MINDING THE GAP

This post provides an alternative perspective on the intention-behaviour gap, the technical term for not following through on one’s intended behaviour. This is a big topic of discussion when it comes to health behaviours for obvious reasons, the key question being “why don’t we follow through on our conscious intentions, even when we really care about the behaviour?” 

Whether it is about exercising more, eating differently, reducing alcohol consumption or quitting smoking, people are consistently frustrated by what seems like an inability to control themselves in the face of urges or emotions. The reality is that there are many different psychological mechanisms at play here, and it can be helpful to consider the different ways in which this intention-behaviour gap manifests and the different psychological positions people take in relation to it as it happens.

In many cases, people experience a conscious sense of psychological conflict whilst an intention-behaviour gap is unfolding in real time. Imagine someone decides they want to go for a run, but when the time comes to do it there is some emotional or visceral resistance to it - a very common experience. It’s like a physical sense of “I just don’t want to.” They may actively wrestle with that resistance or inertia, trying to will themselves to overcome it with reminders of their goals or reassurance that it won’t be as bad as they anticipate. Yet they can’t seem to win this battle, ultimately admitting defeat and abandoning the run. All the while they’re pretty unhappy about it, perhaps ruminating about how frustrated they are that they can’t seem to control their behaviour.

Alternatively, consider binge-eating, in its varying intensities – it’s usually the case that one rationally knows they’ll regret it and they’re desperate to resist, but they just can’t. Behaviour has been hijacked by something beyond the conscious will, despite its protest.

But there are other less-discussed versions of this intention-behaviour gap, one being where people are in the midst of acting in a way they would usually consider “unhealthy” or goal-incongruent at any other time, but they actually feel very good about doing so in the moment, as opposed to rationally struggling with it as described above. The frustration and feelings of guilt don’t come until much later. In this case, it isn’t just behaviour but also feelings and perceptions that have been hijacked by something beneath consciousness.

For example, imagine someone falls into the habit of drinking alcohol a little too regularly for their liking – in the cold light of day as they go about their business they know it isn’t great for their health and likely inhibits some of their fitness progress, so they decide they’re going to cut down the amount or reduce the frequency of drinking. However, evening rolls around and all of a sudden their feelings have completely changed – they’re no longer worried about all of those things, rather attention is organised towards the positive feelings that come with drinking. So they go ahead and enjoy it, no regrets at all… until later, that is, when they find themselves unable to sleep or feeling a bit thick-headed the next day.

Or take the classic situation where every time someone considers returning to an exercise activity they used to do, they end up seeking excuses not to and succumbing to the comforting yet later-disappointing conclusion of “I’ll re-start another time, now I just need to relax.” In the moment they feel justified in their decision, a comforting sense of relief and gratitude for the opportunity to not do the dreaded thing they were anticipating doing. But lo and behold, the next morning they regret yet another day passing where they hadn’t re-initiated their journey towards being active again.

What’s different about these situations is the feelings about the “undesired” behaviour as they occur in the moment. What becomes disturbing is not just the lack of valued behaviour or the engagement in unhealthy behaviour, nor just the experience of being unable to act on conscious intention as per the first examples in this post, but also just how little one cares about it in the moment. It’s as if one’s attitudes temporarily and completely change; “it’s like I’m a different person.”

Furthermore, the experience of being disturbed about this and reflecting on it outside of the situation doesn’t always resolve things. People may have a long hard think to themselves, and declare: “right, I’m going to be serious about this and stop at one drink this time” or “I will get out the door this evening, it’s too important not to and I don’t want my fitness to decline further.” Yet… the situation in question comes around again and it’s the same scenario of concerns vanishing and getting carried away on the cloud of positive feelings provided by drinking/abstaining from exercise. The cycle continues in a kind of yoyo experience – not just over weeks or months, as in “yoyo dieting” or being “on and off the wagon”, but a day-to-day yoyoing, an unsettling experience of being in one state of mind and then a couple of hours later in another.

So what’s going on here?

When trying to understand how our feelings about something can differ so much, a psychoanalyst called Philip Bromberg comes to mind. NB: Bromberg’s work is extremely complex and a comprehensive and detailed explanation is far beyond the scope of this post, but I am attempting to develop my thoughts around how some of the elements of his theories may shed light on the processes of the intention-behaviour gap. It’s simply a different way of thinking about it.

A lot of Bromberg’s pioneering work revolved around the proposition that a core characteristic of the human psyche is multiplicity. Multiplicity is the idea that whilst each of us is a single physical being, experientially speaking our minds consist of different self-states – constellations of attitudes, beliefs, motives, feelings, patterns of attention and behaviour that are organised in such a way that they contribute to qualitatively different senses of one’s self once activated.

These may coincide with social roles - for example most people think, feel and act differently when they’re at work versus when they’re out with friends. But they also stem from other organising psychological forces such as emotions and motives. Consider how your attention, motivation, physiology and behaviour shifts when you’re incredibly angry versus when you’re feeling humorous, or what you’re like when you’re really motivated to do something versus when you’re anxious to avoid it. In other words, different versions of ourselves are activated under different circumstances.

Many other figures in the psychodynamic and wider psychotherapeutic field have developed and utilised this concept, but some aspects of Bromberg’s conceptualisation seem particularly fitting here. Specifically, he wrote in depth about the concept of dissociation of self-states. This term is often used in trauma literature to describe the defensive splitting off of experiences from consciousness, and indeed Bromberg focused some of his work on these more extreme cases. But he also saw dissociation as a natural function of the psyche, operating on a spectrum on which it only becomes pathological in its more extreme forms.

For Bromberg, dissociation is the temporary disconnection of self-states from one another, which is necessary for coherence of experience - imagine trying to function in a particular situation while having all of the conflicting thoughts, feelings, roles, self-perceptions, beliefs and motives you have going on in your consciousness at once. So some dissociation of the array of different states within us is necessary to help us organise our experience and operate as we move through our day.

However, Bromberg would suggest that it becomes more problematic where we have self-states that are in such a state of conflict that we we cannot tolerate the idea of both co-existing, or treat certain self-states as “not me” - we disown or refuse to accept them as things we could possibly feel or act like. Carl Jung would refer to these parts as “shadow” aspects, and suggest that the fact of our rejection of them is what affords them autonomy. And they are autonomous as far as the conscious mind is concerned - as described above, they can hijack our behaviour, feelings and attitudes to disturbing degrees.

As a kind of antidote to this, Bromberg developed the metaphor of “standing in the spaces” - he likened the myriad of self-states we have to islands separated by empty space, the idea being to occupy this space and therefore bridge the gap between dissociated states. In the alcohol example above, the self-state involved in enjoying the experience of getting tipsy is totally disconnected from that of the self-state that prioritises values around health, and hence experiences regret. The idea here would be to find ways to hold both self-states in mind at the same time, thus allowing tension between the two to exist in consciousness.

Bromberg spoke about this in the context of a psychotherapeutic relationship, and there are a number of good theoretical reasons for that as well as the most obvious reason, which is that quality psychotherapeutic work with a professional is always going to create more significant psychological change than solo self-enquiry. Particularly when it comes to potentially addictive substances like alcohol, the most effective path forward is to seek professional support, thus the following discussions are not intended to replace that or act as mental health advice. The purpose of these blogs is not to provide concrete strategies but to stimulate reflection and offer alternative lenses through which to view psychological phenomena, which is what I intend to do with the following explorations.

getTING to know these states better

Let’s consider the drinking example, where there is a self-state that really enjoys the buzz of drinking, experienced as impermeable to input from the self-state that deals with later consequences. People who experience such a dissociation will tell you that it’s like they can’t connect at all to other perspectives at the time - it’s like they are in a feel-good “fog” and nothing else is getting through. This Dionysian-style self-state just does not care one jot – the behaviour is being reinforced by a very positive feeling.

So it is important to ask: why is that experience so compelling in the moment, so it can blast all other motives out of the water? This is of course a matter of individual reflection, but it is worth bearing in mind that through its chemical mechanisms alcohol suspends the inhibitions of normal functioning, increases positive emotion and can provide a transcendent and connected feeling. If one finds that this experience really lifts them up out of ordinary life, it is possible that the state they typically operate in day-to-day is somewhat anxiety-driven or lacking in positive emotion. This can be what makes the positive experience of alcohol so compelling - it compensates.

We might ask the same question of the relief and comforting feelings that come with abstaining from exercise. Why do those have such potency? Again a matter of individual reflection, but removing an upcoming event that has some level of negative feeling attached to it (e.g. dread, resentment, anticipation of aversive physical discomfort) is inherently rewarding at a biological and therefore emotional level. One might ask themselves what kind of associations are attached to the idea of the exercise, or what else is going on in their life such that retreat is so appealing.

In both scenarios it is helpful to acknowledge that regardless of the incongruence of these decisions with one’s values, a need or desire is being met by the habit of drinking or dodging the exercise. It’s doing something for the person, even if that is not yet understood, or in direct conflict with other needs and desires. Furthermore, one has unfavourable neurochemistry working against them. There’s far more to all of us than just biological processes, and the aim of most psychotherapeutic methods is to expand consciousness so we can move in directions underpinned by moral value as opposed to purely biological or hedonistic satisfaction. However particularly in the case of the drinking habits, our biology is powerful and this is worth acknowledging.

Standing in the spaces

From here, according to Bromberg the idea is not to try to directly change either self-state, even the “unhealthy” one. This might sound counterintuitive, but I’ve seen many people continue to wrestle unsuccessfully with unhealthy habits precisely because they think they should be able and need to eliminate or get them under control immediately, often by brute psychological force. Or perhaps they expect a sudden and immediate integration upon holding both self-states in mind. When that doesn’t work, feelings of powerlessness and despair set in and the cycle continues.

The task is instead would be to facilitate more communication between the two, ultimately to an effect of a “compromise”. But there is no way of forcing a compromise - this is an organic process one comes to through increasingly bringing the two self-states into contact over time.

For instance, that might mean paying closer deliberate attention to the sensations of getting tipsy, and identifying any of those that overlap with the more unpleasant ones later, therefore linking them. Or perhaps it is the simple act of acknowledging “I know I’ll feel differently about this later.” The problem initially is that the negative feelings experienced around the after-effects are not experienced during the “tipsy” phase – everything about that in the moment is associated purely with positive feelings. But if one starts to link up bits of that “tipsy” phase with bits of the later more regretful phase, those bits of the “tipsy” experience become tagged with a little negative emotion. It won’t transform the experience, but it might cause someone to just hesitate and think as they do what they are doing. That’s the baseline, and over time it can build into a more conscious engagement with the “tipsy” self and increased communication with the self that will regret it later. Logic isn’t going to cut it, so it’s a case of working to share some of the emotional experiences from each self-state back and forth, essentially associating the positive feelings of avoiding exercise or drinking with the negative consequences later.

Another possibility that various psychotherapeutic models employ is to use a journal to write about the experience when in each state of mind. What does the “tipsy” self-state have to say about the process of drinking, and the reality that other aspects of the self feel differently? What is the motive, what is so important about this experience, what is being addressed through this experience? Then having put that to the more values-based, regretful self-state, what is the response? This is a kind of guided internal dialogue, an attempt to engage in what Carl Jung called the “tension of the opposites”, a situation in which two conflicting states are allowed to exist and express themselves. Theoretically, if both can co-exist and be explored simultaneously as opposed to in silo, a third perspective is generated as a result of the interaction between the two.

Again, this isn’t about forcing a premature integration of self-states, which is impossible, but a case of exploration. Contrary to what some pop psychology gurus may tell you, we can't decide when significant psychological change happens. All we can do is support its progress and maintain patience and persistence in the desired direction of travel. I like to think of lasting change of a significant nature is analogous to making a broth or a soup - you chuck all of the ingredients into the pot, but then you just have to let them simmer and slowly release their flavours in their own time.

This is a post from my individual Substack which explores exercise psychology from a depth psychology perspective. If you are interested in this kind of post, check out my Substack here.

Chloe

Psychology of Movement