Why is it so hard for us to succeed at our goals? Why is it that every first of January we set new goals, and a lot of those goals, for the majority of people, are related to health and fitness. The problem isn't necessarily our motivation because even when we're motivated, we still struggle.
What we've discovered is that part of the problem is the way that we look at the world around us and we don't realise it. We don't realise that our eyes that we think are telling us the truth about the way the world really is are actually part of the problem for why we're not walking enough or we're not running as far as we like, or we're letting go of our goals before we've accomplished them. In the course of trying to understand what is it about our eyes that are part of the problem, I talked with a bunch of Olympic athletes. I asked these Olympic athletes, some of the world's best runners: 'What are you looking at when you're racing to the finish line?' I thought they would be, sort of, master consumers of their visual world, really paying attention to the people that they were competing against, looking ahead, looking behind. But I was wrong. What they do is that they stay focused on the finish line. And I wondered, can we teach the rest of us, who are not Olympic athletes, to do what these experts do and can that help us improve the quality of our own exercise?
Dr Emily Balcetis designed a study in which two groups had to walk quickly to a finish line wearing ankle weights. The first was the baseline group. They were told to walk as they normally would. The second was the intervention group, who were trained to keep their eyes solely focused on the finish line. We said: 'Try not to look around. Imagine there's a spotlight shining just on that finish line, as if you have blinders on and all you can see is where you're trying to go.' Before the task, both groups were asked to estimate the distance to the finish line. The intervention group saw the finish line to be 30 percent closer than the baseline group. And after the task, the intervention group also got there faster. Their pace increased by 23 percent, in fact. And importantly, they said it didn't hurt as much.
When we used a medical scale where people can report how much exertion did it take out of your body, it hurt 17 percent less. Now, we didn't change anything about the course, so we didn't do anything different to what the actual exercise was, but it changed their mindset. Dr Emily Balcetis' study suggests that visual focus and mental focus are connected. It means that people's perception of exercise can be changed to make it look and feel easier. What it does, by narrowly focusing their visual attention, people now thought: 'Oh this this exercise won't be as hard. I think I have what it takes to make it to that finish line really quickly. I believe in myself.' So, that change in visual focus was having a change in their mental focus and their self-appraisals of their ability to do this exercise.
What's also cool is that this tactic can work regardless of whether people were coming in already in shape. You may have already used the tactic of narrow visual focus without even noticing it. Maybe you practice ballet, maybe you practice yoga. And a lot of the suggestions there for holding balance, being able to maintain positions that aren't natural is by visually focusing on a target. If you don't and you're in ballet, you're going to get dizzy as you're spinning around. If you're doing it in yoga and you don't focus on a target, you're going to fall over. So there actually are a lot of instances when we do practice this kind of visual focus and we find that it improves our performance. But holding visual focus for long periods can be hard. This isn't a strategy that's going to work for the full extent of, let's say, like a five kilometre run, because it also can be tiring.
And if you do it from the very beginning and try to keep that up for the next hour that you're hoping that you can exercise, you're really going to burn yourself out. In fact, what we found is that there's an optimal point to use this narrowed focus of attention. It's when you're feeling like you're fatigued, when you're at that choice point, are you going to throw in the towel or are you going to keep going? And when you're trying to find that last push to literally cross the finish line. Some of the best performers, those that run the fastest, run the furthest, they flexibly switch between a wide visual focus and a narrow visual focus. And you see them narrowing in when they need a little extra boost of energy.
A narrowed focus of attention is a tool. But for this tool to work, you need to want to exercise. For people who have no goal, whose motivation is at the floor, this tactic didn't work. So it's not that it's magic. If you don't want to exercise, this isn't going to create a goal for you that you don't already have. It's a tactic that can help you achieve what it is that maybe you're just starting out or you're just starting to become interested in, or for something that you've been working really hard at for a long time, but you need an extra little nudge to push you to the next level. When it comes to fitness, your mind can be as important as your muscles. There's lots of work out there. In fact, work that's been done by my colleagues at New York University that shows when we believe that something is impossible, there's real legitimate changes in our body. In fact, systolic blood pressure goes down.
Why systolic blood pressure? Why am I mentioning that? It's a physiological marker of our psychological mindset. When we're gearing up to do something hard, systolic blood pressure goes up in anticipation of the performance. When we start saying to ourselves: 'This is impossible', systolic blood pressure is decreasing. That physiological indicator of our bodies' readiness to get up and go is turning off. So that mindset that we bring of positivity, hope, and excitement can bring us an energy that translates into better performance. So, you just need to literally see things differently. Absolutely, it's possible to change the way that we see the world. We can do that by just conscientiously thinking about: 'What am I looking at right now?' You can teach yourself to do that and it can have really dramatic outcomes.
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