The Intention Gap: What gets in the way of doing what we want to do?

There it sits. The gym bag. Packed. By the door. Judging you. Ah, so it’s another ‘not today?’ is it?

You want to go. You know that you'll feel better afterwards. You've never once come home from a workout and thought, well, that was a terrible idea. And yet here you are, on the sofa, negotiating with yourself about whether tomorrow counts as essentially the same as today.

You are not lazy. Or maybe you are? You are human. Or maybe… well actually you are but, there's actually a name for what's happening.

The intention-action gap

Psychologists, apparently, call it the intention-action gap, the uncomfortable space between what we intend to do and what we actually do. It's been studied since the 1990s, and it turns out it's very common. Research suggests that around 50% of our intentions never translate into action. Half. We are, as a species, surprisingly good at wanting things and surprisingly bad at doing them.

A related concept is akrasia - which sounds like it should be the sentence “akrasia be bothered” - is a term borrowed from ancient Greek philosophy, meaning acting against your own better judgement. Aristotle wrestled with it, so it says when down this rabbit hole. But Socrates thought it was impossible (he believed if you truly knew something was good, you'd do it). Socrates, turns out, was wrong. Knowing is not the same as doing. We've all got the membership to prove it.

What's actually going on in your brain

When you're deciding whether to go to the gym right now, your brain is running a cost-benefit analysis weighted heavily in favour of present comfort. Behavioural economists call this temporal discounting - the tendency to value immediate rewards far more than future ones, even when the future reward is objectively better.

The present-you who wants to stay on the sofa is fighting the future-you who wants to feel fit and healthy. And present-you has home advantage.

Add to that the effort paradox, when we consistently overestimate how hard or unpleasant an action will be before we do it, and consistently underestimate how good we'll feel once it's done. Your brain is, in short, a slightly unreliable narrator when it comes to predicting your future experience.

So is there a tipping point?

Apparently, research would suggest yes and it's smaller than you think. Research by BJ Fogg suggests the issue isn't motivation: it's the size of the ask. We set ourselves up to fail by treating action as a big, effortful thing, when what actually moves us is tiny. His Tiny Habits model proposes anchoring new behaviours to existing ones and making them almost embarrassingly small. Not go to the gym for an hour. Just first: put your trainers on.

There's also the concept of implementation intentions, a simple technique developed by psychologist Peter Gollwitzer. Instead of "I want to exercise more," you make a specific if-then plan: If it's Tuesday at 7am, then I will put my gym kit on and leave the house. Studies show this single shift can double or even triple follow-through. The decision is already made. There's nothing to negotiate.

It's maybe not a character flaw

We might repetitively think ‘I’m lazy, I’m rubbish. I’m a procrastinated”. And we might be right. But also sometimes other dark arts are at work. What keeps us still isn't a weakness or lack of willpower. It's the way we are wired, to protect us from discomfort, even imagined discomfort, or the effort required. The gap between intention and action is the gap between who we are right now and who we're becoming, or could be if we take the action.

And that gap is bridgeable, not through motivation and not through berating yourself. Through design. Through making the right thing the easiest thing.

The gym bag is still by the door. But now you know why it's been waiting. Maybe that's enough to make Tuesday at 6.30pm different.

What's your gym bag? What do you know you want to do and what's the smallest possible version of it you could do today?