Ep. 49: The Intention-Behaviour Gap with Dr. Ryan Rhodes
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Many of us want to transform our lives—yet something stops us from actually doing it. University of Victoria exercise psychologist Dr. Ryan Rhodes has devoted his academic career to figuring out what prevents people from making the changes they know will improve things. He’s also an expert at the techniques that will set us up for success. In this interview with Medcan’s Dr. Jack Muskat, Dr. Rhodes provides pointers designed to help us all cross the chasm.
Guest bio:
Ryan E. Rhodes is a professor in the School of Exercise Science, Physical and Health Education, and Director of the Behavioural Medicine Laboratory at the University of Victoria. Dr. Rhodes is the Co-Editor-in-Chief of Psychology and Health, and Associate Editor of Exercise and Sports Sciences Reviews as well as the Co-Chair of the Society of Behavioral Medicine’s Theories and Techniques of Behavior Change Interventions Special Interest Group.
Links, references and highlights:
Dr. Rhodes’ Behavioural Medicine Lab: https://www.uvic.ca/research/labs/bmed/
Dr. Rhodes helped to develop the Multi-Process Action Control (MPAC) approach, which takes several decades of scientific research and synthesizes it into a framework designed to encourage the transition from intention to habit and identity. MPAC focuses on exercise but can be applied to any number of lifestyle habit types.
The MPAC blog features numerous different articles that can serve as further reading for those seeking guidance on how to bridge the intention-behaviour gap, including:
“How to Set Stellar Goals”: You have a vague intention to do something. Let’s say it’s become more active. What’s the next step? How about setting a goal? This article discusses the process of setting a goal, and what separates a good goal from a bad one.
“Want to be a Master Planner?” You’ve set a goal. This article is about the way a thoughtful approach to planning can help you achieve it.
The Intention-Behaviour Gap with Dr. Ryan Rhodes final web transcript
Christopher Shulgan: This is episode 49 of Eat Move Think, the podcast from Medcan that empowers people of all ages and cultures to live well for life. Executive producer Christopher Shulgan here, with the latest in our series on how to change.
Christopher Shulgan: This episode is all about something called the intention-behaviour gap. That's the difference between wanting to do something and actually doing it. It gets talked about a lot around the new year. Maybe you want to start working out, or eating better, or writing in your journal every day. You start out on track, and then often things get in the way.
Christopher Shulgan: Luckily, psychologists around the world have been studying this process. Their aim is to develop techniques to help someone go from an intention—I want to start running, say. To a habit, where you run three or four times a week. To ultimately, the assumption of an identity—I am a runner.
Christopher Shulgan: One of those psychologists is Dr. Ryan Rhodes, the Director of the Behavioural Medicine Laboratory at the University of Victoria. He's our guest today, in conversation with guest host, Medcan psychology team lead Dr. Jack Muskat.
Christopher Shulgan: So let's get to it. Here's Dr. Jack Muskat's conversation with Dr. Ryan Rhodes.
Jack Muskat: My name is Dr. Jack Muskat. I'm psychology team lead here at Medcan. And my guest today is Dr. Ryan Rhodes, an exercise psychologist from the University of Victoria, who studies the intention-behaviour gap. That is, what separates an intention—which is the desire to do something—from the action, the actual carrying out of that desire. Dr. Rhodes, how are you doing today?
Ryan Rhodes: I'm very well, thank you.
Jack Muskat: Great, welcome, welcome. Why don't we just start, Dr. Rhodes, with you telling us and walking us through your career a bit? You're the national expert in the science of bridging the gap between wanting to exercise and actually becoming an exerciser. So just tell us, how did you get here to this point, and I'm sure with New Year's just behind us, everybody's interested in exercising and with the pandemic around us, we want to be fit. So it's very timely that you should give us some background to what you're going to talk about today.
Ryan Rhodes: Yeah, thanks very much. So I guess my journey into this area started over 20 years ago. But I came from it as an ex-athlete myself, but someone who still struggled like the rest of us to make sure that, particularly after sports had stopped, to stay physically active. And I think when I came through my training, my interest was in health in general. And I became particularly interested in New Year's resolutions, so it's really timely that we're going to chat about that. But of course, people make decisions about various behaviours all year round.
Jack Muskat: And I think that one of the things that would interest our listeners is whether your techniques are also applicable to other areas other than exercise.
Ryan Rhodes: Absolutely. A lot of what we will talk about is very much transferable to all the types of tasks we intend to do, and sometimes don't do or fail to do. And the reasons why.
Jack Muskat: Okay, so that's good. So even though we're going to be focusing on exercise, these are generalizable to other aspects of our life. And you can point out the differences and areas of commonality. So why don't we get right into it? Tell us about exercise. A lot of us want to exercise. Can you talk a little bit about what we're up against?
Ryan Rhodes: All right. Well, let's unpack this. Trying to change your exercise patterns, that's the number one New Year's resolution. And right behind it is trying to change one's diet. So highly relevant. But what we have found in this literature is that, in any decision about in physical activity, about 50 percent of those who have that intention will struggle. When we kind of tried to divide and understand this intention-behaviour relationship, we find that there's certainly a good proportion of people who don't have the intention, and they're very successful at not doing it. So we certainly don't have an intention-behaviour relationship from the non ...
Jack Muskat: Right. Every time I have the desire to exercise, I take a nap.
Ryan Rhodes: Right. It's more like every time you have the desire not to exercise, you follow through with that.
Jack Muskat: Exactly.
Ryan Rhodes: So I think that's important to understand that that correspondence is very good in intention-behaviour relations. And so that's not the problem. The problem is when we intend to do it, there's about a 50 percent chance. Now we know that with people who are starting a new behaviour, that is much higher. So that's just everybody.
Jack Muskat: Right.
Ryan Rhodes: But when you look at a group of people who are saying, "You know, I haven't been active for quite some time, and I really would like to change this lifestyle behaviour," it's actually closer to about 70 percent. And so only 30 percent follow through. We also know that it kind of counterbalances, so we don't change our behaviour much across the population. So for those 30 percent who are successful, there's another 30 percent who have left it or have dropped it. And so there seems to be this kind of interesting back and forth around physical activity over time.
Jack Muskat: So the gap is then between the conscious decision to want to do a behaviour, and then the result that you haven't done it. And then for us, whether we're laymen or professionals, is trying to understand what happened. Why did that happen? And you're studying that space between those two outcomes: the intent and the action.
Ryan Rhodes: That's right. And what we found is that, and not surprising to some I'm sure, is that the devil is in the details. Because many of us know, these health behaviours are very good for us, and still fail. So we're looking at these intention-behaviour relations. We found that, particularly in physical activity, we have some errors of strategic approaches. And then we do have these sort of more automatic tendencies that we can chat about.
Jack Muskat: Yeah, tell us more about it.
Ryan Rhodes: Okay, great. So when we look at the strategic errors, the number one big strategic error is that we are often intending for what it can confer upon us. But what we have to do is the behaviour. So often, our intention in behaviour isn't actually matched. What we often haven't done strategically is thought around the behaviour that we have to perform, you know, five times a week. And so that detail around okay, so what does it mean about the behaviour is sometimes the first error right there. So if someone says, "I have a resolution to lose weight," that's great. But really, weight loss isn't the behavioural experience that you're going to have for five to six times a week. And so understanding that we actually have to focus more on the behavioural part of this intention. What is this behaviour going to look like for us? So that's the first one.
Ryan Rhodes: The other strategic error that we often make is we tend to be sort of aversive to dropping things in our life. You know, aversive to losing some of our things in our life. So we want to add all the time. So I mean, I always imagine thinking of your utility belt, of all the things you're trying to do in a day. And you're trying to add exercise without considering all the other things you're trying to do in a day. And so intention to engage in regular exercise or change your healthy eating patterns often have—they have an impact on our other goals. And so looking at things like how we're going to reconcile discrepant goals if we have conflicts within these goals, is something that we often don't work through. Because, you know, we often are already at a time crunch in life. And so this type of thinking is going to lead to problems when we go to execute the goal.
Jack Muskat: Right, right. So the first thing is that we're not clear on what our goals are, we're looking at the outcome. You know, I want to be a great athlete, or I want to be a great, great musician, or I want to lose 50 pounds and look great, but we don't really focus on the behaviours, which is where we're not clear on the goals. And the second piece that you're saying, if I understand it correctly, is that we have contradictory feelings about what we're going to have to give up to do this, or we don't make time for it. So, you know, I want to be fit, but I don't want to stop eating french fries. You mean, I'm never gonna be able to eat pizza again? And so that fear, that scarcity or loss aversion that we feel gets in the way of our goal. And then what's the third thing that relates to that?
Ryan Rhodes: Yeah. The other factors tend to be more of our automatic tendencies which, in the cognitive area of psychology, I mean, it's been around for a long time, the notions of habits and approach-avoidance tendencies. And we know that these are very primal, primitive brain-type, behavioural motivations.
Jack Muskat: Right.
Ryan Rhodes: We approach pleasure and avoid displeasure. I mean, it's just a survival instinct, right? It's a basic instinct that is a basic primal drive state. And taking the body out of rest is not all that pleasurable. What we all can agree with with physical activity and exercise is that, after it's done we feel great. When we show the variability curves around that, there's no question about that. Everyone feels great. But what we can't agree upon is how we feel during physical activity. And unfortunately, we've shown that that feeling is really the priming of that motivational system. And so, no matter how much you have these goals, you're going to have this pull, this sort of below your your cognitive approach to hey, I really should do this, you're going to have this pull away from something that's going to be unpleasant.
Jack Muskat: I'm thinking of running. You know, I didn't like running. And I said if I didn't have to run, and I could still be fit I would be. But then I found the pleasure of running once I stuck at it enough, because it started to create its own reward system and change different feelings that I had around the activity. Is that sort of what you're getting at? Or am I misreading it a bit?
Ryan Rhodes: No, it's exactly what you're getting at. Because, I mean, we do have tactics, once we chat about what the issues are, we can chat about how to overcome them, or at least to attempt to.
Jack Muskat: Okay, so maybe we should get into that a little bit, because I think that this is what I think challenges us, that we don't know why we're not doing what we say we're doing. And we're sort of in that dark space where we just don't understand what's going on.
Ryan Rhodes: Right. Right. Evolutionarily-speaking, we want to conserve energy. It takes a lot more cognitive resources to become active than to sort of sit around. And this was a survival component, because when food was scarce, you wanted to use your energy and your movement to in order to maximize your efficiency. And so we might be fighting uphill a little bit on these types of things. And so that's important to recognize. So as we sort of move toward what can we do about it, the first thing we have to think about is that we need to strengthen whatever is going to help us with the repeated selection of something like physical activity or healthy eating, and try to counter those instincts that we know are going to come because that's who we are, that are going to ask us to deselect this, okay? So then we can talk about why this happens, and what to do about it.
Jack Muskat: It's a great segue into what I would call the planning piece, because if our biological evolutionary instinct is to, rather than outrun the lion, it's better to hide and then maybe take a nap, then we have to get out there and do something that stretches us and takes us out of our comfort zone, that that's just temporary. But in order to continue and get through that barrier, we need to plan and we need to do things that will help us do that. And I think that is what I think you've discovered in your research.
Ryan Rhodes: That's exactly right. I think awareness of this helps, because then it provides the backdrop for okay, what do we need to do about it? When it's a vague plan, it's not likely to be executed.
Jack Muskat: Right.
Ryan Rhodes: And so when you think of things like that: outcome goals versus the behavioural goal confusion, or multiple priorities, planning and setting down an action plan is going to help cut through that. It's going to help pin us down and say, okay, when are we going to do that? What are we going to do? How are we going to do it? And it really needs to be scheduled, much like we would any other occupational-related factor, particularly when you're starting.
Jack Muskat: So take us through an example. And I think given the fact that we're all experiencing limited movement during this period, maybe walking would be an example that we could focus on. So let's say I want to get out and start increasing my exercise through that. How would I start that if I've always been sedentary, or how can I increase it? Or how would your model then fit in?
Ryan Rhodes: Yeah. Walking is a great example, because it's low cost. It seems, as you said, one of the only ones we can do right now. And it's very good for our health. And so I think that's a great example. So an example with walking would be to look at the behaviour itself and say how would we like to fit walking into our day? So we want to make it pleasant. So are there certain places we could go to walk that are actually going to be pleasant? We want to help with our health, so we want to have it around that type of moderate physical activity that's in many ways the best for our health, which is just around where we can still talk to people if we were out on a walk, but feel like we're actually exerting some energy expenditure. And so we want to do it not too hard, because that's that approach avoidance thing.
Ryan Rhodes: We've shown that if you exercise too hard when you're starting, then that sort of below awareness motivation is going to kick in and go, whoa, we don't want to do that again. Even if you're telling yourself let's do it again. So we want to have it comfortable. We want to start with a comfortable walk. So that's really important to plan for. And then we want to look at ways that can make it useful. So this is, again, that multiple goal issue. So, for example, walking to the grocery, walking for some form of function could be very useful for people, so that you're actually achieving two goals at once. Another example would be maybe walking as a form of social. So at least here in BC, we're allowed to go out in walks to meet friends and family and things like that. So this is a way to actually achieve two aims. So you're getting healthy while you're having social time, and it can make it more fun too, of course, because socializing is a fun thing to do.
Ryan Rhodes: So we have to think around the plan, around the behaviour, to make the behaviour as appealing as possible, both from a point of view of making it functional within one's life, so that you can't just reject it. So if you're walking to the market, it's a good choice if you can do that. Walking in a nice area, and then maybe bringing things into that walking behaviour that make it more than just walking on your own.
Jack Muskat: I think that's great. And I think that I would also add—and I have a kind of question and then a comment, because your research also brings up something very interesting around identity, but I'll save that for a second. But one of the things that I find remarkable, and maybe for those of us who live in colder climates is that now that it's getting colder, people say, "Well, I don't want to walk. It's too cold." And my neighbour who's out every day with his dog says, "Just wear a warmer coat." And so I'm thinking of how we're all so smart and rational and, you know, we're so good at our jobs and what we do and what we think about and how we solve problems, but we will be deterred by the slightest thing like I don't have proper boots or I don't have a coat. And does that tie into any aspect of your program in terms of where does it fit into the intention action gap? Because it seems silly. If it was our children, we'd say, "Well, you know, you've got to dress warmly. You have to dress for the conditions." But for ourselves, we'll use any excuse to get out of it. Can you tell me what's going on there?
Ryan Rhodes: So yeah, it's a great point. So this is often these automatic tendencies kicking in. And finding a way to rationalize—that isn't really rational—ways to get out of it. And so what we need to do is be aware of that and find ways to plan around that. So one of the ones that comes up for many people, of course, is, you know, a lack of energy or being tired at the end of the day. And so it's not surprising perhaps that more successful exercisers or people who are sticking to it are ones that are doing it closer to the morning.
Jack Muskat: Mm-hmm.
Ryan Rhodes: It doesn't mean that you have to do that. The way we work is often saying where do you have the most energy?
Jack Muskat: Right.
Ryan Rhodes: You know, so some people are night people, and that's fine. And so pick that time and guard it for physical activity, so that you can counter the automatic influences that are going to say, I need more cognitive resources. You want to go when you have the most resources. And so that's really important.
Jack Muskat: That's a brilliant, brilliant insight. Because when we do our cognitive behavioural therapy, so much of what I'm dealing with around cognitive rigidity, that we're so unwilling to give up our habits—whether they're good or bad—to say, well, I need to exercise now, but I'm dead tired. Well, why don't we build in a time when your energy is better, or when you don't have other distractions? And then that creates a reward so that you're not feeling as exhausted when you have to do something.
Ryan Rhodes: Right.
Jack Muskat: I wanted to link that to the idea that once you get out there and start doing it enough times, when does it start to sink in that you are a walker, or you are a skier, or you are a runner? And that identity piece, I think, is critical in terms of our self-identification and the rewards that we need to give ourselves internally and psychologically to make us feel that we are a different person.
Ryan Rhodes: Yeah, it's a great point. We've researched two of these automatic type motivations that actually can help with physical activity. Now they do take time as you point out, but one is the formation of habits. You spoke a little bit about bad habits, but this is the formation of a good habit. And then the other is the formation of an identity. And both of these act in ways that help counter. They're almost like these counter-measures to these normal tendencies that we have to avoid physical activity. So in terms of a habit, the idea here of a habit—I mean, habit gets confounded with the word "behaviour" a lot.
Jack Muskat: Yes.
Ryan Rhodes: But a habit is actually a psychological phenomenon where a behaviour than is repeated in the presence of a cue, you know, it goes back to the very early sort of Pavlovian conditioning type work. And it's a variant of that, where if you engage in a behaviour repeatedly around the same cue, eventually the cue can actually drive some motivation toward the behaviour. Now no one's going to suggest that something as complicated as physical activity or eating is ever going to be completely automatic. But we do have evidence that those who engage in routines eventually do not require the same level of motivation as those who are always trying to do it in a different format.
Jack Muskat: Right.
Ryan Rhodes: And so developing habits by developing routines around cues, can help alleviate and actually counter some of those original instincts not to do it. So, for example, a morning walk or a walk after dinner is something that people find much more easy to regulate, and eventually are doing—they have that kind of selection bias, if you were, to do it, because it feels almost unnatural not to do it. And then people who are taken out of their routines feel like it's so hard to get back in. And again, that's because the cues are missing.
Jack Muskat: Right. And we're told that takes about six to eight weeks. I'm quoting from Charles Duhigg's book on the Power of Habit. And he speaks of the research you've just told us about around the cues. That if you're going on that walk, and the day before you had a good walk in the morning or in the evening, you're going to remember that good feeling you had which is going to then be a cue for you to go on the walk today. And that kind of builds a behaviour and a positive habit on top of another. Does it make sense to say that one good behaviour leads to another good behaviour if you just keep doing it?
Ryan Rhodes: It does. And I fully agree with that, and we've shown that even in the physical activity domain as well. And that's why I sort of started with, when you're planning your behaviour, before these habits form and everything, make sure you're thinking about the most pleasant and enjoyable type of action that you can, because we do know it's very difficult to form a habit on something you don't like. The dread will come back, and you'll start thinking about it, and then you have to try and use willpower to overcome your feelings about it and things like that. So when you're—for habit formation, a pleasant experience is going to be very important. And it's related to how fast you can habituate something. So we've done research on this and it found, just as you said, about six weeks is the holding point. It's not a magic point. I mean, some people can habituate something much faster, and some people continue to struggle. Some of it's around how complicated the behaviour is, but ultimately, six weeks is a nice target point that these other types of drive systems of habituation start to kick in, and it just gets a little bit easier.
Jack Muskat: All right. So you were talking earlier, Dr. Rhodes, about identity, and how that is also a critical part of the whole intention-action cycle. Can you tell us a little bit more about that identity piece and how that's critical to maintaining the habit?
Ryan Rhodes: Yeah, yeah. So like habits, identity takes a while to form. But what we have found is that when people move from their categorization to someone who says, "I exercise" to "I am an exerciser," so it becomes a personal categorization, there's a shift at that point in motivation. And what happens is, we as human beings will work very hard to maintain the standards that we have set for ourselves. So when we personalize it and aren't doing it, that actually creates quite a bit of stress. So it actually creates some of the same types of stresses that are below our feelings, where they're sort of shame and feelings of self-guilt. But in this way, it's trying to motivate us to get it done. Because we really don't like to be in that state of cognitive dissonance.
Jack Muskat: Right.
Ryan Rhodes: And so identity acts as a self-regulating mechanism to keep us on track. So if you see people out there, and you look and you say, "Well, that's an absurd environmental condition," and they're out for a run. It's likely that's what's driving the person is that identity. "I'm a runner, and I'm going to get this done. And I'm going to feel good because I did what I have self-categorized myself as doing." And so that can become a very powerful motivational drive system that can counter some of these initial automatic tendencies. And so it almost kicks in. We call it a reflexive factor because it will kick in when there's a discrepancy, and help motivate people to get it done.
Jack Muskat: So I think what you're saying is if we broaden our self-image to say things like, when you're offered all this junk food, "I just don't eat like that anymore." Or "I don't drink because I'm not a drinker," you personalize it. And then in a way, you're also standing outside of the crowd and you're finding that that's rewarding in itself because you're now invested in your own image, which is technically congruent with what your behaviour is. Whereas before, when you were not eating properly or not exercising, you didn't see yourself as an exerciser or as a successful person. Because psychologically, you're building confidence through these behaviours and actually attaining a new level. You know, we work very much around peak performance, we all want to improve. This is a way of improving through ensuring that those habits and routines will lead to a better you or a better self-image. And then you use that to maintain the behaviour so that, from what you're saying, it's operating on an emotional level, on a cognitive level, on a behavioral level simultaneously. And that then strengthens the predictability that you're going to keep doing it.
Ryan Rhodes: That's absolutely what's going on. And your point around diet and alcohol is an interesting one, because identities often involve rules and labels. You know, so someone will say "I'm a vegetarian." There's a very specific rule set around that.
Jack Muskat: Right.
Ryan Rhodes: And that helps to form identities, having priorities around what to do. And in our lab, what we've looked at is even asking someone to put their life out on a chalkboard, so to speak, or a virtual board, and then reorganize it as to what your most important priorities are, and then follow those in terms of your goals. And it helps to reset the identity. And where does physical activity sit in terms of who you think you are, and where you want to be?
Jack Muskat: What's interesting in terms of our Eat Move Think podcast, was that so much of what we're doing is so interdisciplinary. It's dealing with our physiology, it's dealing with our psychology, our social attitudes, our belief systems. And that we can't just take any one piece and say, "I'm going to do something at a cognitive level without understanding the underlying behavioural and physiological systems that are operating simultaneously. And that's why I see this whole movement to a holistic view of not just preventative health, but everyday living, that you have to feed each part of it, metaphorically and literally. And make sure that they're aligned so that, you know, if we're eating the right food, then that's going to give us the kind of physiological boost that's going to allow us to do the behavioural things that are going to make us feel more confident and more productive and happier. And I think as we wrap up our session, are there any other thoughts you have that perhaps you'd like to leave our listeners with that we didn't express or that you'd like to reformulate?
Ryan Rhodes: I think it might be helpful to reformulate sort of three maybe takeaways from what we've been chatting about, and some of the work we've done. The first one would be that changing behaviour is not easy. So anyone who says, you know, "Three easy steps to success" is dramatically simplifying the process. We actually may have lots of things going on in our lives, and even some endogenous primal drive states that are trying to help derail what we're trying to do. So recognizing that changing a lifestyle is a lifelong journey. And so that's important to recognize. So when someone says, "I'm going on a diet," that's going to suggest that they're going off a diet. And so we want to say this is a lifestyle change. The other is that pay attention to the behaviour itself, and don't worry so much about the outcomes that may have been the reason to start the change. Because it's the behaviour that's going to derail you if you don't focus on making that as pleasant as possible and as easy to do as possible. And not the outcomes. Those are just a consequence of doing that behaviour.
Ryan Rhodes: And the last is to hold the course. You know, there's no magic six weeks, but there does appear to be really good news after about six weeks, that we start to form identities and we start to form habits if we practice a certain way that can help overcome those original motivations that were kind of derailing our intentions.
Jack Muskat: Okay. Well, thank you, Dr. Rhodes. This has been a wonderful interview. You've left us with lots of great things to remember. And here's hoping that we've helped some of our listeners to go from people who harbour the desire to improve their lifestyles, to people who have actually done it. And in so doing, have closed the intention-action gap. Thank you again.
Ryan Rhodes: Thanks very much.
Jack Muskat: Bye now.
Ryan Rhodes: Bye.
Christopher Shulgan: That's it for this episode of Eat Move Think. Thanks to psychology team lead Dr. Jack Muskat for hosting. I'm Christopher Shulgan, the show's executive producer. And the guest was Dr. Ryan Rhodes of the University of Victoria.
Christopher Shulgan: We post highlights and the episode transcript at eatmovethinkpodcast.com, including a link to some of the resources Dr. Rhodes's lab has posted about bridging the intention-behaviour gap.
Christopher Shulgan: Eat Move Think is produced by Ghost Bureau. Senior producer is Russell Gragg. Social media support from Emily Mannella. Editorial direction from Chantel Guertin.
Christopher Shulgan: Remember to rate and subscribe to Eat Move Think on your favourite podcast platform. We'll be back soon with a new episode examining the latest in health and wellness.
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