People with clear life goals are more likely to accept messages promoting healthy behavior. They experience less indecision regarding health advice.
Life Goals
“Life goals have shown a strong association with health in previous research. However, how life goals can promote healthy living is unknown.”
Yoona Kang of the University of Pennsylvania.
For their study, Kang and colleagues tested a theory: Making choices for good health requires less effort for those who have a clearer sense of their life goals.
According to Kang, choices for health always involve choice stress or conflicting feelings. Even simple choices like taking the elevator or the stairs. But what if people experience fewer conflicting feelings about these choices because they have a stronger underlying motive that resolves the conflicts?
Conflicting Feelings
To test this idea, the researchers recruited inactive participants who should be more physically active. These participants were required to be overweight or obese. Additionally, they must have had less than 200 minutes of physical activity in the week prior to selection.
The participants completed a survey with questions about their life goals, indicating to what extent they agreed or disagreed with expressions such as:
“I have a sense of direction and goals in my life.” Or: “I don’t have a good idea of what I’m trying to achieve in life.”
They were then shown messages promoting physical activity. Their responses to these messages were measured using an fMRI scanner, looking at regions in the brain that are typically active when people are uncertain or experience conflicting feelings.
Conflict Processing in the Brain
Participants who scored higher on the life goals questions were more likely to agree with health messages. Also, less activity was observed in the brain region associated with conflict processing.
“We conduct studies to understand how different health messages can change human behavior and why some people are more receptive to these messages than others. This research makes a nice start in explaining why people with stronger life goals benefit more from these types of messages.
Brains, Genes, and Goals
In future research, Kang wants to investigate the interactions between brain activity, genes, and life goals. She will test whether having certain genes can predict the level of synchronization between brain regions associated with reward and social sensitivity. But also whether activity in these regions can in turn predict the strength of life goals.
Living Project-Based?
Setting goals is one of the clichés of fitness. Often, we think of relatively short-term goals like losing 10 kilograms in 6 months, for example.
Setting goals ensures that you know what the desired end destination ultimately is. Keeping the end destination in mind makes it easier to decide which way to go at every fork in the road.
No goals mean no direction. Such choices then become a lot harder. After all, you don’t have a larger framework within which to place these choices.
Now, life goals are often larger and more comprehensive, but also often vaguer and more abstract. “I want to be happy,” or: “I want to be successful.” Like big projects, you can break down these kinds of big goals into sub-projects. Set objective and measurable things for yourself that make you happy or successful.
Then, when facing difficult choices, you can keep these concrete goals in mind.
References
- Yoona Kang, Victor J. Strecher, Eric Kim, Emily B. Falk. Purpose in life and conflict-related neural responses during health decision-making.. Health Psychology, 2019; DOI: 10.1037/hea0000729
