THE TRUE NATURE OF LONG-TERM CHANGE

Why it's harder than we expect

One of our specialities as a sport and exercise psychologists is that of creating long-term behaviour change, most commonly in terms of health behaviours such as exercise and nutrition. Throughout my time working with people on this, and also along my own journey with developing such habits, I have come to realise that one of the biggest barriers to success is the underestimation of what is required and the need for greater self-knowledge. This post is therefore a meander through the requirements and challenge of long-term change - primarily behaviour change, but of course this also demands psychological change. I’m going to go about this via metaphor, because it provides a useful framework on which to hang and organise all of these realities.

This is the view from the top of Smith Rock State Park in Oregon over towards what I believe are the Three Sisters mountains. My husband and I spent 3 weeks driving round Oregon in the summer of 2017 and found ourselves up here one morning. Let’s imagine my goal is to summit the highest peak you can see in the distance, which will serve as an analogy for pursuing a behaviour change goal.

When I took this photo, I naively guessed that those mountains were just a few miles away… but they are in fact 30 miles away as the crow flies. They are also bigger than they look from this vantage point – they’re just under 3200m (2 miles) high, but from the 915m at which I was standing they didn’t look so tall.

This is symbolic of the “motivational phase” in which we often set goals – perhaps it’s the New Year, or some event has inspired us. We feel energised and excited to get going, and everything seems doable. These states of inspiration can be helpful to leverage, but the problem is that they are temporary, and they also lend themselves to excessive optimism. We tend to underestimate the reality of things when we are in this “high” phase of setting goals, as I did as I stood up the top of Smith Rock. The fact that we’d gotten up there in 40-degree heat made me feel pretty chuffed about the fitness my running activities had afforded me, which might give me an inflated sense of confidence if I were to consider hiking to the Three Sisters. But in reality, Smith Rock is well-maintained with many steep yet manageable paths, whereas the Sisters are three times the height and surrounded by wilderness.

This reflects the reality that to give ourselves the best chance of making a long-term change, we need to understand a few things first. We need to understand exactly where we are situated in relation to this goal – what the true distance is (i.e. the time and effort it will take), despite rose-tinted glasses, and what the demands of making that ascent are in comparison to what we have done before. It’s helpful to take note of current achievements, skills and resources, but we must also understand what else we need to develop. Not only does this help prepare us to take on the task practically speaking, but it reduces the likelihood of crushed expectations when the rubber hits the road. This is one of the classic barriers: we bump up against unexpected realities in behaviour change journeys and things aren’t how we predicted, so it feels like we can’t do it. We can, it’s just that we need to know more than we currently do.

This is juxtaposed against the reality that we can’t see the entire route ahead. Where the light fades out towards the mountains, the terrain isn’t visible, so I would need to progress along my journey to see what’s there. In other words, it’s natural to not know what things will be like that far ahead, but to succeed in our quest we need to be prepared to navigate unknown challenges.

This means acknowledging that what we see in the foreground might be totally different to the rest of the journey. For instance, the houses you see below in the photo are the only settlements between the two places, and there are no roads travelling in that direction, unless you went all the way left, out of the scope of the photo and looped round, making the journey about 60 miles. Equally, the flat nature of the immediate landscape is misleading, making things look easier than they perhaps will be once you’ve run out of that initial momentum.

Alternatively, you could look at the flat landscape and consider that things might not look so interesting from down there as they do from up here. It might even get boring for a while, and turn into what feels like drudgery. This brings us to a key element of successful long-term behaviour change, which is that something needs to make the day-to-day processes feel worth it when the end goals are still far away. Either the end goal has to endow the present-moment tasks with sufficient meaning and purpose, or something about the process has to be made enjoyable and meaningful independently. Perhaps this challenge in itself presents an opportunity to work on your values, such as developing the capacity to tolerate discomfort and boredom; or maybe you orient your attention to the things that remain pretty despite being lower down.

Now let’s imagine I start this journey. I’m currently up high, and need to get down to the ground first. Descent is a rich symbol with many meanings, but the first that jumps out at me here is that of humbling, getting down to earth. When we get into a behaviour change journey, there comes a point where we need to get off the “high” of being inspired and then face the true reality of moving forward every day. This often means realising that things are harder and take longer than you think. To do something challenging often involves feeling “lower” than you did previously; by definition, setting yourself an elevated goal means your relative position has changed. But again there is also the invitation to recognise what you’ve built up already – skills, knowledge, resources – that you can use to help you along your journey. Those have not disappeared, it’s just your relative position has changed. This is important because for a lot of people this “coming down to earth” is not just humbling but demoralising – the distance feels too great, the pull of the mountain too weak to make it worth it. Something needs to change about how we feel about that gap, and what it means to elevate your expectations and desires for yourself.

Once into the journey, we can see that if I were to walk as the crow flies it would involve trespassing, which is an interesting metaphor. It could refer to the act of stepping into areas your mind does not believe you belong in, in which case it is going to chase you out. Or alternatively perhaps it could symbolise the need to respect other parts of yourself and be flexible in your route – we all have other needs and motives as well as those to get fitter or healthier, and sometimes they need to take priority for a period of time, so we will have to fit around them. The difficulty here is avoiding the common trap of “because my routine is disrupted the whole thing has gone to pot” - a classic case of our minds ending the journey and declaring failure before we have actually finished or failed.

Something we can’t necessarily predict about long hikes is the climate. In this photo it was around 40 degrees – we consumed over 3 litres of water between us on that hike, and it definitely wasn’t enough. Like heat, intense emotions can tire us out and make things that are already effortful harder, or we can be buffeted off course by tempestuous feelings that emulate wind and rain. Or we might even lose contact with our goals and any enjoyment we had of the process, like being shrouded in fog. Emotional barriers are some of the most common, because like the weather, they are immersive and have the potential to completely change our view. It can be hard to want to keep going when it’s dark and rainy. Understanding how we respond under different emotional circumstances and why can be challenging, and it is often that there is more work to do here than we realise.

There is another element to making long hikes which is knowing if you’re on track and monitoring your progress. This is what landmarks are for. Some of us find that once we’ve set a goal we start along a path towards it but we end up just “going through the motions” – we get distracted by other things in life and we may be doing some of what we need to do to pursue our goals but we are not being particularly attentive to the actual direction in which we are wandering. Equally, having landmarks to mark your progress can confirm to you that you are in fact improving. These aren’t the same thing as the mountain, but they’re a sure sign of “you’re on your way, and objectively further than you were before.”

Now let’s return to the reality that we can’t see all the way ahead. We will be entering into unknown and possibly quite unforgiving territory. Contrary to popular belief, sometimes change can become harder once you’ve been on the journey a while. You will have improved in various ways to get that far, but things will continue to challenge you. If it’s a fitness challenge for example, you will at some stage surpass the initial sharp trajectory of improvement that often happens early on, and you’ll find you have to work harder to achieve the same gains. Or maybe if it’s been a while, your sense of drive and motivation feels like it’s fading away and things feel like more of an uphill struggle.

Equally, if we think about hiking up mountains, there may be wild animals hidden amongst the trees. It’s not particularly likely that you’ll be threatened by a wild animal in these areas, as far as I’m aware, although they certainly do inhabit the forests. But there are always some people who will, and for me this is symbolic of how a portion of people end up sabotaging themselves before they achieve what they set out to achieve. This is particularly the case if the achievement would change their view of themselves; although this would typically be in a positive direction, if it would dismantle old narratives sometimes that feels too destabilising to engage with.

For others, encounters with wild animals may serve as a reminder that we are in new realms and thus we still have more to learn. Things that can appear easy or “innocuous” can lull us into a false sense of security, while things that genuinely are easy may seem too good to be true and therefore suspicious. Coming across a beaver and Columbian ground squirrel were representative of this for me, with my husband reminding me that despite the beaver’s cute looks it would probably annihilate me if I got too close, whilst my fear of an overly friendly squirrel running up my leg was totally irrational (yes, I was scared off by this small squirrel).

Then there are obstacles in general which may require you to change route. For instance, things in your life can change, temporarily or permanently, meaning you genuinely don’t have access to your normal resources. Whilst in the area, my husband and I went mountain-biking round the back of the Three Sisters on the McKenzie River trail. The terrain was more extreme than I anticipated, and navigating it felt like it far exceeded my abilities. Some of the descents were so steep, with dangerous drop-offs to the side and big, jagged rocks on the trail. I wasn’t a confident biker and at the time I feared injury putting a halt to my athletic training, so we decided to come out of the forest and complete some stretches of the ride on the highway. I felt like I had failed, but this reflects a reality that sometimes you have to do the “lesser-than” version for a stretch of the journey.

Let’s say you go through an uncharacteristically busy or stressful period in your life, you fall ill or injured, or you’re just having a difficult time. The best thing to do if you are truly out of your depth is to take the easier route for a bit. This doesn’t mean stopping, but accepting you may not be hitting the targets you want and moving forward in ways that may feel less valuable, but nonetheless move you forward. If you cease to move forward because taking this “easier route” is considered failing or “not worth it”, you will stagnate and possibly give up. This has consequences - if it becomes a pattern that is repeated with other behaviour change efforts, it becomes a narrative about who you are and what happens when you try to make change and run into challenges. It’s as if a part of you remains stuck there in the woods, haunting you for not completing the task. That’s a common part of my work with people - helping them revisit and look for pathways out of those woods, breaking the narrative of “every time I try to change I fail”.

On the other hand, there are times when what appear to be obstacles are in fact not. When we were hiking around Mount Trillium, we came across an enormous pile of rocks that had blocked the trail following a landslide. I refused to continue, scared of what might happen. My husband pointed out that there was in fact an elderly couple with a small, 3-legged dog who had just clambered over and contentedly carried on their stroll. His point was that if they could do it, we probably could. I have no idea if he was right or not - we didn’t do it because it just wasn’t worth the risk to me. But this highlights the need for discernment of the true nature of an obstacle. Is it an obstacle, or is it some kind of emotional mirage posing as an obstacle?

The point of all this is that making a long-term lifestyle change like becoming more active is for a lot of people much more challenging than they anticipate, and for good reason. It seems to me that people can become more sustainably active - but they need to do a lot more digging and explore the realities of doing so. In the same way that we need an accurate map to complete an actual hike, the best way of navigating a behaviour change journey is to make sure our own cognitive maps are as accurate as possible. That way we can chart a realistic way forward.

Chloe

Psychology of Movement