Want To Be More Active? Build An Active Self-Identity.

If you want to get fitter and healthier, it's important not just to change your behavior, but to change your self-identity. Become an active person, and the results will follow.

How Becoming An Active Person Can Improve Your Health

A 2007 study suggests that changing the way you think about your activity level can affect your health.

In this study, two groups of hotel housekeepers completed surveys about the amount of exercise they did and what they ate. They also had several health metrics measured, including their weight and blood pressure.

Housekeeping work is physically demanding. It involves walking, bending, pushing, lifting, and carrying. When you add up all of that movement, it actually exceeds the recommendations for getting the health benefits of physical activity.

One group was informed of this – they were told exactly how much physical activity they were doing each day, and how that activity is considered a form of exercise and can improve their health. The other group had the same measurements done but wasn’t told that their work counted as exercise.

Four weeks later, the measurements were done again. The group that hadn’t been given any information about their work being considered exercise stayed the same. Their metrics hadn’t changed.

On the other hand, the group who had been told that their work counted as exercise lost a little bit of weight and body fat, and decreased their blood pressure.

In follow up surveys, the informed group said that they didn’t do any more exercise outside of work than they had been doing before, but they reported much higher levels of exercise at work.

Their work hadn’t changed, but their perception had.

They were now thinking about it as a form of exercise. After only 4 weeks of considering themselves to be active, these people saw some important changes in their weight and their health, without making a conscious effort to change their behavior! How did that happen?

The researchers had two ideas: a placebo effect and a subconscious change in behavior.

The Placebo Effect

There's plenty of evidence that people experience a placebo effect in response to all kinds of things: medications, medical procedures, foods, allergens… The brain controls what we feel in our bodies, so believing in something can cause physical effects.

The researchers in this study suggested that believing in the health effects of exercise, and learning that they were getting enough exercise to achieve those health benefits, was enough to make them happen. It sounds like a stretch, but if you think about it, this is certainly possible.

We know that what we think and how we feel can affect our health. Consider stress, for example. It’s well-established that feelings of stress can trigger hormone changes that have a major impact on physical well-being. Why couldn’t a belief in exercise also have an effect?

Subconscious Changes

The other theory was that the participants in the informed group had changed some other behaviors that would have caused them to lose weight and decrease their blood pressure.

The researchers thought this was unlikely, because in the surveys taken after 4 weeks, the participants didn’t report any changes in the amount of exercise they were doing outside of work or in their diet or other behaviors.

However, I suspect that the participants probably did change their behavior at least a little. First of all, the surveys used in this study may not have picked up on small changes in behavior.

It’s well-known in research studies (and most health professionals know this from experience) that people aren’t very good at accurately assessing how much exercise they do and what they eat, so it’s possible that people didn’t report their behavior accurately.

It’s also possible that people did change their behavior a little as a result of their new exercise mindset and may not have even realized it.

What Happens When You Become An Active Person

I’ve seen this happen with clients. Someone starts working on a small goal (like drinking more water or going for a walk at lunch) and they start to feel better. That good feeling spreads into other areas of their life and they start to adopt some additional healthy behaviors.

Sometimes these are conscious decisions. “If I’m already working on exercising more, maybe I’ll do something else good for my health. I’ll order a side of vegetables with my dinner instead of fries…”.

Often, though, it’s more subtle. Maybe they'll get up and move more throughout the day, or they'll reduce their portion sizes a little.

They don’t necessarily make a conscious decision to do that, it just kind of happens. And then it starts to snowball, and pretty soon they've picked up a few healthy habits.

How Your Self-Identity Can Shape Your Behaviors

The end result, no matter why it happened, is that those housekeepers were better off once they started thinking of themselves as active. The same can happen for you.

We all have an idea of the type of people we are, and there are parts of our identity that we take pride in.

Maybe you're the person who never forgets someone’s birthday, or you’re the one that your friends can count on to listen when they have a problem. Perhaps you’re the type of person who's always on time, or who can fix anything. Maybe you're good with plants, or animals, or babies.

All of these things are parts of an identity, and the things you do are an extension of that identity. If you think of yourself as a good cook, chances are cooking comes fairly easy to you and you don’t have to struggle with it.

This is why building a new identity is incredibly powerful in terms of achieving your goals. When your identity and your goals are aligned, it’s much easier to perform the behaviors that move you towards success.

Let’s look at how this works, and how it ties in with your identity.

What Happens When You Only Change Your Behavior

In terms of your behavior, who you are influences what you do, which determines the results you get.

Let’s say you lead a pretty sedentary lifestyle. Physical activity isn't something you think about much and you don’t consider yourself to be an active person.

You decide, though, that you want to get fitter.

If the result you want is to improve your fitness, then you need to change your behavior. So you decide that you're going to start working out. You join a gym and find an exercise program to follow.

Your identity hasn’t changed, so at this point you're a sedentary person who works out. Those two things are not aligned.

It’s really difficult to sustain a behavior that doesn’t fit with who you are. You may be able to use your willpower to stick to your exercise program for a short time, but chances are it won’t be easy and eventually you’ll miss a workout (it happens to everyone).

Once that happens, it’s a real struggle to get back on track. That’s because once you miss a workout or two, you are once again a sedentary person who doesn’t work out. Those two things are aligned, so you easily fall back into your old patterns.

What Works

On the other hand, let’s see what happens if you work on changing your identity. First you decide you want to get fitter.

Instead of forcing yourself to stick to a new workout program, you decide to change your self-identity. You decide to become an active person.

After working on changing your self-identity, you become an active person who works out. Who you are and what you do are aligned.

That makes it much easier to continue your behavior. When you do miss a workout (again, it happens to everyone), it will be easy to get back on track. You'll be getting back in line with your self-identity rather than fighting against it.

How to Build A Self-Identity

Your identity and your behavior are very closely related. Your identity drives your behavior, and your behavior also drives your identity. That means that you can use your behavior to change your identity.

The key is to prove to yourself that your new identity is true. You can do that with small behaviors that reinforce who you want to be.

Start Small and Easy

Starting small is really important in achieving your goals. It’s also important in changing your identity.

You need to perform your target behavior frequently if you’re going to convince yourself of your new identity. You’re more likely to do that successfully if you start with small, easy to achieve goals.

A 5-min walk at lunch, for example, may be easy enough for you to achieve every day. Each time you take that walk, you are forming your new identity.

If you set a goal that’s too big and difficult, like going for a 45 minute run on your lunch break, there may be many times when you aren’t able to follow through.

Each time you don’t go for that run, you will be reinforcing your old, non-active identity.

Take Every Possible Opportunity To Reinforce Your Identity

If you're exercising five times per week, that’s only five opportunities in the whole week to reinforce your new identity. That’s probably not going to be enough to solidify your new belief about yourself.

But if you build movement into every aspect of your life, you will have hundreds of reinforcement opportunities.

Every time you take the stairs instead of the elevator, walk to a colleague’s office instead of sending an email, park at the far end of the parking lot and walk farther to the store, or do a few push ups or squats during a commercial break, you are proving to yourself that you're an active person.

The more you reinforce the idea of yourself as an exerciser, the stronger that idea becomes. Every action, no matter how small, contributes to your new identity.

If you see yourself as an active person, or an “exerciser”, you will be active. If you believe that you are an active person, you will do active things. Become someone who never misses two workouts in a row, or who takes the stairs every day, and the results will follow.

If You Need Help To Become An Active Person

I have a few FREE resources to get you started. Download my FREE Goal-Setting Guide that walks you through the process of setting effective goals and creating plans to achieve them. You can also download my FREE Strength Training eBook which will help you get started on your fitness journey.

If you need personalized help, contact me! All of my personal training programs include mindset tips for helping you transform your mind as well as your health!