The Fun Factor: Why Enjoying Your New Habits is Non-Negotiable
💡 Why Enjoyment, Not Effort, is the Key to Lasting Transformation
What's the biggest problem with change? That it's hard and doesn't last.
What if I told you change doesn’t have to be hard or temporary? In this essay, I will address the biggest problems with our approach to change. This will be a controversial exploration of successful change management.
The Problem With Current Health and Wellness Advice
The typical health and wellness advice frustrates me because it doesn’t work. It might seem effective in the short-term, but it’s not sustainable.
Our approach to change and achieving goals is marred by struggle and effort. We’re told that success lies outside our comfort zones, so we must experience varying degrees of discomfort before being successful. This awareness puts many off from making an effort to change or achieve goals, especially for those who’ve hustled and tried many things, possibly experiencing burnout and depression.
Despite the discomfort we endure, our success is fleeting, statistically speaking. Anyone who’s tried making a change knows this. This knowledge easily leads to not even getting started, knowing our efforts are in vain.
The Hidden Dimension of Change
To better understand how to approach change and achieve lasting goals, I want to explain a little-known dimension of change.
A lot of hard work goes into achieving goals, often involving sacrifice. The problem is that lasting change and results are seldom achieved when built on a sense of lack, deprivation, or sacrifice, leading to a life of constantly missing something — to have and yet not have.
True wealth isn’t what you have, it’s the absence of the constant pursuit of what you lack.The same is true for a healthy and lasting change. If the change is underpinned by a sense of lack, of not having or being allowed, then there will be a sense of missing out. To remain successful under the constant feeling of deprivation we typically employ control, restriction, rules, hacks and tricks to stay ahead of the impending crisis or character weakness of not being strong enough to hold out, of failing and giving up.
Most change efforts fail because they’re built on the premise of lack, and few people are strong or willing to persevere.
Few people succeed in changing their physique, health, and well-being. This applies to individual, organisational, and societal change.
Only 20% of people succeed with new year’s resolutions, the average gym membership lasts 2 years, and only 30% of change management efforts succeed in organisations. (I wish I could provide references for these numbers, they’re figures I’ve memorised through my professional experience dealing with change — consider your own success rate: how many times have you tried to make a change and succeeded?)
In short, current health and wellness advice isn’t making any enduring change.
The most common approach to change is based on hope, in my opinion, the idea that “if I persevere, I will reach my goal — the destination and once there, it won’t feel as bad or heavy as it did getting there!” Many strategies and tactics are used, but if they’re based on scarcity, lack, deprivation, restriction, and sacrifice, they will ultimately fail.
A lasting lifestyle change is for life, so your goal isn’t a destination or a finish line.
You’ve likely been told it takes 21, 66, or 100 days to form a new habit. While it’s true habits take time, they can form instantly when you see their worth. A habit is for life. If your results are based on a habit, stopping it would likely affect those results. A habit isn’t a one-time creation; it requires lifelong maintenance. Does it get easier over time? Perhaps, depending on the level of restriction and self-discipline. It still requires lifelong commitment.
Change as a Journey, Not a Destination
I see change as a journey, not a destination. We all experience it as a journey; change and life. Eventually, you run out of willpower or your priorities change and you give up along the journey. Your efforts become another failed attempt to make a lifestyle change. All because you approached change as a race or a sprint.
I get that you want it to be a race, or a sprint. I too would want something uncomfortable to be over quickly rather than being dragged out. You’re thinking, “If I can only cross the finish line THEN I’ll be happy and things will be good!” Even if you do cross the finish line, what you face on the other side is just more of the same … more restriction, deprivation and sacrifice. This can become tiresome.
I’m arguing that change is a journey, not a destination. So, how you travel is more important than how quickly you arrive. Then choosing to travel in a fashion that is more pleasurable makes more sense than a journey that is riddled with challenge, failure and suffering, right?
The Power of Enjoyment in Lasting Change
In a study1, some participants were encouraged to eat healthily and others to exercise. Some participants (chosen at random) were instructed to select the healthy foods or exercises they expected to enjoy most, while others were encouraged to pick the ones they’d benefit from the most, which is the typical approach for most people. The study found that encouraging people to find the fun in healthy activities helped them exercise longer and eat healthier, leading to better results than the group focused on the outcome (finish line).
The Fun Theory: A Real-World Example
In my home country Sweden, an ad agency NORD DDB and car manufacturer Volkswagen came up with a creative marketing stunt dubbed, “The Fun Theory” and in the process also adding proof to the idea that “fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better.” The campaign took place on a busy Stockholm subway line.
As the commuters and travellers emerged from the subway, they had the option of taking the escalator or the stairs. But on this day, the staircase had been transformed into a black and white musical mural, with each step sounding a different note — making it into a functioning piano!
Imagine emerging to street level. You can take the escalator or the staircase and play piano tunes as you climb. Which do you choose?
I’d choose the piano-playing staircase every time! And I’m not alone. 66% more commuters used the stairs!
As the station gets crowded, many commuters and tourists choose the musical stairs over the escalator.
“You know you should be taking the stairs, but it’s easier to take the other route… If we make it a fun experience, a good experience, then people will do it,”
— Andreas Dahlqvist, part of the creative team behind the project.
Key Ingredients for Successful Change
As I stated earlier, change is often hard and temporary. Two things matter most in successfully adopting lasting change:
Do you want to?
Are you able to?
When you want and are able to change, it happens easier, consistently, and lasts longer. When you enjoy something, you tend to do more of it with greater ability and resilience. Approaching lifestyle changes with more fun and with less seriousness is a great “hack” to make it both easier and more lasting. When making change too serious we create an experience where we can start fearing failure. This quickly chases all the fun out of the new adventure we’re on.
It’s Not “Failure”
A big reason for change not taking root is when we experience “failure”. I deliberately put failure in quotation marks, for soon to be obvious reasons. When we experience failure, it can cause stress, anxiety and self-judgement, making it harder to bounce back and we lose momentum. But only if you perceive failure as failure. If you see “failure” as “feedback” or “data” instead, it can help you frame your experience in a more positive light. In truth, this is what “failure” is; feedback. A failed act is data that can be used to learn, adjust, and adapt, increasing the likelihood of success.
This is a more conducive approach to change, performance, and success in life. Carol Dweck popularized the “growth vs. fixed mindset” and in her work showed that seeing failure as indicative of our ability makes it easier to give up. Instead, seeing failure as stepping stones to success, learning opportunities, and data to improve abilities increases chances for success. This way, we become more resilient and better equipped to face life’s challenges.
Imagine you’re trying to eat healthier and doing well for a few weeks. Then, one evening, you find yourself stress-eating a tub of ice cream after a tough day at work.
With a fixed mindset, you might think: "I've ruined everything. I have no self-discipline. I'll never be able to eat healthy." This negative self-talk and self-judgement could lead to giving up on your health goals entirely.
With a growth mindset, you'd reframe the situation: "Okay, I ate more than I expected today. What can I learn from this? I notice I tend to reach for comfort food when stressed. Maybe I need to manage stress better, like going for a walk or calling a friend. In the long run, this experience won't erase my progress. In fact, it can help me become stronger!"
By viewing the ice cream “incident” as data rather than failure, you gain insights into your behaviour patterns and can use this information to make your health journey more sustainable.
I will explore binge-eating and stress-eating more in a future essay, and what I will propose can be controversial. However, this example is shallow and meant to serve as a familiar example.
Change happens in a series of loops, not a straight line, according to psychologists Prochaska and DiClemente. This supports the idea that change is a journey, not a destination. Setbacks don’t mean “back at square one” because change isn’t a straight line or continuum. It’s not “failure” on one end and “success” on the other. Real change happens through a series of loops, helping you learn and strengthen your management skills. (We’ll come back to this as well in a future essay).
Fun Becomes A Factor For Sustainable Health Changes
The journey towards lasting health changes doesn’t have to be a struggle filled with deprivation and sacrifice. By shifting our paradigm and embracing a more enjoyable approach, injecting some FUN into what we do we can make sustainable transformations. When we introduce a Fun Factor; levels of different fun, change becomes easier and more lasting because it’s something we enjoy.
Here’s some questions for you to reflect over that might help you identify some actions that you can take, helping you inject the Fun Factor into the transformations you’re making:
How can you shift your perspective on change from a race to a lifelong journey? What would it look like to embrace the natural cycles of change, including maintenance phases and occasional setbacks?
When was the last time you chose a healthy activity or food purely because you enjoyed it? How might prioritising enjoyment in your health choices affect your long-term commitment and results?
In what ways could you inject more fun into your health routine? Can you think of a creative, playful twist on a typically "boring" healthy habit?
How do you typically respond to setbacks in your health journey? What would it look like to approach these moments with self-compassion instead of harsh judgement? How might viewing "failures" as learning opportunities change your approach to health and wellness?
By taking these actions, you'll start a sustainable and enjoyable approach to health changes. The goal isn't perfection, but progress and consistency over time.
As you embark on this journey, consider joining our "Insider Community" for more in-depth guidance, daily lessons, weekly LIVE calls, and quarterly workshops. These resources can provide the support and structure you need to find more ease, peace, and flow in all areas of your life, including your health journey. Insider Community members get full access to this health series including future series.
Lasting change is easier than you think. By focusing on enjoyment, embracing natural change cycles, and being kind to ourselves, we can create the sustainable health transformations we desire.
Please leave a comment and share your thoughts on this essay — let’s keep the conversation going.
An honorary mention and thanks to Jane Pilger for helping me craft the headline for this essay 🙏
Coming up next in the Health Series:
Knowing that enjoyment is the key to lasting well-being, we’re going to expose and explore what it is that keep us from embracing more enjoyment in life and what we can do about it.
Please consider becoming a premium subscriber and join the Insider Community to gain full access to this and future series, including daily lessons, weekly LIVE calls and quarterly workshops (and more).
Woolley and Fishbach, “For the Fun of It,” 952–66.
Hey, I appreciate the restack 🙏 Glad that you found it interesting.
This is a great article - I see firsthand the impact that approaching change from lack and scarcity has on the longevity of that change in my work with clients who struggle with feeling out of control around food. I look forward to reading your perspective on binge eating in a future article!