Over the years of fitness and nutrition coaching, I’ve observed a curious pattern emerge when people (myself included) want to make a change or achieve a goal. It goes something like this:
First, often without conscious awareness, we develop habits that lead us to a specific undesirable outcome. One day we “wake up” and wonder how in Hell we got to wherever “here” happens to be (e.g. out of shape, in debt, on a dozen medications). So we decide to make a change.
All good so far. But now it starts to get illogical.
Instead of making a small change that’s sustainable and gradually adding to it as we mold new habits, we tend to attempt a complete 180° shift.
For example, instead of adding a ten-minute walk after dinner, we decide to quit drinking alcohol, exercise for 30 minutes every day, triple our protein intake, never eat another donut, get eight hours of sleep every night, and, and, and…
Through sheer determination and will—both of which are absolutely necessary since none of our newly adopted actions are yet normal or habitual or aligned with our identities—we’re able to stick with our new plan for a while. We might even make some progress toward our goal.
Then somewhere along the line life gets in the way, and we start making suboptimal choices and reverting back to at least some of our old habits. Even though we might realize that no one is perfect, this situation causes us to feel bad about ourselves because we “can never seem to stick to ‘healthy’ habits”. And that feeling erodes our motivation to continue putting in effort.
Alternatively, especially if we’ve made some progress, we double-down on our actions, thinking that if a little of whatever we’re doing is producing some progress then a lot more of it will produce even more progress, faster. While this might sound better than the prior situation, it often leads to burnout or, in the case of excessive training or too little food, illness or injury.
And then we start over again, usually after languishing in our inadequacies for far longer than seems appropriate. (I’m exaggerating, but perhaps only slightly.)
All-or-Nothing and Gap vs. Gain
If you recognize that you’ve experienced the pattern to some degree in the past, it’s OK. It happens to us all.
Precision Nutrition, a coaching and education provider that teaches almost as much change psychology as nutrition, calls the process of making the 180° shift and then feeling bad about not being perfect or doubling down all-or-nothing thinking.
They emphasize that while everyone is occasionally inflexible and extreme in their thinking, the tendency can be challenged by practicing continuum thinking.
In continuum thinking we intentionally compare two extremes—for example, never exercising vs. exercising for 24 hours per day or never eating a vegetable vs. being a raw vegan—and aim to move a single “‘notch’ along the continuum towards slightly more positive choices, actions, and thoughts”.
This way of thinking is not only more inspiring but also more sustainable, less stressful, and, subsequently, more likely to produce long-term results.
In a similar vein, Dr. Benjamin Hardy (an organizational psychologist) and Dan Sullivan (a strategic planner, entrepreneur, and coach) discuss the idea of gap vs. gain in their book by the same name.
They say that the gap occurs when we compare our current actions or progress to that of our ideals, which is something that even (or especially) the most successful people in any realm do. Since ideals are, by definition, not perfectly achievable, the gap often produces the same demotivating feelings as all-or-nothing thinking.
In contrast, the gain occurs when we look back at how far we’ve come from our starting point in both action and outcome. Like continuum thinking, this can produce feelings of confidence and inspiration, which lead to more consistent action and better, sustainable, long-term results.
Putting it into practice
Next week I’ll cover a practice that I’ve been using lately to more consistently implement gain or continuum thinking.
For now, spend a few minutes considering the following two questions:
- In which situations do you find yourself doing more gap or all-or-nothing thinking?
- In one (or a couple of) those situations, how many actions/practices can you think of that fall between two extremes for the given situation?
We’ll use your answers to the second question next week…