“Hold on!” “Do not give up!” “Just a little more!” Do you think that encouragement is ineffective? But no: according to new data, even if motivating words are not perceived by us at the level of consciousness, they affect the unconscious and lead to a good result.
In addition to skills and abilities, there is another factor that limits our capabilities – this is fatigue. For example, in athletes, it also has purely physiological causes – lactic acid accumulates in the muscles. However, according to some theories, the brain deliberately “hides” a small reserve of energy, giving signals in advance of complete exhaustion, which in fact has not yet come.
Professor Samuele Marcora, head of research at the School of Sports Medicine at the University of Kent, put forward an alternative hypothesis, which he calls the psychobiological model. According to her, the onset of exhaustion depends on such psychological factors as subjectively perceived efforts and motivation.
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- Motivation management
In one of his experiments, athletes were divided into two groups and given the task of working on exercise bikes while watching a TV screen. For a fraction of a second, images flickered on the screen that did not have time to be perceived consciously: they were registered by the unconscious of the athletes. One group was shown images of happy faces, the other – sad ones. As a result, participants in the first group pedaled three minutes longer and were less tired (according to their own feelings). In further experiments, the group that was shown pictures with positive, motivating words (“forward”, “more energetic”, livelier”) showed results 17% higher than the one in front of which the words with a “negative” signal flashed – “stop”, “hard”, “rest”.
Summing up the study, Marcora suggested creating special glasses for long-distance runners and marathon runners, in which motivating messages would appear for the subconscious. Well, great idea!
Подробнее: А. McCormick, С. Meijen and S. M. Marcora «Psychological determinants of whole-body endurance performance», Sports Medicine, 2015.