Everyone who has set out to improve their health and fitness knows that consistency is key.
Most would even ACKNOWLEDGE at the outset that they ‘hope’ to be consistent.
And yet, statistics show that by March of each year gym attendance would have already dropped by 70–80% from January.
Awareness of the importance of consistency, is therefore not the problem to the global health crisis.
The problem is: the inability and failure to implement consistency.
The problem stems from that health, for most people, is just that: A concept. A blackbox. Humans want IMMEDIATE rewarding.
Concepts do not fuel dopamine and a blackbox concept cannot compete with the immediate deliciousness of eating that chocolate cake.
For non gym rats, it is difficult for the post exercise mood elevation or the body transformation effects one desires but may or may not see some time in the unknown future, to compete with the immediate comfort of relaxing on ones sofa.
Solution: A simple and powerful mental hack to promote consistency is to create visualizations of healthfulness in your brain as tangible wins with each health promoting action taken.
You create the immediate rewarding pathways feedback loop when you visualize healthfulness as an immediately tangible win with each health promoting action taken, at a cellular/molecular level.
This is how it will work:
1. engineer your own dopamine pathways activated by visualizing healthfulness as an IMMEDIATE WIN with each health promoting action taken, at a cellular/molecular level. Your brain sees this as a tangible thing. Human brain likes tangible.
2. Reinforce these dopamine pathways by performing health promoting actions over and over.
3. Boom you have consistency, and a brain REWIRED to be biased towards performing health-promoting activities and making health-promoting choices.
4. You start to feel and see a difference, healthfulness in your lives, on your body — the WIN further reinforces the neural pathways
5. Rinse, repeat the above. Sustainable healthful living lifestyle achieved.
This technique has the added benefit of minimizing or removing the friction between YOU and that health promoting activity because it minimizes the reliance on ‘willpower’ and ‘discipline.’
Now willpower and discipline are important traits, but they are incredibly taxing on neuronal energy and present as friction between you and that THING you want. When you have had a long day at work, it can be a challenge rely on willpower and discipline to haul yourself to the gym or to not eat that chocolate cake.
When you have created your own immediately rewarding pathways to performing health-promoting activies, you need not rely on the high friction mental states of willpower and discipline, that most people simply cannot reliably call on in their already busy and stressful lives.
The reason is because these activities become inherently pleasurable and rewarding in of its own, and your brain is not choosing it on the basis of some potential and intangible future outcome.
Check out the visualization strategy here in my other post.
