Health
How Much Work Is Needed to Maintain a Positive Health Habit?
Holding onto something requires much less effort than you needed to pick it up.
Posted September 15, 2022 Reviewed by Lybi Ma
Key points
- Changing behavior requires effort to overcome inertia.
- Maintaining a change requires much less effort than what was needed to achieve the change itself.
- The key to maintaining change is the intensity of our efforts.
Change is hard. Turning any change into a constant is harder still. There is quite a bit of evidence that human behavior can be modified through interventions but how sustainable any changes are is harder to quantify.
Bodies at rest can be put in motion
Exercise, health, fitness, and active living are all areas where there's considerable interest in behavior change because a lot of us could benefit by increasing our physical activity levels. It takes a lot of work to get stronger, faster, and better at things. Getting skill, in other words, is hard. Our bodies are kind of thrifty and a bit reluctant to change. There is a threshold we have to exceed when we gain ability or skill. Importantly, much less work is needed to keep training effects.
When it comes to physical activity and capacities like strength or endurance there has been an exploration of the idea of the "minimum dose" needed to maintain or preserve. Barry Spiering with colleagues in Spain and Chile reviewed the exercise science literature to see if there was any consensus on the frequency, volume, and intensity of activity necessary to keep what you worked so hard to get.
They found that endurance performance can be maintained when training frequency is as little as two times per week even with a reduction in overall volume by ~50 percent even to only 20 minutes per session. The key is that the intensity of the activity, for example as measured by heart rate, is maintained.
Both size and strength of muscle can be maintained with as little as one session per week and one set of each exercise. Again, though, the intensity (the weight used) has to be maintained. In older folks, two sessions and two sets might be preferable. Overall, the key to maintenance is maintaining exercise intensity.
Brains and behavior are more reluctant
In health psychology, maintenance of behavioral change is of major interest due to the high drop out. I reached out to Dr. Ryan E. Rhodes, professor of Behavioral Medicine at the University of Victoria to ask about any equivalent studies in psychology. He told me that there isn't something that's a direct analogue, but that the closest psychological construct "would probably be habit, cue-based responses formed by behavioral repetition in contextually similar conditions."
In the study of habit formation, the overriding theoretical model is called dual-processing, "where we have both type 1 (automatic, fast, reflexive) responses and type 2 (slow, conscious, reflective) responses that drive behavior." We can think of most of our behaviors as type 1 because this requires less executive function and cognitive resources. When we want to add something, "getting people to form habits is a way to reduce the type 2 burden of behavioral performance—so in essence, this creates a minimal dose of self-control (cognitive resources)".
Rhodes also told me that "Current research tends to show there are two key types of habits. Instigation habits help with the automatic selection of a behavior over other possible choices by priming toward action (an automatic selection bias) and execution habits assist in the actual repetition of a behavioral sequence, like going for the same bike ride due to cued environmental prompts, as your mind wanders to other thoughts."
It takes less to keep more
A good image to have your head about maintaining a change is to think about pushing a heavy object up an incline like a grassy hill. It takes a lot of effort to get the object moving, and it's initially "reluctant" to change its position. But once you get it going and keep pushing you can move it to where it needs to be. Once you stop pushing it takes relatively little effort to keep it where it is resting. You just have to push against it relatively lightly compared to the effort it took to get it to that point.
But if you don't push on it at all, it will slowly slip back down the incline. It doesn't go all the way to the bottom immediately and perhaps it never will. This is the way to think about behavior change. It takes a lot of work to achieve but less to maintain. And if you're trying to increase your fitness in certain domains it takes a lot of effort to push it to someplace else on that incline and again much less effort to hold it there. The key is to go from a mindset of what it takes to acquire a certain fitness goal, into what it takes to maintain that same fitness level. And it's much much less.
Any kind of behavior change is a kind of journey towards a different future you. Some 2500 years ago, the Chinese sage and founder of Taoism Lao Tzu said a journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step. Whenever we think of adding something to our daily lives in a change of behavior we should keep this in mind. The key is to just take steps towards something but if we incorporate the idea of intensity, every now and again we need to do some skips and jumps on that journey.
(c) E. Paul Zehr (2022)
