Struggling to Exercise? Find the Cue that Makes You Move!

What Makes People Tick?

What makes it so hard for people to exercise on a regular basis? And what is the secret to getting people up and moving?

Finding answers to these questions have intrigued researchers for decades. In the 1970s and 1980s, researchers focused on the kind of deliberate and conscious decision-making that led people to exercise.

In the 1990s, researchers began to look beyond the thinking process that led people to exercise and started to consider the role that habits play. They found that developing a regular exercise routine—a habit of exercise—was influenced by many factors:

• Social and physical environments: What will my friends think? Do I have room in my basement to set up my trampoline?

• Degree of control over the exercise experience: Will the weather allow me to cycle every day or will I end up catching a cold after getting caught in a downpour?

• Subjective experience of exercise and the sense of reward: Running gets me high!

• Situational cues that reduce the thinking process related to each step in the process and instead, roll them up into one “procedural mega-step” that triggers the behavior automatically: After I wake up, I roll out of bed and into my gym leggingsand walking shoes, head out the door, and go for my morning walk.

Since then, the science of forming habits that propel us into healthy action has become one of the hottest topics from the ivory tower of academia to popular culture.

In part, it’s our fascination with, and drive, to answer the old-age question, “What makes people tick?”

But more importantly, figuring out how to help people take action and make sustainable change, particularly when it comes to health habits, is a global imperative. The time to turn the tide on the disability and early death due to bad choices and lifestyle habits, including sedentary living, is now. We cannot wait.

Where We’re at Today

If you ask people what the key to success is in most any endeavor, the answer is often willpower and motivation.

But as anyone who’s ever created a New Year’s resolution knows, motivation is hard to sustain over time. Motivation, resolve, and willpower simply aren’t enough to keep certain behaviors going.

What if you could change the equation?

In terms of exercise, what if there was a way to make it an easier routine that is more automatic, takes less thinking, and is hard to break?

Recent research by L. Allison Phillips, a professor at Iowa State University, suggests that instead of depending on motivation–which for many people is abstract, elusive, and/or difficult to sustain—another strategy may be more powerful and lead to success.

That strategy is to focus on what triggers the exercise behavior in the first place.

Have you ever started driving while your mind was on something entirely different than the route you were driving, but you ended up at the right destination anyway? This happens because our brains are wired to make routine behaviors automatic, allowing us to operate on auto-pilot and free up our attention for thinking of other more important or urgent things.

While doing things on auto-pilot may not always work for us, such as when we automatically drive towards home after work on the day we have somewhere different to go, automatic routines serve us well when it comes to exercise.

Find the Right Trigger

Becoming a regular exerciser and developing a dependable routine depends first, on establishing an “instigation” habit. An instigation habit is the trigger or cue that propels us into action.

Cues can either an external or internal.

External cues can be in the form of auditory cues such as alarms and timers; visual cues such as reminder notes or posting a schedule; or physical cues, such as placing equipment where it’s easily accessed. Examples of external cues for exercise include:

• An alarm that rings to tell you it’s time to get ready for the Zumba class

• A timer that you set to remind yourself to get up from your desk to stretch after you’ve sat for a set period of time

• An agreement with friends to head out the door at noon to climb a few flights of stairs before lunch

• Having an exercise band or set of weights near the recliner in front of the TV so they’re easy to see and reach

• Reminder notes posted on your bathroom mirror that remind you to do 2 jumping jacks after you wash your hands

Internal cues are those that arise from noticing your experience and sensations. The most obvious internal cue that is vital to survival is the sense of hunger that tells us to eat. Examples for internal cues to exercise include:

• Recognizing when you feel stressed, anxious, grumpy, bored, or “down”

• Feeling stiff from sitting too long in one place “My body is really feeling stiff from sitting so long at my desk, so I better stand up and take a stretch break.”

• Noticing that your clothes feel tight because you gained some weight over the holidays

Cues work best when they are as closely related to the desired behavior as possible. For example, a note on the box of your breakfast cereal that reminds you to go to the gym after work isn’t as effective as a cue you experience right after you arrive home from work and see your workout gear at the front door. Similarly, if you want to give away unwanted clothes to charity, setting up a box or bag at the front of your closet or near the laundry area is a far better cue than putting a giveaway box in the attic or garage (unless your washing machine and dryer are also there!).

Nail a New Habit in 3 Easy Steps

Anyone who has trained in IWE’s Wellness Coach Training program is already familiar with BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits model. Dr. Fogg, a professor at Stanford University, counsels against depending on motivation and willpower as a way to establish and sustain new behaviors.

Instead, the Fogg Behavior Model incorporates elements described above, including an instigation cue, and creating new behaviors that are easy to do, take little time, demand little effort or money, and are socially acceptable.

Fogg’s “Tiny Habits” formulation is novel because it provides a way to really “nail” new behaviors so they stick. The formula comprises 3 parts:

1. trigger or anchor

2. tiny action or behavior (by tiny, Fogg means really tiny, such as his classic example of flossing one tooth)

3. celebration (eg, fist pump, shout out, etc) that immediately follows the performance of the new behavior

Interestingly, when it comes to exercise, Phillips stresses that creating a powerful cue or trigger is as important as finding the perfect routine. Haven’t you had the experience of not really wanting to do something but once you got started, it was enjoyable and you’re glad you did it? Without a powerful trigger, you wouldn’t have initiated the behavior in the first place.

For wellness coaches, helping people achieve their goals by applying these new concepts about habit formation is hugely rewarding. Gone are the days when it was about gutting it out, engaging in mortal combat with your lack of willpower, or having internal screaming matches between the part of you that wants to stay on the couch versus the part that wants to feel better by exercising.

It still takes time and effort, but the take-home message is that you can change your own behavior and help others do the same by going really tiny, using internal, and external cues, and celebrating the micro successes.

What do you think are the best ways to create an exercise habit? We would love to hear what you think, so please leave a comment!