Make Tough Decisions Easier
We can make making healthy decisions a bit easier by loading up on incentives and removing as many of the actions we need to take that could lead to us shying away from those good behaviors. That way we can head out each morning having already made a lot of the tough decisions beforehand.
This time of the year always inevitably reminds me that I haven’t used my road bike nearly as much as I should have over the last four months of the rainy season. Cycling in my neck of the woods definitely generates inside me such a love hate relationship: riding my bike on a cool early spring morning always sounds like such a wonderful idea while I’m cozy, warm, and dry—emphasis on the dry—in bed.
However, in the morning, in February and March, where I live, you can pretty much count on a very wet and windy ride. And hey, I’ve enjoyed plenty of great wet and windy bike rides in my life. But it takes some doing for me to be motivated enough to get into my bike clothes, pump up the tires, fill the water bottles, choose a route, and finally hop on the saddle. And of course each of those seemingly simple steps are Go/No Go battles.
What that all about really? I mean I know I enjoy cycling. I have a nice road bike that makes riding fairly comfortable. I’m in decent enough shape that I don’t really dread the huffing and puffing up hills (not much anyway). I think there’s something psychological at play here.
We know that humans aren’t very good at accurately predicting how much enjoyment, or Economists use the snooty term utility, we’ll get from doing actual behaviors. That’s part of the reason why we overeat, plan vacations we can’t really afford, forgo vacations for the sake of a bathroom remodel instead, and why I think on many rainy mornings that’ll be much happier sipping my tea watching the rain rather than battling it on my bike.
That’s also part of the reason why less than healthy behaviors are so deceptively appealing. I doubt very many people who end up being dependent on painkillers thought to themselves when they were looking at their pain managing options, “painkillers are the way to go since they’re totally healthy and never hurt anybody.” We’ve all heard the heart-breaking stories of real people being horribly hurt by these drugs, but yet thousands of reasonable people become dependent upon them every year. Why? In part because they can’t jump into their future self’s body and mind and fairly assess that living reality and their current problems with pain.
Come to think of it, there are few traits more human than rosy-tinted aspirations. And I guess we should be thankful for that because if human beings had seen their life existence in more of an objective way back when the lucky ones among our species lived past childhood but then had to deal with everything wanting to eat them and struggling to find enough food and shelter and safety long enough to pass on their genes, they very well might think twice about creating offspring that would have to get by in the same way their parents did.
Thank goodness, though, there are ways of making good decisions a bit easier to make. To take another look at my cycling example, I could leave out my clothes and biking shoes the night before. I can feel the water bottles and check the tire pressure beforehand. I can plan out my route and get excited about seeing certain things and covering a certain number of miles. If I really need reinforcements, I could ask a friend to plan to ride with me at a set time. I’ve always found it much harder to let other people down than myself, that is a sure fire way to get me out the door.
There are certainly more significant decisions we make in life than whether or not we go for a bike ride on any given day. But I’ve found that it really takes the same kind of discipline to hop in the saddle on my bike as it does to make bigger decisions easier to make as well. We can make it as easy as possible to make the healthy choice by loading up on incentives and removing the number of actions we have to make when out headspace is encouraging us to favor the easy or the status quo. And eventually the magic of good habits kick in that alleviates a lot of the constant friction with those darn Go/No Go decisions. Until then, I’ll do my best to enjoy everything I can about being on my bike this weekend, so that I can remind myself that I enjoyed it last time, so I should leave my clothes and shoes out and head out in the morning.