Why "tools" and "strategies" often fail to create long-term change

Find the audio version on our Substack here.

There is a plethora of psychological strategies and tools out there that you can try to increase motivation and adherence for exercise. Think goal-setting techniques, habit change strategies, reflective practices, motivational “hacks” and more. The sheer amount of information on this reflects the universality of the challenge with creating and sticking to meaningful physical activity habits.

But there is a glaring elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about, which is that when applied in isolation, these ready-made tools have limited long-term impact.

Now, this isn’t always the case - sometimes people’s struggles with motivation and adherence ARE to do with know-how, or remedied with simple tweaks to their approach or mindset. The underlying message of this post isn’t that these options are useless or unimportant - they are exactly what some people need, and there are people out there offering great solutions along these lines.

Furthermore, sometimes with ready-made tools and techniques it is a question of experimenting and finding what works for you - different things work for different people. However you can have access to the best interventions in the world but without the willingness or inclination to use them and make the changes they mean nothing. And this is the problem for a substantial portion of people.

The reality is that we are often somewhat unknowingly reluctant or apathetic about making positive changes to our health and fitness habits. This might seem like an odd statement to make - why would we not want to be more active in a way that positively impacts our health and life more generally? It turns out there are all sorts of reasons, and I’ll cover a few of the most common ones below.

The cost of change

The most obvious reason for potential reluctance or apathy towards change is that there are costs to making changes.

Sometimes they’re obvious and you’ll be able to name them readily - time, energy, resources, sacrifice of alternative activities, and so on. Just because we would like on one level to be more active, that doesn’t mean we are happy giving those things up. To quote the wise words of a dream group member, “saying yes always means saying no to something else”, and sometimes we want to say “yes” without saying the necessary “no”.

At other times the costs are hidden or unacknowledged. For instance, making efforts to be more active can require you to deal with psychological challenges that you may not consider in your calculations, such as self-consciousness or lack of confidence. When making our plans we often forget to take into account the emotional demands of exercising, which contribute to anticipated effort and can shift the cost-benefit analysis away from “participate.” There are even subtler psychological costs potentially involved that I will discuss below.

A good place to start then when considering making changes to our health and fitness habits, whether that is by shifting behaviours or mindset, is to create a simple pros and cons list of making your desired changes. What are the benefits, but what are the costs and potential disadvantages? And don’t just stick with the logical answers, pay attention to how you feel as well. For example, you might identify when you ask yourself about the disadvantages that you have an inexplicable feeling of “I just don’t want to” or “I can’t be bothered.”

Don’t worry about being able to explain these sentiments for the moment - the important thing is to acknowledge them, because they won’t go away and stop affecting you just because you ignore them. It’s easy to focus exclusively on our reasons for doing something and avoid any reasons for not, the worry being that thinking about reasons not to will reduce our motivation. But the actual effect is that you see your situation more clearly and then have more information with which to develop a better plan. Giving serious thought to this list can give you an idea as to why you are struggling to make changes. It can also help you to be more realistic or make practical tweaks to reduce any unnecessary resistance - always best to start with the low-hanging fruit.

Lack of faith

Another reason for reluctance or apathy towards change is a background lack of faith in your ability to change or in the effectiveness of your future actions in achieving your goals. This isn’t always obvious, particularly when we are in that initial motivational phase of feeling inspired and ready to go. But a lot of people secretly doubt that they’ll ever make a change that lasts or achieve XYZ. If you ultimately lack faith in the impact of your actions or in yourself, it’s natural that you wouldn’t be 100% invested in making the changes you say you want to make.

If you can identify that this is the case for you, it’s worth reflecting on what this background (or foreground!) lack of faith is based on. You may well come up with reasons that seem more on the rational side (e.g. “I haven’t achieved it yet despite trying” or “I don’t know if I’ll be able to workout regularly enough to make an impact”). If so, keep asking what that is based on - “OK I haven’t achieved it before, why does that mean I won’t ever? How am I coming to that conclusion?”

But like the pros/cons list above you might also identify sentiments that are harder to explain - maybe a vague yet unshakeable sense of hopelessness, an inexplicable tendency to criticise and disparage your potential or efforts, or maybe a lack of ability to imagine yourself having made the change. Again, don’t try to force a logical analysis - just note the feeling down and anything that comes to mind in response.

Contradicting well-worn paths

Another key reason for reluctance or apathy to change is the very fact that it involves contradicting well-worn paths and making new ones. Imagine you are walking through a forest, and you’ve got a long journey ahead of you. You’re going to gravitate towards the paths that have already been cleared - it’s far easier than pushing your way through trees and bushes, and you can maintain a sense of where you’re going.

Our habitual ways of behaving, reacting, perceiving, thinking and feeling are exactly like these well-worn forest paths - they provide us with a) ready-made and therefore efficient ways of making sense of the world and deciding how to act, and b) a feeling of certainty and coherence: “I know where I am, what I am doing and why.” The neural pathways underpinning these mental paths - for example your long-standing view of yourself, your current physical activity habits and typical reactions to challenges - are literally more organised and populated with neurons, hence communication along them travels a lot faster than less-established pathways, making these ways of being feel automatic and familiar.

This means doing something different requires extra energy and engaging with the unknown, both of which can trigger natural resistance. Extra energy requirements will trigger automatic cost-benefit analyses that I have spoken about before in these blogs, and the unknown involves experiencing a degree of disorientation. This isn’t always the case, but it frequently is - for instance, you might have noticed that it can be a real struggle to change your point of view on something, even if you know it’s an unhelpful point of view. The new viewpoint you’d rather adopt simply doesn’t chime with you or have an emotional impact, and this incongruence can encourage an active defence of the old perspective. Essentially, we’ve spent ages buying into the old idea which has served an unknown yet important purpose, meaning it will be defended.

A classic example of this is the rather paradoxical fear of success that many people have without realising. This isn’t just an arbitrary fear of success, but an intolerance of the unknown - succeeding at making big changes often means pre-existing views of self become invalid and require updating, or a forced acknowledgement that good things can in fact happen to you, which can contradict previous narratives.

Sometimes our views do immediately shift upon exposure to a different perspective, but it seems that this new perspective has to somehow align with or cleverly bypass the pre-existing structures, and it’s not always clear what contributes to that. In other words, it’s not exactly in your conscious control.

Another specific reason for this resistance to change is that it can involve the symbolic “leaving of the parental house”, a phenomenon often discussed in depth psychology circles. Throughout our youth we internalise messages about ourselves and the world from significant others and authority figures that shape our worldview - what is “important”, the opportunities we feel are available to us, how we expect to be received by the world, what we think ourselves capable of and who we think we are. These messages may be positive, neutral or negative, and despite the term “parental” they need not just come from parents but also figures like teachers, coaches, peers or even whole communities we spend a significant amount of time around. You can think of them as forming the very foundation of how we engage with the world.

Sometimes, making big changes to our lifestyle or pursuing big performance goals can mean we have to act and think in ways that totally violate these pre-existing messages - and hence to leave the psychological jurisdiction of internalised figures from our past. Maybe it means doing things that were explicitly or implicitly discouraged or punished, such as risking failure and embarrassment or focusing on your personal development; acting in ways that contradict pessimistic ideas about you and your ability; learning to respond to emotions in ways that fly in the face of what was modelled to you; taking on attitudes that were totally missing from your previous environments, or placing importance on things that were dismissed as trivial. This is hard, because it means going up against the structure of your internal world, doing things that feel like YOU shouldn’t be doing them. It’s like rewriting the blueprints for engagement with life.

So if you get the sense that your reluctance to change might have something to do with these deeper layers of your mind - past messages and the limitations of your prior experience and environments - it can be helpful to reflect on what kind of “rules” would feel like they are being broken by you making these changes, or what “realities” would feel contradicted.

There’s no magic solution!

Given what I’ve discussed, it’s clear then that there is no magic solution to these patterns that underpin reluctance or apathy to change. The key is to become open to exploring the reluctance or apathy, and realistically this isn’t always something you can do most effectively by yourself. If you find yourself stuck time and time again in cycles of failure to change, it’s likely that you’d benefit from working one-to-one with a psychologist or therapist who can guide you in understanding the psychological patterns at play. To use another forest analogy, it’s hard to understand the full nature of the forest whilst being stuck in dense clumps of trees. An external party can observe things that are not currently in your view and help you zoom out to see the whole forest.

As always, feel free to get in touch if you have any feedback, questions, or desire to seek further support on this topic.

Chloe

Psychology of Movement