There are only a few ways to change your health behaviours in a meaningful way:
Let’s focus on that last piece through setting up action ahead of time. Think of it as taking your time while hurrying up. Here, you set up your personal environment so that you’re a single decision away from action. For example, you are sitting when you notice that your back is feeling sore. This leads to a pang of guilt or concern. “Am I taking care of my body?” It’s a great question. An important one. But it causes anxiety when we can’t answer it in the affirmative.
Here’s another example: let's say that you have a piece of fitness equipment but it’s in an out of the way corner and/or serving as a very expensive clothes hanger. You could go dig it up, dust it off, or pull the clothes off of it. You realize, though, that by the time you do all of that, you’ll have drained your entire motivation battery – all before you actually start exercising. The motivational moment will have passed before anything happens, which makes things feel pointless.
It’s just as easy (maybe easier) to think, “I should start working out three days a week” because no further action is required. It’s the lack of clarity that kills us. There’s no clear starting point in terms of either action step or time period. Most problematically, it’s disassociated from the immediate moment. Call it procrastination if you want but it doesn’t matter. what you’re really dealing with is a terminal case of vagueness. You don’t know where to start or stop. This becomes just one more layer of friction between the immediate moment and action.
I believe that an inability to respond to our motivational moments in real-time is sometimes stressful. One way you can attack this problem is to better engineer your environment. This is sometimes referred to as nudging. Here, you traverse the many – often hidden – actions that exist between the present and your target. Imagine you’re a mantaur (half human, half human) who sees an intruder in your forest home. In principle, you should be able to take aim with your bow and fell the intruder. Except…
Your bow is unstrung, your arrows are jammed in a tree somewhere And, while we’re at it, you’re overdue for some target practice. The reality is that the odds of a bull’s-eye aren’t zero but they’re not much better either. So, you decide that you want to be ready the next time something like this comes around. This is where pre-loading comes in. Especially if it comes around predictably.
The skill of pre-loading involves setting things up, experimenting a bit, discovering the unexpected gaps between your intention, and – finally loosing that arrow.
Now I’m about to tell you the most important thing in this whole message: you do not actually have to fire the arrow for your effort to be worthwhile.
We get stuck when we feel like effort won’t transfer immediately into results. It feels like a motivational sinkhole. But that’s just an illusion. Whether you take effective action in your next motivational moment is far less important than whether you increase your odds of successful future action. So, while you may not always be successful in the moment, your statistical likelihood increases. Past a certain threshold you begin operating like a casino. You don’t sweat periodic losses because, on a long enough timeline, the house always wins – and you’re the house.