The psychology behind move-to-earn

Humans need exercise. Countless studies have shown that regular physical activity is linked to a wide array of benefits to your health and well-being — emotionally, mentally, and physically.

But don’t just take it from us:

• There’s research from the CDC that shows that exercise can lower your risk of chronic diseases, whether it’s type 2 diabetes, heart disease, various types of cancer, and even dementia.
• For those who prize their neurocognition, Harvard psychiatrists have found evidence that exercise nudges our brain to generate new connections and cells.
• And for others who may struggle with mental ailments, physical activity is the foundation of good mental health, relieving stress and anxiety and boosting creativity and self-esteem.

Taking it even further, exercise changes us at the molecular level. Scientists at Stanford Medicine have found that after tracking biomarkers for a wide range of processes — from metabolism and immunity to stress and cardiovascular function — those who were the most physically fit displayed significantly different results from those who aren’t.

Unfortunately…we’re simply not getting enough exercise as a population. Despite all the evidence to show us the myriad benefits of working out, the WHO found that 1 in 4 adults across the world, or around 1.4 billion people, don’t engage in enough physical activity.

A growing problem

This is a major problem for our health. Because we’re not getting the amount of exercise we need, our collective well-being is suffering as a result.

By 2030, the National Center for Biotechnology Information predicts that about 20% of the world’s population will be obese. This has far-ranging health impacts, as obesity increases the risk of debilitating and deadly diseases, including high blood pressure and cholesterol, stroke, gallbladder disease and gallstones.

The economic impact of this is enormous — in the US alone, experts say that the total cost of chronic diseases, specifically driven by the prevalence of obese and overweight populations, was $1.72 trillion, or about 9.3% of the American GDP. And even for people who don’t have any other risk factors, there are significant long-term impacts of not exercising, such as the increased risk for heart disease, according to the CDC.

Zooming out from physical ailments, there’s yet another epidemic — the worldwide mental health crisis. Already, even before COVID-19 struck, the globe was seeing soaring rates of mental distress. But after the pandemic hit, depression rates in the US tripled.

To top it off, loneliness and isolation skyrocketed, and we grew more stressed than ever before. Financial uncertainty plagued large swathes of the population, and workplace burnout reached all-time highs, with a staggering 89% of employees reporting that they had felt overwhelmed, drained, and excessively stressed over the past year.

How can we solve this? For the most part, accessibility isn’t the issue. Almost anyone can walk outside or grab some running shoes to get moving. Technology and opportunity, perhaps? We think not. The global health and fitness industry is a trillion-dollar juggernaut, and even with all the new technology at our fingertips, we still don’t move enough.

To get to the root of the issue, we need to dig deeper into human behaviour and psychology.

The psychology behind working out

“We’ve evolved to not work out,” explains Dr Daniel E. Lieberman.

Dr Lieberman is a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard and the author of Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do is Healthy and Rewarding. “Today we’ve created this world where we no longer have to be physically active. And so we now have to choose it,” he explains.

When it boils down to it, humans are wired to conserve energy. While we may intellectually know that physical activity is good for us, on the biological level, it simply doesn’t make sense to expend extra energy. We can survive perfectly fine without it, so why work harder?

To make matters even more difficult, many of the benefits of exercise are delayed or hard to quantify. For example, it’s hard to tell exactly when you’ve lowered your risk of heart disease. And in the age of instant gratification, it can often take a monumental effort to convince the brain to work hard over and over again for something that isn’t easy to grasp — that isn’t right there before our eyes.

Introducing incentives

To tackle this issue, a number of researchers have begun to test out how incentives work with exercise. In particular, studies have been done to examine how monetary rewards can help us build habits or stick to an exercise routine.

• One program, which rewarded people for returning to the gym after a missed workout, found that it increased gym visits by 16%.
• Another clinical trial that used loss aversion (participants who didn’t reach a step goal lost $2), logged more steps than the control group.

However, not all the findings tell the same story. Another experiment by the National Bureau of Economic Research came up with outcomes to the contrary. The scientists discovered that, even though participants were promised an Amazon gift card reward, they only made it to the gym a paltry 0.14 times more than the group who weren’t promised anything.

Why the mixed results?

It turns out, designing the right setup to “trick” our evolutionary instincts is a complex game. And to figure out what works and what doesn’t work, it’s important to reference the psychology behind how we form habits — how we transform action into an automatic, consistent routine.

The science behind habit formation

James Clear, New York Times bestselling author of Atomic Habits, provides a simple framework to explore the science of habit change. The four steps of a habit loop, says Clear, are the following:

1. Cue: What triggers your brain to initiate a behaviour
2. Craving: The thoughts, feelings, and emotions to trigger a response
3. Response: The actual habit that is performed
4. Reward: The end goal

Applying this to an exercise routine, we might imagine that the average exerciser might get stuck at various steps. Unless you’re a regular exerciser, you might not yet have the cues in place to prompt you to get running. Or, if you reward yourself with a cookie at the end, you might be undoing all the exercise you just ended up doing!

Luckily, there are some steps that we can take to make habit formation easier:

1. Cue: Make it obvious
2. Craving: Make it attractive
3. Response: Make it easy
4. Reward: Make it satisfying

STEPN, a habit-forming machine

In the modern age, nearly all of us are busy people with packed schedules and to-do lists. While it isn’t rocket science to follow these habit formation laws, many of us simply don’t have the time or energy to construct ideal environments to develop healthy habits.

That’s why startups like STEPN are stepping in to help. By adding the STEPN app to your home screen, there’s an obvious starting point to getting your workout done. Let’s take a look at how that manifests within the science of habit formation.

Cue: “Make it obvious” Every day, the amount of energy that you can use to earn crypto refills. This creates a natural prompt for users to get outside and move so their energy won’t go to waste. Essentially, it makes it “obvious” that you should use up all your energy so you can earn as much as possible. This also conjures up the psychology of “loss aversion,” which has been found to be quite effective in motivating people to work out.

Craving: “Make it attractive.” For many people, going outside to walk, jog, or run can feel boring at times. A lap around the block, no matter how good for our health, simply can’t compete with the dopamine rushes of TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram ready at the tip of our fingers. That’s why STEPN has built-in gamification aspects and pleasing designs to add some fun to the mix.

Plus, there’s the added attractiveness of being able to engage in the web3 world and flex your NFTs. When you can see your colourful NFT sneaker portfolios, there are elements of emotion and excitement added to the mix.

Response: “Make it easy.” Walking and running, fortunately, is quite accessible to most able-bodied individuals. Since the large majority of the population can go outside and take a few laps around the block, this makes it simple and straightforward. With STEPN, once you’re in the ecosystem, you’re set. You don’t need to drive to the cycling studio, sign in, change, and then get on the bike.

In the future, STEPN plans to make it even easier to access the ecosystem with its rental system platform.

Reward: “Make it satisfying.” This is the most obvious one. With crypto incentives after every walk or run, STEPN ensures that users are rewarded for their workouts. And for many people, that can be the final nudge they need to get themselves on a healthy habit kick.

Conclusion

Move-to-earn is still a very early category, but user results from STEPN are already showing incredible promise and impact. Thousands of people are developing healthier habits and integrating a consistent workout routine into their daily lives. By leveraging human psychology and making exercise addictive, STEPN is on a mission to transform the health of millions of people around the world.

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