By DAVID SHAYWITZ
Company — the conviction I can form my future — is an important driver of human well being and human potential.
It’s also the issue ignored by most digital well being platforms.
College of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman, who has spent a long time finding out this, says company boils all the way down to the idea “I could make a optimistic distinction on the planet.” Individuals with excessive company imagine there’s something they will do subsequent that may assist – after which they really attempt.
As Seligman emphasizes, the moments after we “attempt exhausting…persist towards the percentages…[and] make new, inventive departures” are exactly when company is at work. That further effort and sustained willpower — 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 get well from adversity however (ideally) to bounce again as a good 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 more durable principally meant failing once more. With the arrival of GLP-1 medicines, many discovered that their weight would come down — and keep down. Oprah Winfrey called the sensation “a reduction, 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 enhance that comes from lastly having the ability to take management of your well being. That surplus sense of chance will be channeled into the acquainted well being fundamentals — transferring extra and sleeping higher — but additionally, typically extra importantly, into how we present up in {our relationships} and communities, within the enthusiasm we convey 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.
Linked health platforms have an identical alternative. Every discrete achievement — ending a category, driving thrice in every 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 enhance that comes from every small win and making it simpler to translate that confidence into the remainder of life.
There are strategies 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 enhance a way of management and chance.
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 route: many thoughtfully crafted interventions, when rigorously evaluated, have disappointingly yielded solely modest, typically short-lived modifications in habits; within the case of the megastudy, the results noticed have been on common practically ten instances smaller than professional forecasts. Cracking this nut stays one of many greatest alternatives in well being and expertise.
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 more durable 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 drawback, however provided that we use them thoughtfully. Up to now, 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 actual white area, I’d argue, is a platform that may reliably domesticate company at scale. Constructing one thing like that may 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, get well from lapses, and let small successes accumulate right into a lived id of functionality.
None of this — from GLP-1s to digital well being platforms — makes habits change simple, however it does make sustained, structured assist extra attainable than earlier than, for sufferers, for shoppers, and for workers making an attempt to remain properly whereas they work.
Whereas we don’t have all of the solutions, designing for company will seemingly emphasize:
- Early, simple wins which are small however significant (“I damage 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”), quite 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 expertise on enhancing our intrinsic potential quite than simply crunching our extruded numbers, we will strengthen our company and with it, our capability to stay more healthy, extra fully realized lives.
In a yr when tech-forward well being platforms are vying to include essentially the most agentic AI, our biggest problem, and most vital alternative, could also be determining how one can 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
