If you believe a large German health insurance company, a program called WOOP that they now offer online to everyone is doing real miracles. “This makes people more able to implement their wishes. They stop putting things off and tackle their plans. They start eating healthier. They train more and are more physically active.” The program also helps with stress, chronic back pain and “in negotiations, studies or work”. It also improves relationships.
That’s laying it on pretty thick, but not entirely wrong. The Hamburg psychology professor Gabriele Oettingen found that the popular advice to think positively is actually more damaging when it comes to realizing plans. For her, pure dreaming is “a quite convincing, if short-lived, substitute for doing.” She then developed the WOOP program with her husband Peter Gollwitzer, also a psychology professor.
What’s in the way?
With WOOP, making a wish (W for.) is just the first step wish) and imagine its implementation – preferably with your eyes closed – (O for outcome) to color. Because then you open your eyes again and think about what could stand in the way of the fulfillment of your wish (O for obstacle.obstacle). Oettingen calls this encounter between desire and reality “mental contrasting”.
So armed, it is important to have a plan (P for plan) to design to implement the wish. It takes the form of the implementation intentions developed by Gollwitzer, also known as if-then plans. A jealous woman who constantly calls her boyfriend to check in on what he’s doing might decide, “If I get jealous, I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing.”
Mental contrasting
A team led by the psychologist couple tested the approach with 256 women. Half only received information about exercise and healthy eating. The other was additionally instructed in WOOP. The WOOP group then ate a quarter more fruits and vegetables and continued to do so two years later. The other women initially had almost as much healthy food on the table, but after two years their diet was almost the same again. When it came to sports, things were a little different. In the first few months, the WOOP participants exercised about twice as much as the comparison group – about a hundred versus fifty minutes per week. After two years, however, the lead was gone. Apparently more WOOP sessions are necessary to keep going.
A meta-analysis of twelve studies that examined the first half of WOOP, mental contrasting, also showed that the approach works. However, on average there was no additional benefit when the second part, implementation intentions, was also used. The decisive advantage seems to lie in imagining your wishes – and also what stands in the way of achieving them.
Would you like to find out more about the topic? Then read why we achieve our goals more effortlessly when we know what drives us in Wwhat drives me?
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