By DAVID SHAYWITZ
Company — the conviction I can form my future — is a crucial driver of human well being and human potential.
Additionally it is the issue ignored by most digital well being platforms.
College of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman, who has spent a long time learning this, says company boils all the way down to the assumption “I could make a optimistic distinction on the earth.” Folks with excessive company consider there’s something they will do subsequent that may assist – after which they really attempt.
As Seligman emphasizes, the moments after we “attempt laborious…persist in opposition to the percentages…[and] make new, artistic departures” are exactly when company is at work. That additional effort and sustained dedication — not simply the mindset — exhibits up as improved efficiency, larger achievement, and enhanced well being. It additionally manifests as resilience, enabling us not solely to recuperate from adversity however (ideally) to bounce again as an excellent higher model of ourselves.
GLP-1s highlight the power and promise of newfound agency. For a lot of dwelling with weight problems, previous makes an attempt at weight reduction strengthened a “cycle of despair” – making an attempt tougher principally meant failing once more. With the appearance of GLP-1 medicines, many discovered that their weight would come down — and keep down. Oprah Winfrey called the sensation “a aid, like redemption, like a present.”
The deeper change is psychological: for the primary time in years, effort feels rewarded. GLP-1s unlock an agentic dividend: the motivational increase that comes from lastly with the ability to take management of your well being. That surplus sense of risk might be channeled into the acquainted well being fundamentals — shifting extra and sleeping higher — but additionally, usually extra importantly, into how we present up in {our relationships} and communities, within the enthusiasm we deliver to our hobbies and pursuits, into the totality of experiences that make life so significant.
Company is the motivational currency of well being, the ATP of habits change – it lets success in a single area drive progress in others.
Related health platforms have an analogous alternative. Every discrete achievement — ending a category, driving thrice in per week, noticing that the steps really feel simpler or the again hurts much less — is a small proof of “I can do that.”
In fixating narrowly on efficiency metrics, platforms like WHOOP, Oura, Peloton, and Tonal are leaving company on the desk. The chance right here is to assist folks acknowledge, title, and financial institution their achievements, compounding the agentic increase that comes from every small win and making it simpler to translate that confidence into the remainder of life.
There are methods that appear to assist company – cognitive reframing, parts of motivational interviewing, wholesome dialog abilities that assist folks generate their very own plans, positive-psychology workout routines that improve a way of management and risk.
However there isn’t a well-validated playbook. The 2021 Duckworth–Milkman exercise megastudy and a 2022 review by Feig and colleagues each level in the identical course: many thoughtfully crafted interventions, when rigorously evaluated, have disappointingly yielded solely modest, typically short-lived adjustments in habits; within the case of the megastudy, the results noticed had been on common practically ten instances smaller than knowledgeable forecasts. Cracking this nut stays one of many greatest alternatives in well being and know-how.
Furthermore, as public-health thinkers like Michael Kelly and Mary Barker, and Angela Duckworth in her emphasis on “situational agency” remind us, habits is all the time embedded in social practices and day by day routines, not floating in particular person headspace. Kevin Corridor’s work on obesity underscores the identical level from a metabolic angle: in environments saturated with ultra-processed, hyper-palatable, calorie-dense meals, many individuals will overeat and achieve weight. Our environmental defaults could make it a lot tougher for particular person company to realize traction.
Highly effective rising applied sciences — from AI to related units and “health OS” platforms — now give us a brand new lever on this downside, however provided that we use them thoughtfully. To this point, most effort has focused on treating folks as objects to be managed, with platforms competing to instrument each second and compress our lives into ever extra granular scores and rankings.
The true white area, I’d argue, is a platform that may reliably domesticate company at scale. Constructing one thing like that will imply placing our most subtle AI and connected-health instruments within the service of scaffolding human company — serving to folks see actual choices, notch early wins, recuperate from lapses, and let small successes accumulate right into a lived identification of functionality.
None of this — from GLP-1s to digital well being platforms — makes habits change straightforward, nevertheless it does make sustained, structured assist extra attainable than earlier than, for sufferers, for customers, and for workers making an attempt to remain nicely whereas they work.
Whereas we don’t have all of the solutions, designing for company will possible emphasize:
- Early, plain wins which might be small however significant (“I harm much less,” “stairs really feel simpler”).
- Guided selections as an alternative of scripts or chaos, so folks expertise themselves as selecting, not simply complying.
- Suggestions that hyperlinks progress to particular person effort (“since you did X, you’re now experiencing Y”), slightly than to the brilliance of algorithms or the knowledge of clinicians.
- Methods to financial institution progress so actions add as much as a lived story: “I’m somebody who exhibits up.”
By focusing know-how on enhancing our intrinsic potential slightly than simply crunching our extruded numbers, we are able to strengthen our company and with it, our capability to reside more healthy, extra fully realized lives.
In a 12 months when tech-forward well being platforms are vying to include essentially the most agentic AI, our best problem, and most vital alternative, could also be determining the best way to leverage these ever-more highly effective rising applied sciences — with knowledge, humility, and humanity — to nourish the event of essentially the most agentic folks.
Dr. Shaywitz, a physician-scientist, is a lecturer at Harvard Medical College, an adjunct fellow on the American Enterprise Institute, and founding father of KindWellHealth, an initiative centered on advancing well being by means of the science of company. This piece was previously published on the Timmerman Report
