Putting Psychology to Work: Motivate Your Running with Confirmation Bias

When I was in grad school at Harvard, I had a cool professor who helped us learn to apply ideas from psychology to our teaching to better motivate and educate our students. (Thank you, Hunter Gehlbach!)

I loved it. It turns out, psychology is a really great tool for understanding people’s behavior so we can influence it. While it’s fun to picture ourselves becoming psychology masterminds who can manipulate our spouses and children, as runners we can benefit from using psychology to motivate ourselves.

Motivate Yourself Using Confirmation Bias

Confirmation bias is our tendency to look for and pay attention to information that supports something we believe, and ignore information that challenges what we believe.

Example: You think barefoot running is the greatest trend out there. You add other barefoot runners to your twitter feed, and recommend “Born to Run” to all your friends. You search for barefoot running blogs online and add them to your feeds. You secretly believe your friend who hated her minimalist shoes just didn’t give it enough time to ease into them, and probably shouldn’t be running on so much pavement. You stop talking to running shoe specialists at your local running store. Basically, you look for people and information that supports what you believe, and stop looking for, or discredit, information that doesn’t support your belief.

How can you make confirmation bias work for your running?

Being aware of your own confirmation bias can help you overcome it. If you’re having a tough time with your running, you may feel that running isn’t working well for you. Once you start to feel that way, your brain starts looking for examples that support your negative feelings. Guess what? It’ll probably find them, and the more it finds, the more negative your thoughts about running will become.

If you start feeling discouraged and unmotivated about your running, try to remind yourself that confirmation bias is going to work against you. Try to make it work for you instead, but telling yourself you CAN do this, and looking for all the evidence that you’re capable instead. Write all the evidence that you’re capable down, and ignore all the evidence of failure. (Ok, within reason… I’m talking about keeping motivated to stick with running or a reasonable goal here, not looking for evidence that you can run a marathon despite being injured or something crazy like that.)

When you start trying to reverse your confirmation bias, you’ll notice there’s often a TON of evidence of your own capability and motivation you were ignoring.

So don’t get bogged down in the negatives you didn’t go for a run this week, it’s cold out, you’ve quit three gym memberships… running isn’t going to be any different and instead focus on the positives you’ve gone for runs when it was less than 20 degrees out, you like running more than you ever liked the gym, you have great friends who always ask how your running is going, you’re really looking forward to that race in the spring.

If you pay attention, you’ll realize that being aware of your own confirmation bias can help you be more objective. Have a friend who you feel doesn’t make time for you? Maybe you’re too quick to dismiss her texts or belated e-mails. Maybe that boss you think doesn’t like you is stressed out and busy, and you’re ignoring some evidence that she’s really happy with the work you’re doing because your insecurities are making it hard for you to accept praise.

So… remember to look for evidence that supports what you WANT to believe, and focus on it when you need some extra motivation. You’re not being delusional, you’re just stacking the deck in your favor… our brains do it to us all the time. Make it work for you 🙂