Stop Relying on Willpower: Tips on Teen Motivation and Behavior Change

What we know as psychologists about behavior change is that it's not only about willpower and self control. Sometimes designing your environment beats discipline. When we make things easier for ourselves, they're more likely to happen. Yeah. Let's not wait to feel like changing or feel like changing and enact that change, but let's actually just make the change easier to do and figure out how to do that and help our teens do that too.

Welcome back to the Parenting Pair Podcast. I'm Doctor. Annalise Karen.

And I'm Doctor. Suzanne Allen.

And today, we are going to jump into the question, why do we keep doing the things that we know are unhelpful and yet keep doing them? And what we should do about it? Mhmm. Right? So I was thinking about this on the drive over here today.

And what and so I thought about something we might be doing that's unhelpful. We're asking you to rate and review our podcast at the end. Does that make sense? Because what if you're busy? What if you have to jump off the podcast?

And then you don't get the opportunity to hear us ask if you would be willing to rate, follow, review the podcast. So I'm gonna do it differently today. See? Old Deb highlights die hard, and I'm changing. So if you have a moment, could you, and whenever you're listening on, give us a rating, give us a review because it just helps get the podcast out to more people.

Alright. Alright. Let's get started. So why is it that you tell yourself you're going to stop scrolling before bed over and over again and then you keep scrolling before bed? Right?

Or you say, I'm gonna start working out. And you say it to yourself for four months. I'm gonna start tomorrow morning and then we don't do it. Mhmm. Right.

Or for

our teenager that they say, I'm going to come home from school and take a twenty minute break and then start my homework. And every night at 09:00 they're scrambling because they took a two hour nap and they haven't gotten anything begun. Right. Right.

I think what people jump to is that someone doesn't have enough willpower. Someone isn't, you know, organized enough or doesn't have enough self control. There's some sort of, you know, character deficit or something like that. Or sometimes I've had

teens say like, must maybe I just don't care enough. I mean,

I think I care, but I guess I don't because I'm not doing anything to change it. Right. And what we know as psychologists about behavior change. Because that's really a lot of what we're in the business in helping people figure out how to change their behavior in ways that they want to improve their mood or improve their life or improve their sense of self or understanding of themselves. What we know about that is that it's not only about willpower and self control, Right?

Sometimes it's about the environment that you're in. And we can do things to set ourselves up for greater success in our environments. And that's what really today's, you know, episode is about. Right. And that sometimes you enact the behavior change.

If you do something different or you set up the environment to make it easier for you to do something different, that your mood and energy kind of changes after that. And so a lot of times, know and listen, I think it's great to build motivation. I do that with young people

and Absolutely. We we we do that as a part certainly with, you know, substance use treatment. We spend a lot of time on motivational interviewing. There there's absolutely a place for motivation. Mhmm.

But what we all psychologists also know about motivation is a big component. A big amount of motivation comes after behavior change. Because once our behavior has changed, it becomes reinforcing. Mhmm. So getting on that slope to get started with the new behavior is what we're talking about today.

So sometimes I'll

say to kids, like, let's drop it. I know you're motivated. I know you care. I know you want to get off your phone earlier at night or stop checking that thing or start your homework earlier.

Let's drop So That's the wish.

Yeah. Yeah. And let's drop the worry about it and discussing whether you're motivated or not or what's wrong with your self control or whatever it is. And let's just do something to either make it easier for you to do what you wanna do or make it harder for you to do the thing that you need to stop doing.

This is our takeaway from today. We're working on make it easy or make it hard. So and that's sort of like a mantra to have in your brain. If, you know, how can I this thing I wanna do, how can I make it more easy for myself? Mhmm.

And the thing that maybe I don't wanna do, how can I make that more hard? So let's let's sort of talk it through with an example.

Yeah. Right? So, you know, I get up very early a couple of mornings a week to walk my dog, and sometimes as the weather changes and the darkness changes and my energy changes throughout the year, that can get increasingly difficult. One of the things I've started doing is I buy pajamas that are actually real clothes and a sweatsuit, and I sleep in them. And so I sleep in my clothes so that when I get up in the morning Yeah.

I don't actually have to change and get dressed. I mean, it only saves me, I don't know, like a minute and a half, two minutes in the morning. But there's something about rolling out of bed and I'm in my clothes that makes it much easier for me to get out the door and actually walk the dog when I need to or want to.

I think that's a brilliant example. And it reminds me of I was sort of talking about myself. I said four months, I believe, but it was really like five years that I told myself, I'm going to work out early in the morning. I'm going to get up early in the morning because I have kids and it's too busy and I don't work out. What I but that was really difficult for me.

You know, I wasn't getting enough sleep, I was very tired. And so it was really difficult. And I did two things. One of them similar to yours. I didn't wear my workout clothes to bed, though that's probably a good one.

But I find them the night before and have them all ready in the bathroom so I can roll into the bathroom and just change and it's all right there. Because if I have to go through my closet and find them in the morning at five in the morning, I'm not gonna do it. Mhmm. And the other thing I did to make it easy was commit to meeting someone else. So I so I just have that.

I know that Brooke is waiting for me. I know that that other people are waiting for me. Mhmm. And so then I've got my clothes. Brooke's waiting.

I'm gonna go. Mhmm. Right? Whereas if the clothes weren't out and Brooke wasn't waiting, I probably wouldn't go. Mhmm.

Right? So I made it I made it easier.

Yep. Yeah. When we make things easier for ourselves, they're more likely to happen.

Yep. Yep. And so let's do the other side of this, the make it hard. Right? So I think about that, you know, if a teen, say for instance, is, you know, getting very distracted, you know, doing their homework.

This is a little bit of make it easy, make it hard. It's just how you look at because they're on their phone. Right? Move the phone and put it to the other room. Make it harder to get to that thing that's that's distracting you or make it easier to focus.

Whichever way you look at it. Yeah. Right? Yep. But you know, sometimes if I'm working with someone, say, who who wants to drink less or whatever, don't have the alcohol in your home.

Right? Drive a different way that isn't by the liquor store on the way home. Make it a little bit easier to not engage in the thing or to do the activity that you want to do and not engage in the activity. Make the activity harder that is the one that isn't maybe the best for you or you want to change. Mhmm.

Mhmm.

I've done this with young people who, you know, still, for social reasons, because their team or their acting troop maybe has a social media account, right? So they need to have some of these accounts to access information about practices being canceled or something. But they'll say, once I, you know, go on to Instagram to look at whether the practice is still happening, then I wind up looking at, you know, 15 other things. You know, one of the things we'll do is take some of the icons off the phone, right? So if it's so easy to just tap the button and the thing pops open and it's all there, right?

If you actually have to go to a web browser and type in www.facebook.com, right? Right. You have to take kind of an extra moment to think, Do I really want to do this? Or move the icons off the front page and the home page so that you have to kind of scroll through your phone or your iPad to get to those ones and look at it. So, you have kind of a moment or two to think to yourself, Do I really want to open this and go down this path right now?

Because sometimes, you know, we just need like a little speed bump, right? Like those speed bumps, you're going 50 miles an hour and all of a sudden you got to slow down to 25 and you start to pay attention and think a little bit more. We need to put our own little speed bumps in. And I say to them, even as an adult, I do this. Like, I'll leave my phone upstairs and then go downstairs to do laundry and make dinner.

So then I have to really think,

do I want to go back upstairs and check my work email? Like, do I need to do that right now? Right. And again, from a psychological perspective, this makes a lot of sense, right? Because habits really help us, you know?

So often we just do things out of habit because it makes the day go more quickly, but then we're not as aware. So when we try to break that habit, it's difficult, right? So if a teenager has a habit of, I don't know, handling their afternoon a certain way when they're in middle school, that may be fine, you know, to go out and get some exercise and do this or that before they do their homework. That may not work anymore in high school when they have more homework and other things. So we have to change that habit.

But the habit allowed us to do things, you know, quickly or more fluidly. Right? And so it's like we just have to put that speed bump in to kind of remind ourselves to change it. Right? The other thing when you were giving that example, Suzanne, of working with the teenager on the apps, you know, and how to manage that is teens have great ideas.

So again, they have great ideas that we're not going to come up with. So just reminding us parents that we don't always have to be prescriptive with these ideas. Right? So so if you're listening to this podcast, it's not that we want or we're suggesting that you go home and tell your teen, you need to make it easy and you need to make it hard. You know, you need to make it easy to do your homework earlier and you need to make it hard for you to access your phone.

No. We're not saying be so prescriptive. I actually encourage you to say, what would make that easier for you? If there's a goal that your teen you can either see that they're missing or that they're acknowledging this is hard for me to get done, being curious and just asking that question and then maybe offhandedly mentioning that you've been trying to use this sort of mantra in your own head make it easy, make it hard is just gentler and would invite more willingness, I think. Because also they just have better ideas about their lives and what might make it easier for them.

Mhmm.

Well, I think you're right because those two approaches might look very similar, but they're actually quite different. Right? If your teen is bringing up a problem, or they're not bringing up a problem, but you're noticing one. You go upstairs and every time they're supposed to be doing work, they're on their phone, right? If you go in and you say, You've got to find a way to get off your phone.

I'm going to put it in another room or You need to do this, right? Their back's going to go up and automatically there might be some defensiveness there and kind of an unwillingness to engage in that conversation. As I think I would be if my husband, you know, rolled over and yapped at me in that way when I was scrolling on my phone at night and should be going to sleep. Right. Versus maybe not a moment when they have the phone in the face or, you know, recognizing or kind of acknowledging to them like, you know, I know you've been trying to get to sleep earlier or get your work done sooner, and it can be so hard because there's so many competing things for your attention and there's so many things to keep in You know, what do you think is going on?

You know, one thing that I've been doing for myself is trying to just think of ways to make my life easier. Or when I want to stop something to make it a little bit harder, Do you think there's something that you could do or I could do make it a little bit easier for you to get up in the morning? To make it a little bit harder for you to forget bringing your Chromebook to school? You know, what could you do? What could I do?

And you're right. I am amazed every time by the ideas that kids and teenagers come up with themselves, and often not right in front of me. Sometimes we'll have this discussion. I'll offhand like, make it easy, make it hard. That's what I'm doing.

And I'll tell them what I'm up to. Yep. And they'll come back the next week or two weeks later and say to me, you know, I thought about that and here's this thing I tried. And it's a better idea than I would have come up with because I don't know, you know, what exactly every moment of their day looks like. And sometimes they have really cool ways of encouraging themselves or talking to themselves about it.

I had a young person say to me a while ago, and I have not forgotten it, that they try to think of how to be a good friend to their future self. And so, what would future me tomorrow feel better about if I'd gone to sleep earlier? Like, how am I gonna be good to future me? What would make it easy? What would make it hard?

And just like I love it. Know. Just that twist on it of thinking of future you with like love and kindness, like I wanna take care of Suzanne tomorrow. And Suzanne tomorrow shouldn't be on people.com till 11:30 at night reading about celebrity breakups of people she doesn't even know who they are because she's too old to know them. Right.

Future Like, Suzanne would be better tomorrow if

she went If you to did something to make it hard to be on people.com late at night. Yes. Yeah. So But that's Absolutely. Teens have have the best idea.

And when

you do that and engage them in these types of conversations, the other side benefit of this is you're really honoring and acknowledging that autonomy. And if you want to hear more about autonomy and kids individuating and making their decisions, we had a great episode on this very early on.

Number three, number four,

what is autonomy and why teens need it? You can go back and listen to that.

Great mention there because I think what you're really talking about is helping teens think for themselves, that cognitive autonomy. Right? So there's the behavioral autonomy, them doing things for themselves, but what Suzanne was just walking you through was the more that we can help our teens reflect and come to their own judgments about things, They may be better problem solvers than we are and that really empowers them for when they are off on their own or when they spend more time with peers to be able to reflect and make decisions on their own and not just be prescribed what to do from adults. It helps them feel it and it

also helps them develop their own problem solving skills to think about what is getting in the way of me doing this and what could I do to make it easier? What could

I do to make it harder? Yeah. So I do want to put a little caveat in here. Because what we're talking about here, simply, it's kind of like removing friction. Know, it's like rolling down a hill, right?

Like what's the behavior we want and how can we make that more likely? And what's the behavior that we don't want and how can we make that less likely? Right? And a lot of the times, that is changing the environment in some way. There are times we use this strategy as clinical psychologists with a number of clinical concerns that people come in with.

And so there are certainly times where behaviors can be riskier or more concerning or just where you might need the help of a professional where we are going to help as part of a larger treatment, help someone make something easier or make something harder. Like the idea that would come to mind is when, you know, people are maybe cutting, right, or engaging in non suicidal Some sort of self injury. Self injury. We do work with really, you know, how can we make it less likely that you're going to do that in terms of what do you use to do that and how can we remove those things? And being really planful about that and how can we plan for what we can do instead.

And that's in a broader array of therapeutic intervention. But really, there's make it easy, make it hard in just about every clinical intervention. Whether we're talking about skin picking or binge eating or there are so many ways that we can change our behavior, but changing behavior is hard so when we can reduce that friction, when we can work to make it a little bit easier, it actually really can lead to improvement. So if you're thinking about a problem that you think, I'm not sure how to approach this one, it might be something that a therapist could give you insight into.

Mhmm. Not sure how to approach this or I'm concerned about some of the risk or Sure. Struggles with this, that getting help and supporting you in a larger plan, which is likely going to include some of this, but that getting that support is really valid and warranted in many situations.

Yeah. Okay. I think us to that what now? And I think what we're talking about here is that we're shifting from this idea of like just motivation or just self control to really design. Right?

Like sometimes designing your environment beats discipline. Yep. Yep. That changing the environment is more effective than just kind of white knuckling it or relying so much on willpower. Yeah.

Let's not, you know, sort of like wait to feel like changing or feel like changing and enact that change, But let's actually just make the change easier to do and figure out how to do that and help our teens do that, too. So for fun,

this week, we would love for you to think about for yourself, parents, one thing that you might want to do more

of or maybe do less of. Or change in your patterns.

And find a way to make it easy or make it hard. Make it hard.

Alright. With that, we always love hearing from you, so don't hesitate to send us an email. Hello at theparentingpair dot com or DM us on Instagram at theparentingpair. And what are we talking about next week, Suzanne? Think we're going to The holidays.

Yes, they're right upon us.

Yeah, they're upon us. So we're going to be talking a little bit about holiday stress and how to try to manage that for yourself and for your teen during the holiday season and managing sometimes those tricky larger family situations. Great. We look forward to that.

And now a quick word from our lawyers. The Parenting Pair Podcast is designed for informational and educational purposes only. Do not rely on the information presented in this podcast as a substitute or replacement for professional psychological or medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. If you have concerns about you or a family member's well-being, please contact a licensed mental health professional or physician.