Harnessing Energy to Make Change |
Intentional change takes time and motivation.
Building excitement, reframing negative emotions, building in play, and introducing a little anxiety can help.
These emotional hacks can help you harness the energy for change.
It’s often said that people hate change, but that’s clearly not true – people are constantly trying to improve themselves and their situations. Multiple studies reveal that the desire for change seems to be a core aspect of being human. When there is no change, we feel stagnant or bored and move on to something new. Even in studies of very young infants, researchers measure when the babies look away from an object to indicate when they are “done” and ready for change. But intentional change — like eating better, losing weight, getting out of debt, or being a better parent — is hard because you have to maintain motivation and persistence for a long period of time.
So how do we build and keep the motivation and energy needed over time to change our habits and meet goals? There are some emotional “hacks” that can help along the way.
1. Build in excitement, but not success. When we succeed at something and get a reward, we feel happy, and that signals that we have accomplished the goal. We feel happy when we win, when we finish the race. That feeling of happiness is a signal that we can sit back, coast a bit, and enjoy our success. Many habit-building programs encourage us to celebrate success and reward ourselves when we make small changes. But research on emotion suggests something different — if you are trying to make a change over time, you don’t want to view each step along the way as a success because then it will decrease your motivation.
A more effective tool is to view the small change as one step closer to the big goal — that you are drawing closer and closer to making the life shift that you want. Visualize it, draw it, or do whatever works for you to make the outcome feel exciting and real. Setting markers that indicate you are approaching your goal can also help, such as coloring in a picture of a house as you pay off the mortgage. Building excitement about the future can help keep you motivated over time.
2. Reframe negative emotions to reduce distraction. Negative emotions focus attention on specific problems. Sadness causes us to focus on loss and its causes; anger causes us to focus on obstacles to our goals. This narrowed focus can be beneficial in situations where you need to move on past loss or overcome obstacles, but it can be distracting when we are trying to focus on intentional change that occurs over time.
If you eat a piece of cake while working on your healthy eating and you view it as a failure, the resulting sadness can make you remember all the previous times you failed, and success will feel unlikely or impossible. This focus on failure distracts attention from your bigger goal of eating healthy.
Negative emotions like sadness can be reframed to reduce the distraction they create from your bigger goal pursuits. The rain that prevented you from running while you were training for the marathon might make you feel angry. But you can reframe it as a rest day or a strength day and rework your plan. Reframing quickly lets you move past the temporary situation and stay focused on the bigger intentional goal.
3. Build in play to maintain interest. People often try to just grit out long-term changes and pursuits. We put our heads down, focus on the problem, and try to use sheer will and determination to push through to the end. That’s a tough, and often unnecessary, way to go (unless you are trying to run 200 miles, in which case, it’s going to come down to determination).
For most of us, most of the time, building play into our planning around a goal can help us maintain motivation. Play is stimulating and engages interest and focus on the activity. Play can be something individual or something you do with others as a social activity. Play could be a competition with friends, or activities that build toward your bigger goal that are also fun (instead of a run, maybe soccer one day). Trying to grit out change is exhausting. Enjoyable activities that feel playful can replenish your emotional, cognitive, and social resources to keep going.
4. Don’t be afraid to use a little fear. Fear or anxiety are signals that there is a looming threat to something important. If you are pursuing an important goal as part of your intentional change, you should feel some anxiety when there are threats to your likelihood of succeeding. Some anxiety about not making the goal when you think about or encounter risks of failure can be helpful.
A student who has an upcoming test and who is not anxious at all is less likely to study. This is especially true when excitement about reaching the goal is not sufficient to keep focused on the goal, and motivation starts to wane. Negative emotions are more powerful and compelling than positive emotions, and the emotion of anxiety can be especially motivating. It is important that the anxiety is a small dose — too much can be debilitating and lead you to freeze. But a little bit of anxiety when you think about failing can be just what the doctor ordered when you’re struggling.
People thrive on change and growth. We all set goals to improve ourselves and improve our lives. But change occurs over time, which makes it hard to maintain the motivation and energy needed. The emotional hacks above can make intentional change more successful, and maybe even a little more fun while you’re going through it.