You got to know when to hold them, and when to fold them, when to walk away, and when to run
The Gamble, Kenny Rogers
How do we move into action?
Behavior Activation Therapy (BAT) is an empirically validated treatment of clinical depression. Some evidence suggests that this element is a most powerful factor in Cognitive Treatment of depression, another empirically supported treatment of clinical depressions. The essence of BAT is getting the depressed person to do more behaviors that, in the past, were experienced as pleasurable or satisfying (mastery experiences). That’s it: you just have to do more and you feel better. True, but not always useful knowledge. The essence of depression is (experienced) anhedonia and amotivation. Getting someone to do more when they are depressed is a very challenging task. Getting ourselves to do more (of what we know we should be doing) can be a challenging task. What do the theories and research on motivation tell us about understanding and addressing these challenges?
If your interested in Behavior Activation Therapy, a good introduction is: Jonathan Kanter, Andrew Busch, & Laura Raush’s Behavioral Activation: Distinctive features (NY: Routledge, 2009), part of Routledge’s CBT Distinctive Features Series. For a very applied view of BAT you might look at Christopher Martell, Sona Dimidjian, & Ruth Herman-Dunn’s Behavioral Activation for Depression: A clinician guide, 2nd ed (NY:Guilford, 2022).
Implementation Intentions
Setting a goal
- Chracateristics of “good” goals
- Specific
- Measurable (“paired with feedback”, how will you know when you have reached your goal?)
- Within zone of proximal development (not too easy/not too hard vs. “difficult”)
- Intermittent reinforcement generates the most stable behavior patterns
- Attainable/feasible (within current environment)
- Acceptable (self-concordant)
- goals and values
- Committing to a goal
- Goal commitment is the process whereby a person become set to achieve a goal, Deckers (2018) suggest that this, “implies a person’s willingness and persistent determination to expend time and effort in it’s pursuit.” (p. 356)
- He continues, “an analysis of a number of investigations supports the generalization that greater commitment means a greater expenditure of effort in trying to achieve a goal” (p. 356).
- “greater commitment is associated with a goal being more attractive and being considered more achievable.” (p. 356).
- Commitment could be measured by asking the person for a global rating, or by using the Hollenbeck, Williams, and Klein Goal Commitment Items (Hollenbeck et al., 1989a, 1989b; Klein et al., 2001):
- Goal Commitment Scale Items
- (rate each item with this scale: Strongly disagree = 1 2 3 4 5 = Strongly agree)
- It’s hard to take this goal seriously. (R)
- Quite frankly, I don’t care if I achieve this goal or not. (R)
- I am strongly committed to pursuing this goal.
- It wouldn’t take much to make me abandon this goal. (R)
- I think this is a good goal to shoot for.
- Item followed by (R) are reverse scored; for example, 1 becomes 5 and 4 becomes 2. The higher the score, the higher the level of goal commitment.
- H.J. Klein et al., 2001, The assessment of goal commitment: A measurement model meta-analysis. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 85, p. 34.
- One way to increase commitment is to publicly announce your goal, especially to significant people/groups in your life.
- Goal shielding refers to preventing other goals or behavior from interfering with obtaining your priority goal.
- Deckers (2018) suggests that goals create two sources of motivation:
- Individual set goals to , “exceed or improve upon their current state, level, position”
- People work toward goals to reduce the discrepancy between their current state and desired state
- Planning for goal attainment
- Planning for goal attainment
- Implementation intentions (if-then contingencies), the where/when/how
- Steps toward goal completion (subgoals, successive approximations)
- Anticipation/creation of “suitable occasions”
- Anticipation of obstacles and contingency plans (Plan B’s)
- Striving to make goal directed behavior “automatic” (It’s always easiest to do what you have done in past)
- Self-regulation challenges
- Getting started
- “good intentions” versus “implementation intentions”
- Recording/publicizing plans
- Set up environment-behavior links that cue behavior
- Recognizing opportunities, “limited hold” situations
- Focusing on long term effects (shifting the conflict between short
- term and long term outcomes)
- Dealing with distractions/interruptions
- Anticipating problems
- Planning for problems
- Rehearsing
- Resuming after a halt
- Engaging System 2 (deliberate consideration)
- Refocus on goal
- Resume plan
- Implementation intentions (if-then contingencies), the where/when/how
- Movement toward goal attainment, two perspectives (Decker, 2018)
- To-date perspective: how far have I come from my starting point? The beginning of the achievement process is the reference point
- To-date perspective: how far have I come from my starting point? The beginning of the achievement process is the reference point
- As we progress toward a goal, our motivation my increase from a To-go perspective but may decrease from a to-date perspective (Bonezzi et al. 2011)
- Senioritis
- Subgoals (proximal goals) may help maintain motivation
- To-date perspective: how far have I come from my starting point? The beginning of the achievement process is the reference point
- Nothing works all the time: dealing with lapses
- Lapse versus Relapse (Why it’s not a good idea to count the days since your last cigarette or the number of days in a row you have exercised)
- Motivational Interviewing: a change strategy (Miller, 1983; Miller & Rollnick 2002)
- empathy, acceptance, open listening, compassion
- because nagging, scolding, shame, berating, threatening always work so well, right?
- eliminate negative judgment, focus on desired outcomes, focus on accurate appraisal [feedback]
- Help me understand?
- What do you want? What have you been doing? How is that working out for you?
- developing discrepancy
- Avoid counter-control: empower the person (don’t give advice)
- Motivational interviewing yourself: the value of third-person self-talk (Moser et al., 2017; Orvell et al., 2021)
Reaching a goal – any problems here?
- Chose your goals careful, sometimes you reach them: “be careful what you wish for”
- After a time, you may find that ‘having’ is not so pleasing a thing after all as ‘wanting.’ It is not logical, but it is often true. Mr. Spock
- “Arrival fallacy is this illusion that once we make it, once we attain our goal or reach our destination, we will reach lasting happiness,” Tal Ben-Shahar
- The problem is that achievement doesn’t equal happiness
- Durability Bias in Affective Forecasting
- affect forecasting is our prediction of how an event (negative or positive) will affect how we feel
- The durability bias, the tendency to overpredict the duration of affective reactions to future events, may be due in part to focalism, whereby people focus too much on the event in question and not enough on the consequences of other future events. ( Wilson, Wheatley, Meyers, Gilbert, Axsom, 2000)
Goal disengagement
- Attainable and unattainable goals
- Costly goals
- Deciding if goal is obtainable (or worth the price)
Options
- Maintain effort and goal: possible frustration and emotional distress
- Maintain goal but not effort: failure and emotional distress
- Discontinue goal and effort: loss of dream and potential emotional distress & possible shift to other goals
- “disengagement . . . . is most adaptive if it leads to pursuing new meaningful goals.”
- “A psychological construct that is conceptually related to our definition of goal disengagement has been described as secondary control (Heckhausen & Schulz, 1995; Schulz & Heckhausen, 1996). Secondary control integrates different facets of self-protective processes (e.g., goal devaluation, attributions, or social comparisons; see Abramson, Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978; Wills, 1981) and refers to the idea that people control their reactions to some stressors by accommodating to them. Indeed, some processes identified with the term secondary control (e.g., goal devaluation) are virtually synonymous with what we are characterizing here as changes in goal commitment.” (Wrosch, Scheier, Carver, & Schulz, 2003a, p. 11).
People vary in how easily they can disengage from unattainable goals
- Wrosch et at., speculate that “self and personality processes” might be involved, but also point out that, “this would seem to be a question of how accurately the person can weigh available information and present and future constraints.” (p. 12). They use the example of gamblers seeing loses as “near wins” contributing to their difficulty leaving the gambling table.
- Alternative goals make disengagement easier, and the ease with which an individual can imagine possible future scenarios could facilitate seeking alternative goals.
- Costs of disengagement
- Benefits of disengagement
- “But how long is too long? Unfortunately, there is no definitive answer to this question” (Wrosch et al., p. 15).
- Wrosch et al., (2003b) discuss their results from three studies (ug students; young adults and older adults; parents of children with cancer and parents of healthy children); their general conclusions: disengagement from unattainable goals is associated with higher levels of self-mastery and lower levels of stress and depressive symptoms; reengagement with new goals predicted subjective well-being
- “the capacity to find, commit to, and pursue new goals is a protective factor that may help a person manage unattainable goals. (p. 1505).
- pro’s and con’s of having a Plan B
What are the orgins of goals
- Our text distinguished between other-assigned goals and self-generated goals
- Reeve suggests that Self-Generated Goals are presented as arising through our thinking (cognitive processing) and can be influenced by multiple sources:
- our values
- personality traits
- biological and psychological needs
- exposure to attractive role models
- Deckers discusses level of aspiration as a source of goals, “Traditionally, level of aspiration refered to a person’s desire to excel, to do better the next time, or to do better than other” (2018, p. 345), “our human nature drives us to want more or to improve, not to want less and get worse.” (p. 345).
- the idea of future selves: “individuals may visualize possible selves they would like to become and other possible selves they would like to avoid” (p. 345)
- he also discusses physiological needs, psychological needs, environmentally activated goals, and other people as sources for goals, “the goals of the group become the gpals of the individual” Ip. 348)
- Values are often seen as foundational in our development of goals. Goals that are consisten with our values tend to have fewer negative effects and lead to less conflict.
A last consideration: are we always aware of our goals?
- Decker (2018) concludes his discussion of goals by considering “Goal Achievement Without Awareness” and quotes the Roman poet Ovid (43 bce to 17 ce), “the cause is hidden but the effect is known.” He suggests that humans may not always be aware of all the events which motivate our behavior, and may attribute to thoughts or intentions responsibility for actions which are not truly the case. He presents, “Two hypotheses describe how motivation without awareness is possible.” (pp. 365-366):
- We may be unaware that a certain goal actually motivated our behavior: some views of the unconscious.
- We may be unaware that that they have selected a goal, that the goal was activated (subliminal influence); for instance, research has shown the value of an outcome can be influenced by manipulations the individual is not aware of (Baugh, et al, 2001; Aarts et al., 2008).