A Crucial Ingredient For Making Lasting Change

Change can be hard.  It is easy to get complacent in life or simply become “stuck”.

To make lasting change, it is important to figure out what you want and why you want it.  The “why” is the hard part, as it needs to be meaningful and impactful to you.

A study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (Falk et al., 2015), decided to lead people through a self-affirmation exercise before scanning people’s brains after they were given typical advice about the health benefits of exercise.

The self-affirmation exercise simply involved thinking about things that are important to you (e.g., family, religion, etc.).  Finding your “why”.

After completing this exercise, researchers measured activity in the Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex. This area of the brain helps to determine if study participants took the advice about exercise to heart.

Results showed that not only did people in the self-affirmation group “take the advice to heart” but they also exercised more than the group who didn’t do the self-affirmation exercise.

Take Home Message

When it comes to making change, finding your “why” is crucial.  It is also wise to review your “why” consistently to help ingrain this message.

Bonus tip

Whatever goal you are after, try to stay the course for 66 days. Recent research shows that it takes an average of 66 days to form a new habit (not 21 days as is oftencited).