Motivation dip? Why the middle of a goal is the hardest part

Week one of anything is great. New running shoes, a fresh notebook, a plan. The last weeks are great too: the race is close, the launch is in sight, you can almost taste it.

And then there’s week seven. Nothing’s new any more, the end is still far away, and you start wondering why you ever thought this was a good idea. If that’s where you are right now: it’s not you. It’s the middle.

The “stuck in the middle” effect

In three experiments, researchers Andrea Bonezzi, Miguel Brendl and Matteo De Angelis (2011) found that motivation can be high near the start and near the end of a goal, and dip in the middle.

Their explanation is about what you compare your progress to. At the start, you compare to where you began, so every step feels like a big jump: you’ve already doubled your distance. Near the end, you compare to what’s left, and every step feels like a big chunk of the remainder. In the middle, both comparisons feel small. Five more kilometres doesn’t feel like much of anything.

You also cut more corners in the middle

It’s not only motivation. In a series of studies, Maferima Touré-Tillery and Ayelet Fishbach (2012) found that people stuck to their own standards more at the beginning and the end of a sequence than in the middle. One example: people who celebrated Hanukkah were most likely to light the candles on the first and last nights, and more likely to skip one of the nights in between.

The middle feels like it “counts less”, so that’s where the shortcuts sneak in.

And near the finish, we speed up

The flip side is just as useful. In a famous study at a university café (Kivetz, Urminsky and Zheng, 2006), customers with a “buy ten, get one free” card bought coffee more often the closer they got to the free one. Customers who got a twelve-stamp card with two stamps already filled in finished faster than those with a regular ten-stamp card, even though they needed the same ten purchases.

Feeling close to a finish line pulls you forward. So the trick is to create more finish lines.

5 ways to get through the middle

1. Make more finish lines

Break a long goal into stages of three or four weeks, each with its own clear end: “By the end of March, I run 10 km without stopping.” Every stage has its own exciting start and its own pull at the end, and the long middle shrinks.

2. Switch your view at halfway

Before halfway, look back at how far you’ve come. After halfway, look ahead at how little is left. That way you always look at the smaller, more motivating number, which is what the “stuck in the middle” research suggests helps.

3. Give yourself a head start

Remember the pre-stamped coffee cards. When you set a new stage, count what you’ve already done: “I’ve already run three times this week, two to go” beats “five runs this week” on a Wednesday.

4. Celebrate the halfway point

Halfway is usually ignored, which is exactly why it’s a good moment for a small celebration: a nice dinner, new running socks, an evening off. Mark it, and the middle becomes a milestone instead of a swamp.

5. Let someone else watch the middle

At the start, your own excitement carries you. In the middle, a partner who checks in every week does the job instead. A meta-analysis of 138 studies (Harkin and colleagues, 2016) found that monitoring your progress helps, and helps more when you report it to others. Our guide to tracking your progress shows a simple way to do it together.

The middle is easier with two

Pactful pairs you by hand with someone who’s working on a goal of their own, ideally close by. We’re starting in Hamburg, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht. You’ll hit your boring middles at different times, which means one of you is always there to say, “Come on, halfway is a milestone.”

Join the waitlist. Consider it your first stamp.