145 How to Change: External vs Internal Motivators
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Henry: Hello, I'm Henry Emmons and welcome to Joy Lab.
Aimee: And I'm Aimee Prasek. Here at Joy Lab, we infuse science with soul to help you build your resilience and uncover your joy. Today, we are talking about external and internal motivators when it comes to changing behaviors. And we've done several episodes around behavior change, early this year. And I'll put some, ~uh,~ links in the show notes to those episodes.
I think they're fantastic! Gives us some juice for this one as well. We've [00:01:00] kind of like hinted at this topic broadly, but I wanted to shine a light on it because I think it's really important. It's kind of fun. ~So,~ It's a lot of fun. I love this stuff. ~So, external and internal motivators are really the rewards or reasons to achieve something or complete something that are provided.~
~Oh no, I said in trans, uh, I'm going to start that over. Sorry. If Ellie edits this, also, we wanted to start using her name if we want to take anything out, and then she'll search it. Okay. Ellie, I'm starting that over. All right. ~So external or extrinsic motivators are the rewards or reasons to achieve something, ~uh,~ or complete something that are provided by an outside force.
And then internal motivators, those arise from within. ~Um,~ You want to do something because you want to do it. That's that intrinsic or internal motivation. Not to impress someone else or fit in, but because it matters to your own being. Now, ~Um,~ I'm not setting that up to say external motivators are all bad, uh, and we'll talk a little bit about that as well, but when it comes to meeting our wellbeing-related goals, our resilience goals, our joy goals, I'll just give a little cliff notes version right now.
External motivators are insufficient in and of themselves. [00:02:00] We need internal motivation as well.
Henry: Yeah, that makes sense the way that you phrased that and I'll add that I am not opposed to using external motivators not at all. When they work. But I do think it helps to put them into context. ~I,~ I say this often, but much of our biology is really devoted to motivation. And there's a simple reason for that, I believe, which is evolution. Our survival depends on our motivation. And so does the passing along of our genes, which is what drives a lot of evolution. And this is powerful. And then when it is in play, we may act primarily out of instinct, ~you know,~ just this instinctual drive to survive. But this gets complicated [00:03:00] because we live in such a different world from our ancestors.
And so what is instinctual might not actually be in our best interest So food, for example, this is a good example. We are wired to just get as much energy as we can with as little effort as we can possibly put forth. And that is not so good for us in today's world. Because most of us can take in just a ton of simple carbs so easily.
It gives us energy, right? And with almost no effort. So you can see the problem that lies in just relying solely on our wiring. So I think when it comes to motivation for what is best for our wellbeing, we've got to be pretty smart about this. We've got to be a little more clever than our instinctual selves, if you will.
External motivators are one [00:04:00] way to work around our built-in biology. ~So,~ For example, being paid not to eat as much, or something. And sometimes these help us, and sometimes they don't.
But ultimately, we're in charge of our own motivation. And I think it really pays to consider how much of it is coming from within us, how much from outside of us, and is that balance really working for us?
Aimee: Yeah. I, ~ ~I'll just, quick story. Um, my daughter, my five year old, we were on a walk down our road and it's like, it's like a circus on this road next to us. There's kids everywhere. I don't always like going down that road because there's too many kids,
Henry: Hehehehe
Aimee: but my daughter loves going down that road. So we went down that road and ~um,~ there was a parent near us.
And their five year old was at the far end of the road, not listening, heading toward the busy road. And [00:05:00] the parent, told the brother, Go, go get your sister. Tell her she'll get a piece of candy if she comes back. I was like, that is a great external motivator. Sure enough, he raced down there, told her she'd get candy, and back she came.
And it was, you know, safety first. Candy, she was safe. I thought that was good. I know, so sometimes external motivation like that was very good. Bribing children, your children, to follow directions at times I feel like is skillful parenting. ~But let's,~ we'll do a pivot here and get back to the heart of this.
~Um,~ So there's this really interesting study that I want to talk about that has to do with financial incentives for weight loss. And it, I think it really highlights how external motivators, like you said, Henry, can be good, also not so good. So this is a classic study that kind of fueled, really, the employer well being models [00:06:00] around external motivators.
And also, I think, ~um,~ that biggest loser show. I think they, I don't know if they put any research, but if they did, they pulled from this study. ~Uh,~ So briefly, let me explain the key bits. 57 participants were randomized into three groups, and now all three groups followed the same weight loss plan. But they had different incentives, or at least two of them.
So there was one control group who had monthly weigh ins and just followed that weight loss plan. Then there's two incentive groups that follow that weight loss plan, monthly weigh ins as well, ~uh,~ but they had different incentives. So, one could win money based on their monthly weight loss, kind of like a lottery drawing if they lost the weight they could win a certain amount of money. The other group would pay money up front and then they'd get their money back if they lost weight.
So, I'll let Henry off the hook [00:07:00] here, listeners, because I feel like I
Henry: I'm never right on this.
Aimee: so, listening, those of you listening, which group do you think did the best after four months, four months of this weight loss program?
The one without any incentive, the ones who could win money, or the ones who got their money back? I'm just going to tell you now. It was the incentive groups. They did the best. And it was the group who had the chance of winning money that did the very best. So you can see, this is where creators of The Biggest Loser, perhaps, and all those payment focused wellbeing programs, or ~sort of~ even those point focused wellbeing programs, same concept.
They stopped reading the rest of the study, though. It looked great. You pay people. They complete the goal. Done. Alright, so, all of those participants came back three months [00:08:00] later. And they did another weigh in. Now, guess who was doing the best at that point? They'd finished the weight loss program, then three months later they come in for weigh ins.
Who was doing the best? The control group. They're group that had no external incentive. They had no external motivator provided by the study. Fascinating. So there's, there's actually a lot of science to support why this happened. But here, let's dig into it a little bit more. So since this study, there really has been more research specifically looking at ~Um,~ these same strategies of financial incentives to change behaviors, and the results are mixed, but there does seem to be something that is more clear, or a few things that are more clear, and ~that's,~ I'll name a few of them.
The first is that financial incentives for boring tasks can be very effective. It can increase the completion for [00:09:00] tasks. ~Um, you know. Um,~ If you yourself maybe just hate cleaning the toilet, if you gave yourself a dollar or two bucks for every time you cleaned the toilet, you would probably clean the toilet. So that can be helpful. Now second thing I want to note, financial incentives for wellbeing related goals can be effective for folks who really need the money. So when that money will immediately sort of go for things like necessities. Paying people to meet wellbeing goals can be very effective in that case.
Now, on the other side of that, folks who do have enough money for necessities like food, rent, mortgage ~you know,~ the basic living necessities, then financial incentives for wellbeing-related goals can backfire. And that's what happened in this study, and that's what we see across a lot of studies. This is sometimes referred to as the over justification or the undermining effect. [00:10:00] Which means the incentive can actually strip away our internal motivation for something.
I'll give an example that maybe folks can relate to. Let's say you start baking these elaborate cookies for fun. It's meditative for you, the measuring, mixing, decorating. And then someone tells you, these are so good, you have to sell them. So, you're like, yeah, that's a good idea. Open up a side hustle where your baking now becomes a bit of a transaction.
You bake a cookie, you sell it for money. So that money, that external motivator, can start to overshadow what was once your inner motivation of loving to bake. Suddenly, if you're not making the money, then you're not enjoying the baking.~ So that's kind of this undermining or this over justification effect.~
~I'm going to start that sentence over.~ So that's the undermining or over-justification effect. The external motivator begins to strip away the internal motivation. Same thing goes for veggies. There's a good study around this. I'll give an example here. Let's say I pay you [00:11:00] 15 dollars for every day that you eat two cups of veggies daily.
It works. You will eat more veggies if I pay you. But then I stopped paying you. And will you still eat those veggies? Studies on this say no, and get this. You'd actually eat less veggies when I stopped paying you, compared to someone who had set the goal themselves, with the internal motivation fueling their mission to eat more vegetables, to eat two cups of veggies a day. So that's the undermining effect.
Henry: So I'm going to guess that this isn't just about eating more veggies day, although that would be a good thing to do
Aimee: Right.
Henry: And, you know, there are a thousand choices like this that we face every day. And, of course, none of us make the best choice every single time. But why wouldn't we? You know, if it's in our best interest, ultimately. Why [00:12:00] wouldn't we? We know full well that this would be healthiest for us, why don't we just do it? So, we talked earlier about the power of evolution, ~you know,~ where we're wired to behave instinctually in ways that serve us, but often we don't behave that way. And in today's really complex world, our survival instinct is just not as reliable of a guide. So we don't want to put our instincts in charge of our lives. There's also another powerful biological force that I think is in play here, too, and that's called homeostasis. And most people have heard this term have a sense for what it means. Basically, I think of it as when it comes to physiology that the body is designed to keep things as they are.
To stay in some kind of an equilibrium, whether or not [00:13:00] it's a healthy equilibrium that we're in. So in other words, however things are, we're designed for them to ~kind of~ stay that way, good or bad. So we tend to be resistant to change, even at a biological level. And I think that this may at least partly explain why it's so hard for us to create new habits, even the ones that are good for us. You know, little things aren't so hard to do. Maybe, like even eating two cups of veggies a day, not so terribly hard, but if you, any of you, have tried changing the really big, long standing patterns of your life that you think would make a huge difference, you know how hard it is to do. So one thing that we believe in here at Joy Lab is what we call the 51 percent rule.
And again, that means you don't have to be perfect about any of this, but so long [00:14:00] as you're making the choice that is better for you, more than 50 percent of the time, well, you're moving toward a healthier and hopefully happier life. And especially if that motivation comes from within. I think your examples were just really great, Aimee, that external motivators come and go.
You know, they're not reliable. They're not lasting. And we, we want to create something that is lasting and reliable. Something we can carry with that doesn't change just because things around us have changed.
Aimee: Yeah, I'm thinking too with, you know, the 51 percent rule, 51 percent internal motivation, maybe 49 percent external too. I mean, it goes in that capacity as well, this idea that there's, find a little bit more of that internal or intrinsic motivation to [00:15:00] fuel ~Uh,~ a change in behavior. It doesn't have to be everything, but it needs to be something like you said, Henry, because external motivators, they come and they go.
When they're taken away if you've got like couple percent more internal motivation,~ um,~ that can make a big difference. And a reminder too, to not be so hard on ourselves. I think that grace, that self acceptance, that self compassion creates the space for us to tap into internal motivation. It's that curious paradox that Dr. Carl Rogers expressed when he said, "the curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I change." There's that intrinsic motivation, self acceptance. So to close, actually I want to read the beginning of that quote. It's from his book, ~um,~ titled On Becoming a Person, A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy.
I think it's liberating wisdom when it comes to motivation and [00:16:00] creating change in our lives. So ~here's what he,~ here's what he wrote. " I find I am more effective when I can listen acceptantly to myself and can be myself. I feel that over the years, I have learned to become more adequate in listening to myself so that I know, somewhat more adequately than I used to, what I am feeling in any given moment.
One way of putting this is that I feel I have become more adequate in letting myself be what I am. It becomes easier for me to accept myself. As a decidedly imperfect person, who by no means functions at all times in the way in which I would like to function. This must seem to some like a very strange direction in which to move.
It seems to me to have value, because the curious paradox [00:17:00] is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I change." ~I love that.~
~That's very good.~
~Alright. ~
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