From Joe: In a prior post about candy jars in the office, I urged you to think seriously about the states of mind that characterized people who voiced opinions about whether or not candy jars were acceptable artifacts in an office setting. If you have already done that, you probably noticed that most commentators – no matter whether they approved or disapproved of such jars – framed the issue in moralistic terms: Candy jars are not a problem in themselves, they said. Instead, the problem was in the people who lacked self-discipline, suffered from feelings of inferiority, had issues hanging on from their childhood or, as one commenter put it, need therapy. As far as I can see, this kind of moralistic discourse does nothing to address the practical concerns of people who are trying to devise lasting changes in life habits.
We know from decades of research that unhealthy habits die hard. High relapse rates characterize virtually all successful programs for smoking cessation, drug usage, dieting, fitness, etc. It’s a gloomy picture.
If you’ve been trying to lose weight along with our Fittest Loser contestants, I hope you have been thinking seriously and creatively about how you personally will address the relapse issue once the contest is over. As with any project, it’s important to confront such issues early and thoroughly in a detailed pre-mortem that can increase your chances of success.
You haven’t done a fitness pre-mortem? Well, get your butt going!
First, consider how you spend your design time regarding new habits. Perhaps it would be profitable to broaden the kinds of knowledge and practices you bring to bear on the problem. Maybe you need to reframe your practices and develop new lenses for looking at yourself. Do you really need to read more diet books or exercise manuals or other procedural guides to maintain your gains? Probably not. Especially if you’ve already made a substantial amount of progress. Such items might be comfort foods rather than spurs to further progress.
Here’s a hypothesis you might want to think about in lieu of the comfort foods:
Mental rigidity — the inability to control what you pay attention to — is the greatest single threat to your long-term success!
From this perspective, people with weight issues, fitness issues, drug issues, etc. are people who rigidly pay attention to aspects of experience that are dysfunctional for them. If that’s true, then they will benefit by reframing their problem as one of attention management rather than personal weakness or bad genes or whatever.
Once they begin paying attention to how they manage attention, they might make more lasting progress than would be had by spending cognitive resources learning more about trendy diets or exercise routines.
To make improvements that last, you have to change the cognitive structures that guide the hand to the candy jar.
Paying attention to how you pay attention is an essential part of learning to change those cognitive structures.
To go full circle, paying attention to the candy jar as if it were nothing but a candy jar keeps a habit hard to control.
Taking the time to frame the candy jar as a complex artifact which elicits a wide range of emotions might actually make it very easy to override the hand’s determination to reach.
You touch on some important points which are often neglected in regards to losing weight or improving your fitness. Most people who want to lose weight focus on the physical side of things like diet and exercise.
Of course this is an important part, but the reason most people are where they are is because of poor lifestyle habits. Over the years they have mentally programmed themselves to behave in a certain way. What is often overlooked is that evenif someone manages to improve health and lose weight with a lot of hard work, the mental program which initially made them overweight is still locked in their minds. This is one of the major factors as to why so many people end up putting the weight back on at some point.
It is vital that weight loss is approached not only from a physical perspective, but also from a psychological perspective. Get the mind right and everything else will fall into place.