed her own mindset about her exercise routine. She now pays close attention to the different ways she gets physical activity outside of the gym, like cycling to work or having walking meetings. Now, when she’s cleaning her house, she no longer thinks about it as a chore. It’s good exercise.
The New York Times
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