Staying Motivated: It’s All a Matter of Timing

(CC) Jason Rogers/Flickr

Well, and Reference Points… and Attentional Shift

Let’s say you decide to go on a diet with a specific weight loss goal in mind; we’ll say 50 pounds, just for an illustration. After six months on the diet, you’ve lost exactly 25 pounds. Six months, and you’re only halfway to your goal. All of a sudden there seems to be a whiff of unreachability in the air. It makes you feel like giving up. And that makes you mad and ashamed at yourself, because now you feel like a quitter.

Well, be at ease. You’re not a quitter. You are, in fact, perfectly normal, based on psychological studies conducted by researchers at the Kellogg School of Management and Italy’s LUISS Guido Carli University. They were looking into the validity of the old saying, “The closer he gets to home, the faster the horse runs.” Meaning, the closer you are to whatever your desired goal may be, the more energized you are about getting there.

What they found, as a number of prior studies had found, is that the old saying is correct — but what they also found, what eluded previous researchers, is that the saying only holds when you are closer to your goal than you are to your starting point. And they discovered something else: Whatever your goal, your motivation hits its lowest point and your will to continue is at its most feeble when you are halfway to meeting that goal.

They call this their “psychophysical model of goal pursuit,” but don’t let that spook you. It’s actually fairly simple. There are two keys. The first is perception. If we perceive ourselves as making progress toward our goal, we will be more motivated; if we feel like we’re barely moving, we become discouraged. But how we perceive our progress hinges on our point of reference. Any given goal pursuit involves two basic reference points: your starting line, and your finish line. Our motivation is highest when we use the closest of the two points to measure our progress.

Example: If, after one month, you’ve lost 5 pounds toward your goal of losing 100, you’ll be more jazzed up if you use the starting line and not the finish to measure your progress. Compared to where you began, you’ve already lost 5 pounds, an encouraging sign, but compared to your goal, you’ve only lost 5 pounds, a zeal killer. So the savvy weight loser, or other goal pursuer, will, in the words of one of the study leaders, “adopt their initial state as the reference point at the beginning of goal pursuit and the desired end state as their reference point when nearing the goal.”

There is, of course, one fly in this ointment. The researchers found an inverse relationship between the distance from your reference point and your amount of motivation, which means that the further you get from your starting point, the less motivating it is. Fortunately, at some point your finish line will be closer than your starting line, and you can switch to that — the horse’s home — as your reference point to spur you on. And that is why, it turns out, that your motivation toward meeting any goal is at its very lowest when you are halfway there, when neither point of reference is close enough to provide encouragement.

They call this the point of “attentional shift,” and there isn’t much you can do about it except be aware of it and the fact that once past it, you get closer to your finish line every day, and your mantra shifts from “How far I’ve come” to “How close I’m getting.” One basic shortcoming of all this advice is that accomplishing some goals can require such imposing lengths of time that both the start and the finish seem ineffectually distant for most of the journey. Our 100-pound-loss hypothetical, above, could easily take a good two years.

In the case of such extended durations, two suggestions might be helpful. One, be patient and be positive. A lot easier said then done, admittedly, but sometimes you simply need to be your own motivation. Two, try breaking the long haul into a series of shorter hauls, with intermittent goals that make the distance manageable. Five pounds a month, for instance, is both doable and potentially motivating.

Just remember to switch your reference points on the 15th of each month.

(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News):

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Staying Motivated: It’s All a Matter of Timing is a post from: CalorieLab - Health News & Information Blog

Source: http://calorielab.com/news/2012/09/21/staying-motivated-its-all-a-matter-of-timing/

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