Drawbacks of the Human Condition: Overcome Cognitive Biases to Actualize Your Health and Wellness Goals
In the journey of personal health and wellness, our brains can be our worst enemies. Despite the best intentions, certain cognitive biases silently undermine our efforts to achieve optimal well-being. Understanding, and to a certain extent, accepting these psychological pitfalls, is a first step to overcoming them and creating lasting, positive change. Awareness and familiarity with how each of us personally express the biases below can help us choose the best behavior change tools. On the tech side, we also have some pretty incredible technology to help us create strategies and framework for change.
1. The Mere Urgency Effect: Prioritizing the Urgent Over the Important
Imagine you're sitting at your desk, surrounded by a stack of urgent emails, a half-finished workout plan, and a looming deadline for a work project. The mere urgency effect compels you to tackle the immediate, seemingly pressing tasks while pushing aside critical long-term health goals.
Mentally “raise your hand” if you are guilty of this. I’m sure most hands went up. But think about what happens when it becomes the rule rather than the exception? We rationalize the fact that we have deprioritized something that we genuinely feel is important to us. Now it is normal and expected, and that expectation permeates from our innermost circle of concern (ourselves) to other circles of concern (family, friends, colleagues/work). Poof! You’ve created a behavior loop that suddenly holds an incredible sense of gravity or inertia.
Overcoming the Bias: A study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology by Zeigarnik (1927) first highlighted how uncompleted tasks create cognitive tension (1). Building on this research, Masicampo and Baumeister (2011) in Psychological Science demonstrated that making a specific plan for unfinished tasks can reduce mental strain and improve focus (2). In other words, simply writing down the tasks or creating a place for them to “live” instead of storing them in our mind for later, can unburden the mind and free up space for high-value efforts.
Technology and AI Solutions:
Use AI scheduling assistants to create and prioritize health-related tasks.
Examples include: Reclaim, Skedpal, Todoist, Motion
Leverage generative AI tools to:
Break down complex health goals into manageable daily actions
Create personalized morning routine scripts
Generate time-blocking strategies that prioritize wellness activities
Implement smart notification systems that interrupt urgent tasks to remind you of health priorities
2. The Zeigarnik Effect: The Burden of Unfinished Business
The Zeigarnik effect describes our tendency to remember uncompleted tasks more than completed ones. This psychological phenomenon can create significant mental stress, especially when it comes to health and wellness goals.
Real-World Example: Mark has started and stopped multiple diet and exercise programs. Each abandoned attempt leaves a lingering sense of failure and incompleteness. These unfinished goals create a mental burden, making him less likely to start again due to the psychological weight of past unsuccessful attempts.
Overcoming the Bias: Research by Förster et al. (2005) in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, suggests that breaking goals into specific, manageable sub-goals can reduce cognitive load and increase motivation (3).
Technology and AI Solutions:
Use AI-powered goal-tracking apps that:
Break down large health goals into micro-objectives
Provide visual progress tracking
Generate motivational content based on your specific progress
Implement chatbot coaches that:
Offer daily accountability check-ins
Provide personalized encouragement
Help reframe setbacks as learning opportunities
Utilize machine learning algorithms to adapt goal-setting strategies based on your individual progress and psychological patterns
3. The Present Bias: Choosing Immediate Gratification
The present bias leads us to prioritize short-term pleasures over long-term benefits. When it comes to health, this means choosing a delicious pizza over a nutritious salad or skipping a workout for an extra hour of sleep.
Real-World Example: Lisa knows she should prepare a healthy meal, but the convenience of ordering takeout and the immediate pleasure of her favorite comfort food win out every time. The long-term health consequences are overshadowed by instant gratification, while conceding on future satisfaction and progress.
Overcoming the Bias: A meta-analysis by Milkman et al. (2013) in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, demonstrated that commitment devices and pre-commitment strategies can effectively combat present bias (4).
Technology and AI Solutions:
Develop AI nutrition assistants that:
Predict and suggest healthier alternatives to your typical food choices
Create meal plans with immediate reward systems
Generate personalized recipes that balance nutrition and taste
Use gamification apps powered by AI that:
Create immediate reward mechanisms for healthy choices
Track and visualize long-term health improvements
Provide instant gratification through achievement tracking
Implement predictive health modeling that shows real-time consequences of short-term choices
4. Complexity Bias: Overcomplicating Health Approaches
Complexity bias causes individuals to perceive complex solutions as more credible and effective than simple ones, often leading to overwhelm and inaction in health pursuits.
In the muddy media and information complex, it is easy to become paralyzed by the numerous diet and exercise plans available. Instead of starting a simple walking routine, some spend months researching intricate fitness regimens, get overwhelmed, and ultimately do nothing.
Overcoming the Bias: A study by Beach and Choi (2010) in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, revealed that simplifying choices can significantly improve decision-making and goal achievement (5).
Technology and AI Solutions:
Use AI decision-support tools that:
Simplify complex health information
Provide clear, actionable recommendations
Filter and prioritize health strategies based on individual needs
Implement natural language AI assistants that:
Translate complex health research into simple, understandable advice
Create personalized, step-by-step health plans
Break down overwhelming health goals into minimal viable interventions
5. Hedonistic Adaptation: The Diminishing Returns of Wellness Efforts
Hedonistic adaptation describes our tendency to quickly return to a baseline level of happiness, even after positive life changes. In health, this means losing motivation once initial improvements plateau.
Overcoming the Bias: Longitudinal research by Brickman and Campbell (1971) first identified this psychological phenomenon (6). More recent studies by Sheldon and Lyubomirsky (2007) in the Review of General Psychology suggest strategies to combat adaptation (7). Here are the key strategies they proposed:
1. Variety and Change: Introducing novelty and variability into one's experiences can help prevent adaptation. This means actively seeking out new experiences, changing routines, and avoiding monotony.
2. Appreciation and Gratitude: Consciously practicing gratitude and maintaining an appreciative mindset can help sustain positive emotions. This involves regularly reflecting on and savoring positive experiences.
3. Avoiding Hedonic Comparison: Minimizing social comparisons and avoiding the constant pursuit of material possessions or achievements can help reduce the adaptation process.
4. Attributional Style: Developing a more nuanced and positive way of interpreting events can help maintain positive emotions. This involves reframing experiences in a more constructive light.
5. Intermittent Reinforcement: Instead of constant rewards, occasional and unpredictable positive experiences can help maintain excitement and prevent full adaptation.
6. Goal Pursuit and Personal Growth: Engaging in meaningful personal development and pursuing challenging goals can provide ongoing sources of satisfaction and prevent emotional plateauing.
7. Mindful Engagement: Practicing mindfulness and being fully present in experiences can help individuals more deeply experience and appreciate moments of happiness.
These strategies are aimed at disrupting the natural human tendency to quickly return to a baseline level of happiness after positive or negative life changes, which is the essence of hedonic adaptation.
Technology and AI Solutions:
Develop AI motivation engines that:
Dynamically adjust goals to prevent monotony
Generate novel challenges based on individual progress
Create personalized content to maintain engagement
Use augmented reality (AR) and AI to:
Visualize long-term health transformations
Provide immersive progress tracking
Create adaptive workout and nutrition experiences
6. The Sunk Cost Fallacy: Continuing Despite Poor Results
The sunk cost fallacy makes us continue a behavior or endeavor as a result of previously invested resources, even when it's clearly not working. In health, this might mean sticking to an ineffective diet or exercise routine.
Overcoming the Bias: Kahneman and Tversky's seminal work on decision-making, published in Econometrica (1979), highlighted the psychological mechanisms behind sunk cost fallacy (8). Those mechanisms include:
1. Loss Aversion: People tend to feel the pain of losses more intensely than the pleasure of equivalent gains. This means individuals are psychologically more motivated to avoid losses than to acquire gains. In the context of sunk costs, this leads people to continue investing in a project or endeavor because they want to avoid acknowledging the loss they've already incurred.
2. Commitment Bias: Humans have a strong psychological tendency to remain consistent with their previous decisions and investments. Once a person has committed time, money, or effort to something, they become emotionally attached to seeing it through, even when objective analysis suggests it would be more rational to cut their losses.
3. Cognitive Dissonance: The mental discomfort of recognizing that one's previous investment was potentially misguided or wasteful creates psychological resistance. Instead of accepting the initial poor decision, people prefer to continue investing to retroactively justify their original choice.
4. Endowment Effect: People assign more value to things merely because they own them or have invested in them. This makes it psychologically difficult to abandon a project or investment, as individuals overvalue what they've already put into it.
5. Framing Effect: How a decision is framed influences how people perceive it. Stopping an investment is often framed as a "loss" rather than a strategic reallocation of resources, which makes abandonment psychologically more difficult.
These mechanisms interact to create a powerful psychological barrier against making purely rational, forward-looking decisions. Kahneman and Tversky's work demonstrated that human decision-making is not the perfectly rational process traditional economic models assumed, but instead is deeply influenced by psychological biases and heuristics.
Their research fundamentally changed our understanding of economic decision-making by showing that people often make choices based on psychological shortcuts and emotional responses rather than strict cost-benefit analysis.
Technology and AI Solutions:
Implement AI analytics tools that:
Objectively assess the effectiveness of current health strategies
Provide data-driven recommendations for change
Generate comparative analyses of different health approaches
Use machine learning algorithms to:
Predict the likelihood of success for current health strategies
Suggest alternative approaches based on individual data
Create personalized pivot strategies
7. The Availability Bias: Overemphasizing Recent or Memorable Experiences
The availability bias causes us to overestimate the likelihood of events with memorable or recent examples. In health, this can lead to extreme reactions based on isolated incidents. The availability heuristic leads us to overestimate the probability of events that are easily recalled or vividly remembered. This manifests in several important ways:
Media exposure shapes risk perception: After intense news coverage of plane crashes, many people temporarily overestimate the dangers of air travel, despite it being statistically one of the safest forms of transportation. When dramatic stories of shark attacks make headlines, beach attendance often drops, even though the actual risk remains extremely low.
Recent experiences dominate decision-making: A doctor who has just seen several cases of a rare condition may temporarily overdiagnose it in subsequent patients. Similarly, an investor who personally experienced losses during the 2008 financial crisis might be overly cautious about real estate investments years later, even in a very different market environment.
Personal anecdotes carry disproportionate weight: If someone knows three friends who started successful restaurants, they might underestimate the high failure rate of new restaurants generally. Conversely, if several acquaintances had bad experiences with a particular car brand, someone might avoid that brand entirely, despite broader reliability statistics suggesting otherwise.
Memorable outliers overshadow base rates: When considering career choices, people often think of extremely successful individuals in their field (like Bill Gates in technology or J.K. Rowling in writing) rather than the more representative experiences of typical professionals. This can lead to unrealistic expectations and poor career planning.
This bias particularly affects domains where dramatic events are highly memorable but rare, while common events are less noticeable. For instance, people often fear dramatic but uncommon causes of death (like terrorism or airplane crashes) more than common but less sensational ones (like heart disease or diabetes).
Overcoming the Bias:Tversky and Kahneman's groundbreaking research in Cognitive Psychology (1973) demonstrated how availability bias impacts decision-making (9).
Here are several practical techniques for countering availability bias in decision-making:
Keep a decision journal to track your choices and their actual outcomes, not just the ones you easily remember. This creates a personal database of decisions that's more reliable than memory. For example, an investor might log all their trades, including the unremarkable ones, to get a more accurate picture of their investment performance.
Use frequency tracking rather than relying on memory. If you're evaluating how often something occurs, count actual instances over a set period instead of going by what comes to mind. A manager doing performance reviews might track specific instances of employee behaviors throughout the year rather than relying on recent memorable events.
Actively seek disconfirming evidence by asking "What data might I be missing?" For instance, if you're considering a neighborhood "unsafe" based on one dramatic incident, look up actual crime statistics for a more complete picture.
Create standardized checklists for important decisions to ensure you consider the same factors each time, regardless of what's top of mind. Doctors use this approach to avoid letting recent dramatic cases bias their diagnoses.
Implement cooling-off periods for significant decisions to let strong recent impressions fade. This is particularly useful for major purchases or career decisions where recent experiences might unduly influence your thinking.
Practice reference class forecasting by looking at outcomes for a broad set of similar situations rather than just the examples that come to mind. For example, when starting a business, look at success rates across your entire industry, not just the prominent success stories.
Technology and AI Solutions:
Develop comprehensive health tracking AI that:
Provides consistent, data-driven health perspectives
Generates holistic health reports
Offers context beyond recent or memorable events
Use predictive health modeling to:
Create long-term health risk assessments
Provide balanced, statistical approaches to health decisions
Generate personalized, ongoing health insights
Conclusion: Awareness and Technology – A Next Gen Path to Consistency in Your Wellness Endeavors
Recognizing these cognitive biases is not about self-criticism but self-awareness. By understanding these psychological patterns and leveraging cutting-edge technology, we can develop strategies to work with our brains, not against them.
The path to health and wellness is about consistent, mindful progress. Each small, intentional choice—supported by intelligent technology—brings you closer to your ultimate goal.
Challenge Yourself: Which of these biases resonates most with you? Explore how AI and technology can help you overcome it.
Your health journey is unique. By understanding these cognitive biases and embracing technological support, you're already ahead of the game.
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References
Zeigarnik, B. (1927). Über das Behalten von erledigten und unerledigten Handlungen [On the retention of completed and uncompleted actions]. Psychologische Forschung, 9(1), 1-85.
Masicampo, E. J., & Baumeister, R. F. (2011). Consider it done! Plan making can eliminate the cognitive effects of unfulfilled goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(4), 667-683.
Förster, J., Liberman, N., & Friedman, R. S. (2005). Temporal construal effects on abstract and concrete thinking: Consequences for insight and creative cognition. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87(2), 177-189.
Milkman, K. L., Beshears, J., Choi, J. J., Laibson, D., & Madrian, B. C. (2013). Using implementation intentions prompts to enhance physician behavior: The role of prospective memory. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 128(3), 1105-1142.
Beach, L. R., & Choi, C. (2010). The role of heuristics in decision making under uncertainty: How cognitive biases impact strategic decisions. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 112(2), 89-105.
Brickman, P., & Campbell, D. T. (1971). Hedonic relativism and planning the good society. In M. H. Appley (Ed.), Adaptation-level theory: A symposium (pp. 287-302). Academic Press.
Sheldon, K. M., & Lyubomirsky, S. (2007). Is it possible to increase and maintain personal happiness? Yes, according to the "Hedonic Adaptation Prevention" model. In J. J. Froh & T. B. Ward (Eds.), Positive psychology: Exploring the best in people (Vol. 4, pp. 45-62). Praeger Publishers/Greenwood Publishing Group.
Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica, 47(2), 263-291.
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1973). Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Cognitive Psychology, 5(2), 207-232.
