Months of binge watching, doom scrolling, home schooling, and stress eating have left many people more determined than ever to start a new fitness regimen in January.
Even a global pandemic that is closing gyms and keeping people indoors won’t deter many from pursuing this perennially favorite New Year’s resolution. To turn a fitness aspiration into a habit, experts often recommend that people adopt rigid exercise routines and rituals, scheduling workouts or sleeping in running clothes, for example. But new research suggests that flexibility might go further to help people exercise more.
“People think, ‘It would be wonderful if every morning I went for a run at 7 a.m. and then was showered and ready to work at 8 a.m.,’” says John Beshears, the Terrie F. and Bradley M. Bloom Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. “It’s a wonderful aspiration, but the reality is that some days you need to drive your kid to school.”
So, what’s the alternative? Beshears teamed with researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins University in 2015 to test different ways to help 2,508 Google employees exercise at the company’s gyms more often.
Even with the convenience of an on-site facility, some busy Google employees found it difficult to stay active. Academic literature would suggest that they just needed the right cues and environment to help them establish a habit they would eventually repeat automatically, without conscious effort and thought. However, that wasn’t that case, according to the study, Creating Exercise Habits Using Incentives: The Trade-off Between Flexibility and Routinization, published by the journal Management Science in October.
Rigid exercise routines often fail
As part of the study, participants identified a daily two-hour window every weekday as their ideal exercise time. The researchers randomly assigned participants to one of three study conditions:
- Routine. Researchers paid these participants only if they worked out for 30 minutes during their designated time. Half would receive $7 per session, while the rest got $3.
- Flexible. Participants would be compensated for working out at any time, with the same $7 and $3 breakdown as the routine group.
- Control. This group was encouraged to exercise without financial incentives.
During the four-week intervention period, the “routine” participants being paid $7 a session and the $3-earning “flexible” participants visited the gym at approximately the same frequency. Not surprisingly, “routine” gym-goers were more likely to exercise within their appointed time slot.
After the initial four weeks, when the financial incentives ended, people with rigid routines were more likely to give up on the gym. While both groups exercised less often, people who aimed to work out only during their scheduled window were 10 percentage points less likely to visit the gym at least once a week, double the 5-point decline of those who went whenever they could.
“When we set up our experiment with Google, we thought that setting up the repetition would be the winning formula to helping them form habits,” Beshears says. “We were absolutely surprised when our ‘flexible’ interventions ended up being better for longer-term habit formation.”
Beshears conducted the study with Hae Nim Lee, a former doctoral student at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania; Wharton professor Katherine L. Milkman; Robert Mislavsky, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University; and Jessica Wisdom, co-founder of Humu and a former people analytics manager at Google.
Get off the couch, even during a pandemic
While routines have helped many people stay productive and support their families during the COVID-19 pandemic, flexibility might be the self-care solution for people who tend to put everyone else first. And for anyone prone to setting overly ambitious exercise goals in 2021, Beshears’ findings lend support for some familiar advice:
Squeeze in exercise when it fits. Busy people can’t assume that every day will follow a prescribed pattern—client meetings arise, deadlines loom, kids get sick. Exercise doesn’t need to happen at the same day or time; it just needs to happen.
Be realistic and forgiving. Daily gym sessions scheduled with the best intentions can quickly become self-sabotage triggers when life’s inevitable stressors arise. Beshears recommends that people start with goals that they can actually achieve, given the other obligations competing for their time.
Focus on the habit, not the reward. Incentives, such as a small payment per workout, might have helped study participants form a fitness habit faster. And the potential to lose weight or improve one’s health might serve as powerful motivators. But an enduring habit ultimately transcends any potential reward.
“You do the habit because it’s a habit, not because you get something from performing that action,” Beshears says. “Regardless of whether you’re being paid money to do something or how intrinsically enjoyable it is, it’s a separate issue.”
Overcoming the initial hurdles that stand in the way of a good habit often requires people to challenge seemingly innocuous behaviors, says Beshears, who has been studying how people make financial and health care decisions for more than 10 years. Getting a handle on these day-to-day patterns can help people overcome bigger self-defeating tendencies.
“Why do we mindlessly, automatically reach for the potato chips instead of the carrot sticks?” he asks. “When we understand that, we have some real insight that could help people improve their lives.”
About the Author
Danielle Kost is the editor-in-chief of Harvard Business School Working Knowledge.
[Image: monkeybusinessimages]
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