High intensity exercise training (HIIT) is increasingly supported by research as a way to improve physical functioning in older adults. In an ongoing study, my colleagues and I are looking at HIIT as a way to prevent age-related declines in health among people with HIV, who are at greater risk for chronic diseases and disabilities than their age-matched peers. Nursing PhD student Harriet Fridah Adhiambo led a qualitative study to better understand our study participants' experiences with exercise, with results that support key propositions of Two Minds Theory. You can read her full paper here.
Harriet asked participants several questions: Their current reasons for exercising, their previous experiences with exercise, barriers that they experienced when trying to exercise, and what they saw as the benefits of exercise. Two Minds Theory suggests that people's experiences can be meaningfully differentiated on the basis of temporal immediacy, the extent to which something is described as an experience happening "now" versus as something that happened in the past or is expected to happen in the future. Immediacy can be identified based on verb tense (past/present/future) and also on other markers such as whether a statement is abstract (less immediate) or concrete (more immediate). Dr. Jay Efran and I described this diagnostic use of immediacy in language in a 2000 book chapter about psychotherapy.
Two Minds Theory further suggests that temporal immediacy gives insight into whether a statement is coming out of the Intuitive Mind (more immediate) or the Narrative Mind (less immediate). I have previously shown evidence of a substantial disconnect between questionnaire responses framed as "I currently feel ..." (more immediate/Intuitive Mind) and those expressed as "I usually feel ..." (less immediate/Narrative Mind). One would logically expect that we could average together 7 days' worth of surveys on "how I feel today," and get a result that closely approximates a single retrospective question that says "on average, how I felt over the last 7 days." But the level of agreement is generally 25% or less. This evidence suggests that temporal immediacy in language is a meaningful indicator of whether a statement reflects the views of the Narrative or the Intuitive Mind.
Finally, Two Minds Theory suggests that only the Intuitive Mind controls behavior. I have argued that it's not a matter of effort or concentration; the Narrative Mind is simply too slow. In the context of exercising, this means that statements about actual behavior (exercising or not exercising) ought to be tied to the more-immediate Intuitive Mind, and statements about desire or intention (reasons for exercising, plans to exercise, etc.) should be tied to the less-immediate Narrative Mind.
This predicted pattern of results is exactly what Harriet found. The "reasons for exercising" question yielded statements that 85% of the time were in line with the Narrative Mind. For example, people made abstract statements like "exercise is vital to mental health" or described their overall experience with exercising and what they liked or didn't like about it. Asking people about their reasons for exercising seems to have prompted them to reflect on the future, and future-focused talk is about plans and goals. In line with Two Minds Theory, this type of language also had markers of non-immediacy such as abstraction and a lack of personal language. For example, this statement fails to contain the word "I" or "me" anywhere in it: "physically active means walking to work, walking to the store, working in the garden [or] house."
The "barriers to exercise" question also produced mainly Narrative responses. For example, people who talked about past barriers related to the COVID-19 pandemic seemed to be in a more Narrative, storytelling mode: e.g., "you know, like during COVID, everything, you know, would close. It was harder to go back. I tried doing it at home and noticed that ... it's easier around people." This example has some of the non-immediacy markers ("you know") and broad statements like "it's easier around people." Barriers related to age and comorbidities were a bit more immediate, e.g. "I have arthritis, just about every part of my body in some area. So it limits me for a lot of things." Yet this example also has some level of non-agency ("it limits me" instead of "I'm limited") that may indicate a more Narrative frame. Breaks in speech such as "you know" are also among the elements identified by Efran and Cook as examples of non-immediacy in language.
The past-focused "previous experience with exercise" question produced a mix of Narrative- and Intuitive-type responses. In the Narrative frame, a good example is the broad summative statement "gaining weight over the years has diminished my enjoyment of hiking." The following example has "I" statements, but also an interesting lack of agency: "I was going to the gym four or five times a week. Then I relocated here to Denver and got stopped. My job was consuming a lot more time." A few Intuitive-type responses about past exercise experiences were tied to a particular event, such as "I ended up getting hurt ... and it took me, like, 9 months to heal." A concrete event of that type might be described in more immediate language because it was in some sense still "real" to the participant; it divided their experience neatly into "pre" and "post." Yet those concrete memories were also the exception to the rule, with most past-focused statements being less specific and more abstract.
By contrast, participants' responses to the "benefits of exercise" question were most likely to result in high-immediacy, Intuitive-Mind statements. For example, people commented on their current experience with statements like "my breathing is better" or "I really noticed that I'm feeling better, physically and mentally." Notice the present tense and the use of "me" or "I" in these statements, compared to the more abstract ones given above. There were some Narrative-type statements in the "benefits of exercise" category as well, such as "I think the benefit is it keeps you healthy." However, the Intuitive-type responses were predominant in this category, which is potentially noteworthy because these participants were all actively engaged in an exercise program at the time of the interview -- i.e., a present-focused situation, which would be expected to pull for an Intuitive-Mind response.
As expected, then, statements about actual exercise behavior tended to be more immediate, including more "I" statements, less hedging or distancing language, and more descriptions of actual experiences rather than abstract goals. The highest level of immediacy was seen in response to the "benefits of exercise" question, which might have been particularly salient for this group of participants who were, in fact, engaged in an exercise program at the time they were interviewed. Results might be different for a group that was not exercising, and for whom the benefits were more abstract; in that situation, people's responses for the highly-Narrative "reasons for exercising" category and the "benefits of exercising" category might not have been so distinct.
One thing that I wish we had examined in this study is whether individual participants with more Intuitive-level reasons for exercising or benefits of exercise were actually more successful at exercising, and whether having more Intuitive-level barriers or negative past experiences would have reduced their level of success. An additional hypothesis derived from Two Minds Theory is that Intuitive factors exert greater control over actual behavior, so someone with a lot of Narrative-level reasons for exercising but one very good Intuitive-level reason against (e.g., pain) would probably be expected not to be exercising regularly even if the total count of benefits versus barriers seemed to favor exercise. In other words, I'm interested to know whether the Intuitive-level benefits and barriers should be weighted more heavily than the Narrative-level ones in predicting someone's actual behavior. This type of comparison of behavior vs. the linguistic features of people's decision-making process would be an interesting direction for further research.
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