BY JIM BISSETT
JBissett@DominionPost.com
There’s nothing wrong with that gleaming, futuristic-looking treadmill your kids went in on to buy for you.
Back in 2019.
Now it hangs out in a corner of your spare bedroom, looking for all the world like an abandoned work station on the Starship Enterprise.
It’s not like you didn’t immediately try it out.
You hopped on, but then your one kid cranked the speed control to Heart Attack (the notch right above Pulled Hamstring) while your other kid live-streamed the event, to the eternal bliss of your cousins tuning in.
To think all this started with that New Year’s resolution noise you made leading up to it, about how your walking regimen was going to get you in shape for that 5k, which would have you running marathons in no time.
That’s the thing with New Year’s resolutions.
Most of them don’t live past January.
An economist can tell you why. Yes, an economist.
Specifically, Carlos Alos-Ferrer, the chair professor in economics at the Lancaster University Management School in the United Kingdom.
(SUBHEAD, 10-point, centered) Internal debate
Alos-Ferrer is a world authority in the field of neuroeconomics, which borrows liberally from neuroscience, psychology and economics to gauge how people (and their brains) make real-world decisions.
So, you may ask, what does this have to do with New Year’s resolutions and exercise?
As it turns out, plenty.
“When you state a New Year’s resolution, or any long-term goal, you are (metaphorically) talking to the wrong part of your brain,” Alos Ferrer wrote recently in Psychology Today.
That is, all-declarative goals – “I’m going to lose 20 pounds by June 1st,” or “I’m going to start being nicer to people,” as examples – are pre-engineered to fail.
Such goals, resolutions, the researcher noted in Psychology Today, aren’t measurable.
And if they aren’t measurable, he said, they aren’t realistic.
(SUBHEAD, 10-point, centered) Of motion and emotion
At WVU in Morgantown, Christiaan Abildso most definitely agrees.
He’s a physical activity specialist with the Family Nutrition Program at WVU Extension. Every day Abildso goes to work to help you work out better.
Be it a New Year’s resolution or a regimen you’re occasionally grappling with, make time for your workouts, he said – in whatever form they may be.
Yoga on YouTube, for one.
Another: A playlist of rockin’ songs you listen to – but only to be cranked during exercise. So you’ll have something to look forward to, he said.
“Even going up and down the stairs in your house is a good way to get your heart pumping,” the specialist points out.
Abildso echoed Alos-Ferrer in a third example.
“It might not be the wisest thing to say, ‘I’m going to get up at 5 a.m., no matter what.’ The ‘no matter what’ part is going to get in your way.”
Stay immediate – and in motion, he said.
“It’s the movement that matters,” he said. “Even if those immediate results are as simple as, ‘I feel proud for taking 15 minutes to be good to myself.’”
(SUBHEAD, 10-point, centered) Making it stick
The stating of goals, to change eating habits or outward behavior, do arrive from the “more rational, long-term oriented part of your brain,” Alos-Ferrer notes.
New Year’s resolutions, as a rule, though, he said, tend to be too in-the-moment for the brain to seriously process.
It’s the more impulsive, short-term-oriented part of the brain that gets us into trouble, he wrote.
You know, he said: Because all those habits embedded within us, even the unhealthy ones, are just too hard to reconfigure. At least all at once.
Which goes back to that business about talking to the “wrong part” of the brain, he said.
Twenty pounds by June or trying to go all-Olympics on the treadmill should turn into month-by-month increments instead, Alos-Ferrer proposes. Make it measurable to make it stick.
That way, he said, goals can be calculated and achieved, opposed to being abandoned – because they are too daunting or too many.
