Ask a group of experts why it is hard to lose weight, and you'll likely hear some of the following answers:
Sound familiar? Yet even among a crowd of educated health professionals, you'll rarely hear what may be one of the most important weight loss barriers of all: It is a loss-framed goal.
As decades of behavioral research make clear, goals that focus on losing things we dislike don't work, as well as goals that focus on gaining things we desire1.
In this post, we'll explore part of the psychology behind why "loss goals," such as weight loss, pain reduction, procrastination, and smoking cessation, so commonly fail and how we can reframe our self-improvement efforts into "gain goals" with a greater potential for success.
If you want to improve your quality of life in 2024, there are two proven behavior strategies through which you can frame and motivate your goals. These strategies are negative reinforcement and positive reinforcement.
As shown in Figure 1 below, nearly any goal or New Year's resolution can be approached with either a positive or negative reinforcement strategy. However, rather than realizing that we have an essential choice between these two options, we often default to how other people approach the same goal.
If you want better results than most other people, stop doing that.
If both........