Struggling To Stick To A Workout Routine? Copying Your Friends Might Help

By Emily Reynolds Keeping to goals or new habits is not easy — so much so that there’s a cottage industry of life coaches, motivational speakers and stationery companies offering you tricks, hints, motivational journals and other products apparently designed to keep you on the straight and narrow. But there might be an easier — and considerably cheaper — way of doing things. Rather than trying to motivate ourselves alone, Katie S. Mehr and colleagues from the University of Pennsylvania argue in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, copying the strategies that our friends use may provide us with some much needed drive. The team asked 1,028 participants, all of whom said they wanted to exercise more, how many hours they’d spent exercising in the previous week, before randomly assigning them to one of three conditions. Participants in the “copy-paste” condition were asked to pay attention to how people they knew motivated themselves to work out, and were told they could ask them directly for strategies and tips. Those in the “quasi-yoked” control condition were told that the research team would “help [them] learn about an effective hack or strategy that motivates people to exercise” — no mention of friends. In another, simple control condition, there was no message. Two days later, participants completed a second survey, describing what strategies they planned to use in the next week to exercise more. More specifically, those in ...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Health Social Sport Source Type: blogs