How Hard Is It to Change, Really?

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A study I saw recently from a few years back brought into question my long-held assumption that most people find change difficult and resist it mightily. More on the study in a moment.

First, as I’ve quoted my grandmother saying, “The only people who crave change are wet babies.” And it’s not just me: Many people believe this resistance to be the norm. Indeed, the whole self-help industry is predicated on the idea that it takes a lot to motivate people to change. The industry wouldn’t exist, after all, if change were easy, right?

One of the results of this thinking is that we tend to promote change in small bites. We push “atomic habits,” “tiny habits,” and “micro-changes.” We talk about eating the elephant one bite at a time. Horrible image, but it is certainly evocative of tackling a large, difficult project slowly.

OK, so what if you wanted to improve your memory; enhance your self-esteem; increase your mindfulness; tackle your physical fitness in terms of strength, duration, and flexibility; improve your test-taking abilities; strengthen your ability to focus; and, finally, crank up your happiness? Could you take on all of these improvements at once? No way, right? It made me tired and cranky just to contemplate this list. Clearly, this is the work of several years, isn’t it? Or at least, months of carefully planned and staged effort?

Well, a study from 2016 found that a small group of students who took on all these self-improvement chores, pushing themselves for five hours a day, for six weeks, made substantial improvements in all areas. What’s more, in a follow-up study six weeks later, the students were found to have maintained significant improvements in all areas without any further instruction or effort.

Could it be that I, the whole self-help industry, and possibly you, have been underestimating our ability to improve ourselves, both in timing and scope? Or is this result a kind of halo effect of focusing on improving a group of impressionable young adults in areas they all have absorbed from the current culture as important?

We do have to allow for the small study effect—often if a study is repeated later at a larger scale, the astonishing differences from the starter study turn out to evaporate. The effects of random chance can be mistaken for a measurable difference in a small study but will come out in the wash in a larger study. In this way, many a small study becomes larger than life in its effects before it is chiseled down to size. And then the (squishy) results often take on a life of their own. The infamous Mehrabian study that found that “93 percent of communication is body language, or in other words, how you say it, not what you say” was a small study that got distorted out of context. As we know now, that is both a misrepresentation of the facts of the study and a real distortion of the point Mehrabian was trying to make, which was about decoding communication when the content is saying one thing and the body language another. Subsequent research has long since straightened out these ideas, but I still have people tell me cheerfully, when they find out I am an expert in communications, “Oh, did you know that 93 percent of communications is body language?”

But back to that intriguing multi-faceted change study. We need to repeat it at much larger scales and with different age groups. And we need to analyze the results carefully with an eye for discovering whether the findings hold up in a variety of settings and with a variety of kinds of change.

But if it does turn out that wholesale, large change at breakneck speed is the right way to go, then a whole universe of hardworking change efforts needs to be re-thought, we need to stop talking about being kind to ourselves, and we need to suck it up and get to work.

Which possibility do you believe?