Why your spin bike has become a clothes rack – and what you can do about it, according to behavioural science

Humans want to improve ourselves, but sometimes willpower is lacking. Shutterstock^[7]

The problem is that regular exercise involves willpower and discipline beyond most of us. Especially when faced with the choice between comfy couch and spin bike. Your ambition may be willing^[8], but your flesh is weak. Exercise feels hard.

This is because our brains evolved in the Stone Age when it made survival sense to loaf about^[9] whenever the opportunity arose. With limited food, our ancestors needed to conserve energy for the next chase or flight.

This is true for other vices too, such as binge eating^[10] or gorging on sugary foods^[11]. But these things are often counterproductive in the modern world where we consume a lot more energy than we normally expend.

Self-regulation

But your bike is also a beacon of hope. Even though our psychology is often at odds with modernity, we have a trump card: the ability to self-regulate. At our best, we can override daily temptations and move towards longer-term goals.

Psychological research^[12] has identified two key ingredients to this (in addition to setting goals): monitoring your behaviour for any breaches, and correcting them whenever detected.

You’ve scored two out of three so far: you made the commitment to the bike and you noticed you failed to live up to it. Now it’s time to work on the correction.

Nudge yourself

Zen masters turn weakness into strength. You too can use the human psychological failings from our evolution to your advantage. This is known as self-nudging: changing your own choices to make your best decisions more likely.

An example is the “sunk cost fallacy”, our tendency to base decisions on irrecoverable past expenses.

Here is where the spin bike makes sense: having incurred the expense, you might have a greater motivation^[13] to go on your own new bike than to go to the gym. Membership can easily be cancelled, but the bike has been bought.

You could also go wholesale and use the very tools governmental Behavioural Insights Units use, on yourself^[14]. For example, policymakers use the EAST framework^[15] to make our desired behaviours easy, attractive, social and timely for us.

Make working out at home as attractive as possible, perhaps by watching TV at the same time? Shutterstock^[16]

The spin bike at home is easy to use^[17] compared with changing into your fanciest lululemons^[18], packing your gear, driving to the gym and parking your car.

It is also timely. You can use the home spin bike whenever it suits you without needing to queue for lockers, equipment and showers.

Why not make it attractive too? Many home exercisers use a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down. In our house, the spin bike is permanently parked in front of the widescreen TV. Behavioural scientists call this temptation bundling^[19].

You can also make your spin bike experience social. This is the Peloton phenomenon^[20]: instructors, leader boards and interactions with the exercise community.

Turn over a new leaf

So should you try again in 2025? Yes.

The new year is a natural opportunity for self-improvement due to the fresh start effect^[21]. Psychologist found events that mark the passage of time (birthdays, holidays, new years) allow people to mentally consign their failures to the past and start again with a clean slate. It’s an uncanny tactic and it works.

The lesson is that the end of the year provides a great opportunity to ring in much-needed changes. But that’s not enough. You also need some simple strategies to help you stick to them.

Read more https://theconversation.com/why-your-spin-bike-has-become-a-clothes-rack-and-what-you-can-do-about-it-according-to-behavioural-science-245154

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