“If more information was the answer, then we’d all be billionaires with perfect abs.” – Derek Sivers

Most advice about how to get in shape or eat healthier is about what to do and the benefits of doing it. But we all know what to do, more or less: eat less sugar, move more, drink less, and sleep at sensible times, among a dozen other things that we all know we’re supposed to do. 

And we all know the benefits of doing it too, more or less: you’ll feel better, look better, and maybe live a bit longer. None of us struggle to understand that. We struggle with following through on it.

The gap between knowing and doing runs deep in human nature. Several exotic-sounding words have emerged to describe it. One of my favourites: 

Psychologists settled on a more basic name: The Intention-Action Gap, the universal problem of people failing to enact their intentions. We all have two sides to us.

Knowledge isn’t enough to stick to a training or weight loss plan. If it was enough, we’d all have sixpack abs.

Closing the intention-action gap

Every one of us has struggled with the the gap between intention and actions. It isn’t a moral failure, it’s a psychological problem. The good news is there are proven ways to close the gap. One of the most effective ways is to cultivate strategic psychology inflexibility around things that are important to you. In this case, to simply refuse to ask yourself the question: do I feel like doing this? 

What usually happens is something like this. You come up with an exciting plan to follow a new habit: “This is my time! No more excuses. I’m going for a 5-mile jog first thing in the morning every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning, minimum!” You’re excited to have this plan locked down. You wonder why you didn’t do it sooner. Everything’s going to be so much better with this new habit in your life.

High hopes 

Monday morning arrives. You’re lying in bed. The giddy high of planning is a faint echo from the past, replaced with a twinge of inner resistance as the plan collides with reality. But you lug yourself out of bed and go for the run, and afterwards you feel great! You did it!

You keep it up for a week. Two weeks. 

Then, one wet, cold and windy Monday morning, you’re lying in bed, your alarm is about to go off, and you’re supposed to lace up your runners and go for a run. But this morning you’ve got a lot to do, you didn’t sleep too well, and you feel a gnawing sense of distraction.

Self-haggling

This is where a psychological pothole looms ahead. A pothole that will knock the habit off its tracks, straight into a ditch where habits die. You let a sliver of a question enter your mind. I committed to doing this, and I’ve kept it up for a few weeks, but today it’s pissing rain out, it’s cold, I’m tired, and I’ve got a ton of things to get done. Do I really have to do this run today? 

Even if that self-negotiation lasts only a minute or two, it plants the seed of a thought: this habit is negotiable, and that you can decide on a case-by-case basis whether to follow through with it.

You need to dodge that pothole. It leads to the same ditch every time, and it’s strewn with bright hopes, broken promises, and lost potential. Not to sound too dramatic.

Two selves

The restraint bias is the tendency for people to overestimate their ability to show restraint in the face of temptation. 

Our moods and thoughts are always in flux. To draw a simplistic line down the middle, we have two sides. The “lower” self, who gravitates towards laziness and short-term thinking, and the “higher” self, who sets goals, strives to overcome hurdles, and wants to build a life to be proud of.

The lower self’s chief advantage is that it’s simply easier to follow your whims, laze around all day, and avoid difficult things. The higher self has a major disadvantage: it lives in a fantasy land. It sets plans designed for itself, forgetting that the lower self shows up all the time, like a chimpanzee gatecrashing a black-tie dinner. 

Why motivation fails 

Motivation ebbs and flows. It’s reliably unreliable. As the saying goes, “People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing. That’s why we recommend it daily” – Zig Ziglar.

So how do you “bathe” in motivation so you’re able to spring into action? How do you muster up the willpower when you’re not feeling it? You don’t. You just take the first step.

You might be thinking that this sounds too simplistic or circular, like “the secret to sticking to a habit is sticking to a habit”, akin to “the trick to successfully walking across a tightrope is to simply avoid falling”.

However, this is not the case, because there are two psychological powerhouses working in your favour when you tap into them. Knowing them makes a huge difference.

Two psychological truths and a lie about taking action

The lie is that your attitude is the only driver of your behaviour. Your behaviour creates your attitude as much as the other way around. In other words, after you’ve taken the first few steps, like putting on your runners, your state of mind changes to be congruent with your action. Don’t wait for motivation. Memory can be a saboteur here. It’s easy to forget just how dramatically your mental state changes after you take action.

And when you reframe the habit as non-negotiable, something interesting happens. You save mental energy. Pledging to a habit, using strategic inflexibility, bypasses the enormous waste of energy that comes from deliberating and fighting with yourself, including berating yourself for failing to act on your promises. 

Energy conserving machines

Using willpower and making new decisions day in and day out is taxing (psychologists call it “decision fatigue”). All mammals are in essence “behavioural economisers”, built to conserve effort unless the juice is worth the squeeze.

However, you can train your mind to override the voice of your lower self, the self that wants you swaddled in a cosy comfort zone. It starts with training yourself to develop a type of faith – a faith that even though you may not believe it in the moment, you will never regret resisting your lazy impulses. And second, making your habit easier to follow, using techniques we’ll get to a minute.

Strategic inflexibility

Just as you don’t debate with yourself whether to brush your teeth (hopefully you don’t anyway), you just do it. You’ve committed to a plan. Now it’s just about acting on it, without stopping to ponder it. You refuse to weigh up pros and cons, or hem and haw as the rain drizzles outside like a siren song of excuses.

To people who don’t know this “trick” – this psychological reframe of seeing a habit as non-negotiable – it looks like you’ve got infinite reserves of willpower. But you probably don’t. You’re just leaping over the bumpy terrain of cognitive friction – the distraction, resistance, and excuses – because you know an even better reward is waiting on the other side. 

Taking action regardless of how you feel and doing it consistently builds up momentum and gives you enormous psychological rewards. The version of you who committed to the plan suffers from excessive optimism, but this version is still wiser than the version of you that wants to slack off. 

Rewiring your brain, one choice at a time

The first step can be hard. Your inner resistance will kick up. Neuroscience shows that when people resist a craving when it’s at its strongest (including the urge to slack off), it accelerates their brain’s rewiring. This isn’t surprising. One of the cornerstones of neuroscience is that “neurons that fire together wire together”.

Taking action when you don’t feel like it reinforces the neural pathways that make it easier to keep up the habit next time.

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

All-or-nothing thinking is a thief of happiness. Thinking of actions as either a total success or a total failure leads people to think, “if I can’t do it perfectly, I won’t bother”. That will mean not bothering, because none of us can sustain perfection in anything.

Any workout is better than no workout. Five minutes beats no minutes. A missed session isn’t the end of the world but it disrupts your momentum, making it harder to take action next time. If you miss a day because life gets in the way (which it will), don’t stress, just start again as soon as possible. 

Make your daily target easier to hit than you think it should be. If you want to read more, or exercise more, or meditate more, or whatever you want, don’t commit to an hour a day, because then you’ll feel like you’ve failed when you don’t have time for the full hour. Aim for the hour but commit to just ten minutes.

If you can’t do a full gym session, then do a few push-ups or something similar instead. If you want to quit your 20-cigarettes a day habit, then a day where you smoked 19 is a win.

This applies across the board. Consistent steady progress, not daily perfection.

Environment hacking makes all the difference

If you are continually slipping into bad habits that you don’t want to be doing, or not doing enough of the good habits you want to follow, then you need to design your environment to throw friction in front of the bad habits and as little friction as possible for the good habits. It’s easy to tell yourself that you will pledge to a habit, but if your environment is at cross-purposes with that habit, following through will just be unnecessarily difficult.

Here are some of the best known techniques to do this. Feel free to pick what suits your lifestyle and add it to your arsenal to give you the best chance of closing the Intention-Action Gap: 

• Design your environment to make good habits as frictionless to follow as possible. For example, keep your gym gear in plain sight beside the door or at the end of your bed instead of buried under a pile of clothes in the closet.
• Put friction in front of bad habits. For example, if you’re spending too much time on social media, remove the apps from your phone, or use a website blocker (there are plenty of free ones), or log out each time. The extra hassle makes the bad habit less appealing.
• Use “if-then planning” to plan how you will respond in the face of obstacles. For example, “if I don’t have time for the gym today, I’ll just do a 10-minute workout at home”
• Tell people about your plans, so there’s positive pressure on you to follow through. This is psychological judo: leveraging your own embarrassment (of your peers seeing that you haven’t followed through) to counteract your lesser instincts.
• Get clarity on the precise steps you will take. This is called “implementation planning”, where you plan out where and when you’re going to perform the habit. This cuts through vague ideals (like “eat healthier”). Clarify in granular detail how you will follow through. This is energising and makes the first step easier. A lot of procrastination (maybe most) is rooted in uncertainty about the specific first steps to take.
• Use reminders – like a recurring nudge from your phone to go for a run. Sometimes, we simply forget to follow through on a habit and need a reminder.
  
• Consistently track your habit – such as marking on a calendar or journal what you’ve done and what you plan to do. Visually seeing progress helps carry you forward.
• Visualise yourself doing the habit. Neuroscientists have shown that visualising an action reinforces the same neural pathways that are activated when you take the action, making it easier to take the action when the time comes. The type of visualisation matters: visualising the outcome is a bad idea (it tricks your brain into thinking you’ve already done the work). Visualise doing the task itself.
• Start now. Don’t wait for “Monday” or “next week” for a fresh start or any other artificial delay; now is the time. Momentum takes time to build up. Telling yourself you’ll make a fresh start Monday usually just means a wasted Sunday.

This applies to any plan or habit you want to follow (including our own training plans). If you want to lose weight, or put on some muscle, or learn a new language, or drop a bad habit, or build a new skill, or pursue any difficult goal, then relying on willpower or being “authentic” to how you feel in the moment is just self-sabotage.

Know when to rest

Now, this does require a bit of common sense. If you’re ill, or genuinely exhausted, go rest. Tomorrow is another day. Your body knows. Listen to it – and you’ll learn to tell the difference between psychological resistance and a real signal from your body saying you need to rest. When you’re better, get back on track.  

Likewise, there are times to check in with yourself (saw, once a week or once a month) and review your system of habits to see if there’s anything you would tweak about it.

There is one last ingredient to this that I haven’t mentioned yet, and it might be the most underappreciated and powerful driver of behaviour.

Pride and progress

We all have an inner voice subconsciously judging us and deciding how much self-esteem to dole out based on our actions. Consistency creates mini-victories over and over, and this builds self-esteem. Eventually, when you’ve built up a consistent habit, your pride steps in and takes the wheel. Your pride will make you more self-accountable, and it will give you the emotional rewards you need to keep up the habit.

Your self-esteem becomes so tied up in the habit that it becomes unthinkable for you to pretend you “don’t have time for it” – one of those most common excuses we tell ourselves to let our egos off the hook.

This is the stuff of self-help cliches but that doesn’t make it untrue or less important: You don’t have to let a thought or emotion dictate how you behave. You can ignore your lower self and dictate your actions. Motivated? Great. Not motivated? Take a leap of faith and do it anyway. You’ll discover – or more like rediscover – that you feel great after. 

The temporary self-denial of following through regardless of your mood is repaid many times over. After all, the future version of you is benefiting, and that’s the key to a good life – acting in ways that will make tomorrow’s version of you thankful.