Why Values and Good Intentions Aren’t Enough: How to Close the Belief–Action Gap
If I asked you what you value most in life, it’s likely your answer will be pretty predictable.
Most People value Health, Family, Living well, Being present, and Enjoying the time They have.
So you probably have a fair idea about what you value. But, take a look at your daily actions, and they might tell a very different story.
If someone was spying in your windows today, here’s what they might see:
- An argument with your partner quietly brewing, because you’re annoyed at them but too tired to speak up.
- Mid-week drinks because "it’s been a long day".
- A huge dinner plate because you skipped lunch - again.
- A late-night scroll because you need to “switch off”, even though you know it will leave you foggy the next morning.
None of these behaviours make you a bad person. They just make you human.
They reflect something psychologists have studied for decades:
The belief–action gap.
What is The Belief-Action Gap?
The belief-action gap, or intention-behaviour gap, is the distance between what we say is important versus what we actually do day-to-day. It helps to explain why good intentions don’t always lead to action, and why it is so hard to break unhealthy habits.
It’s frustrating but predictable, and it’s especially common during high-pressure times like the Christmas and New Year period, or high-stakes periods at work, when your demands rise but your mental bandwidth shrinks.
The good news is with the right tools, you can close the gap.
This article gives you practical, evidence-based strategies to help you stay aligned with your values, even when life gets busy, messy, or emotionally charged.
Research About the Belief-Action Gap
A 2023 meta-analysis of physical activity studies found that, among people who intended to exercise, roughly 47.6% failed to follow through, i.e. they remained “unsuccessful intenders” (Feil et al., 2023).
Another large 2024 study showed that forming detailed plans, especially “action plans” or “coping plans”, significantly helped bridge the gap between intention and exercise behaviour (Wee, et al., 2022).
Self-regulation techniques also work. A meta-analysis of “mental contrasting” (imagining a desired future, then contrasting it with present reality and obstacles) showed a small-to-moderate positive effect on health behaviours over 3 months (Cross and Sheffield, 2019).
More recently, a 2025 study found that people’s personal tendencies around how they value physical effort can influence whether their intentions lead to behaviour. For those who see effort as less aversive, or more manageable, intention translated into action more reliably (Maltagliati, 2025).
Habit formation strategies matter. Research on habits and physical activity shows that when behaviours become habitual, they’re triggered more by context or cues than by conscious intention. This means that good structuring of your environment and routines, and consistency in your practice makes a real difference (Hawlader, et al., 2023).
Setting intentions alone usually isn’t enough.
What helps is concrete planning, environmental design, consistent small behaviours, and understanding your own motivations and tendencies. This helps to reduce decision fatigue and mental load, leading to more sustainable behaviour change that aligns your habits with your values.
Why Some Behaviour Changes Feel Easy and Others Feel Almost Impossible
Not all gaps are created equal. Research shows several factors influence whether an intention translates into action:
Starting vs stopping behaviours: Initiating a new behaviour, like exercise, is usually harder than maintaining an existing one, while stopping a behaviour, like reducing late-night scrolling or alcohol, also has challenges. Stopping a behaviour often requires new positive replacement behaviours for the behaviour that is stopped (Kray et al., 2018; Duckworth et al., 2023).
Perceived effort & self-efficacy: If a behaviour feels achievable and manageable, it’s more likely to happen.
Environmental support & stress: Context cues, social support, and low stress reduce friction. This makes follow-through easier.
Habit strength (“habit stickiness”): Well-established habits are easier to maintain because they require less conscious effort. New habits take more planning, cues, and repetition to stick (Lally et al., 2015; Gardner et al., 2022). When thinking about wellbeing in the workplace, this shows why popular wellbeing challenges, though inspiring, often don’t lead to long term behaviour change.
Essentially, the smaller gaps are often the ones where habits, confidence, environmental support, and planning are aligned. Larger gaps appear when these supports are missing or when stress is high.
Why the Gap Gets Wider During Stressful Periods
Most professionals feel stretched at different times of the year, and the impact on their mental health is clear.
Here’s why the belief–action gap often gets worse in high-pressure times:
Decision fatigue from juggling work deadlines and family demands
Emotional overload, especially for parents and carers
Disrupted routines around sleep, exercise, and food
Social pressure to “celebrate”, for example during Christmas and the New Year, in ways that don’t support wellbeing
Financial stress, which can reduce mental bandwidth
Reduced daylight (in some parts of Australia) affecting mood and energy
Travel, visitors, or school holidays reducing personal time
When your cognitive load increases, your healthy habits become harder to access. This is the moment when values and behaviour drift apart.
But you don’t have to wait for January, or when all the stress has disappeared, to “get back on track”. You can close the gap now, with simple, research-backed shifts.
Practical, Research-Backed Ways to Close the Gap
Here are five strategies that can help you stay aligned with what matters and keep you on track with your healthy habits.
1. Clarify Your Real “Why” (Beyond Vague Goals)
Before anything else, clarify what you care about. Choose 2–3 core values for the season, such as connection, calm, clarity, or health. Then pair each value with one simple behaviour you can commit to.
Why it works: when your values are explicit, they act as internal anchors. That clarity makes it easier to notice when you’re drifting and to course-correct before you act.
Example: If “presence” is a value, you might set: “No screens after 9pm” or “At least one 15-minute meaningful chat with my partner per weeknight.”
2. Shrink the Goal Until It Fits Into Real Life
People who build mental contrasting and implementation intentions, i.e., picturing obstacles, and creating clear “if X happens, I will do Y” plans, are significantly more likely to translate their intention into action (Loy, et al., 2016).
Example:
“If I finish work after 5pm, then I’ll spend 10 minutes writing tomorrow’s to-do list before I log off.”
“If I feel like cracking open a drink on Wednesday after work, I will instead pour a glass of water and go for a 10-minute walk.”
Planning ahead like this reduces friction, and it reduces reliance on “motivation in the moment.” It primes you for action when you’re at your weakest.
3. Design Support Into Your Day, Not Just Into Your Head
Life is busy and unpredictable. Heavy goals often fail because they require perfect conditions. Instead, go for small consistent actions over almost impossible huge goals.
5 minutes of simple stretching or breathwork.
Packing lunch the night before to avoid take-away.
Setting aside 5 minutes to check in with your partner before bed, even if it’s quick.
Planning consistently, plus simple and manageable actions (rather than lofty goals) increases follow-through (Wee, et al., 2022).
4. Shape your environment and defaults
It’s easier to stick with good behaviours when your surroundings support them.
Keep healthy snacks visible and handy.
Remove or limit cues for behaviours you don’t want, e.g. late-night social media or alcohol).
Build “buffers” between work and personal life. Even 10 minutes of transition helps reset your mind between two different aspects of your life.
If you tend to skip exercise, schedule it like a meeting. Put it on your calendar, with reminders, and make it non-negotiable.
Habit-theory research shows that behaviour becomes automatic when it’s triggered by cues and then repeated often. Setting up a supportive environment helps make new habits stick (Hawlader, et al., 2022).
5. Use Social and Professional Support Strategically
Sustained change is easier when you don’t go it alone. Even light accountability, like a wellbeing buddy, a partner agreement, or a coach, increases your chances of follow-through. This makes behaviour change more sustainable over the long-term.
Recent studies show that interventions that combine planning, social support and self-monitoring outperform those relying on intention alone. As one study noted, the intention–behaviour link becomes stronger when intention is clear, the goal is prioritised, and the actions don’t conflict with other goals or strong motivations (Connor, et al., 2023).
What This Means for Busy Professionals
The start of the year is a classic annual test of whether your daily actions reflect your deeper values. Despite good intentions and purposeful resolutions, work deadlines, family commitments, fatigue, and changes in routine mean it’s easy to slip into autopilot or short-term coping, and lose sight of the bigger, value-aligned goals you have set for yourself.
Here’s a quick checklist to help you stay grounded:
Pause and choose 2–3 values that matter most right now.
Write down one small action per value (something you can realistically do).
Identify likely obstacles, and build simple “if–then” plans.
Look around your environment — what supports and what undermines those small actions?
Invite at least one other person into a “buddy system” (partner, friend, colleague, coach).
It won’t be perfect. You might slip up. Maybe you’ll slip up several times. But alignment isn’t about perfection. It’s about consistency and intention.
Ask yourself: which belief–action gap is most likely to show up for you in the next month, and what’s one small action you can take now to close it?
Closing the Gap Doesn’t Mean Doing More, It Means Doing Differently
Intentions, values and hopes for a good life matter. But as recent research shows, they don’t automatically translate into action.
If you want your actions to reflect what you truly care about, especially during busy and stressful periods, you’ll need more than rely on your own goodwill.
You’ll need clarity, planning, small actions, a supportive environment and perhaps a little help from others.
That’s how values become habits. And that’s how wellbeing sticks.
If you want to close your own belief–action gaps or help your team stay aligned with what matters most, I can help. I work with busy professionals and leaders to design personalised, evidence-based strategies that actually stick, even during the busiest times of year. Reach out to explore how Sunrise Well can make your wellbeing goals real, not just aspirational.
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REFERENCES
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Divine, A., & Astill, S. (2025). Reinforcing implementation intentions with imagery increases physical activity habit strength and behaviour. British Journal of Health Psychology. https://www.ovid.com/journals/bjhp/abstract/10.1111/bjhp.12795
Conner, M., Wilding, S., Norman, P., (2024) Does Intention Strength Moderate the Intention–Health Behavior Relationship for Covid-19 Protection Behaviors?, Annals of Behavioral Medicine, Volume 58, Issue 2, February, Pages 92–99, https://doi.org/10.1093/abm/kaad062
Cross A., Sheffield D., (2019), Mental contrasting for health behaviour change: a systematic review and meta-analysis of effects and moderator variables. Health Psychol Rev. 2019 Jun;13(2):209-225. doi: 10.1080/17437199.2019.1594332. Epub 2019 Mar 29. PMID: 30879403.
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Hawlader, M.D.H., Mozid, NE., Sharmin, S. et al, (2023) The art of forming habits: applying habit theory in changing physical activity behaviour. J Public Health (Berl.) 31, 2045–2057. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10389-022-01766-4
Loy L.S., Wieber F., Gollwitzer P.M., Oettingen G., (2016), Supporting Sustainable Food Consumption: Mental Contrasting with Implementation Intentions (MCII) Aligns Intentions and Behavior. Front Psychol. Apr 29;7:607. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00607. PMID: 27199840; PMCID: PMC4850472.
Maltagliati S., Raichlen D.A., Rhodes R.E., Cheval B., (2025), Closing the intention-behaviour gap in physical activity: The moderating effect of individual differences in the valuation of physical effort. Br J Health Psychol. May; 30(2):e12790. doi: 10.1111/bjhp.12790. PMID: 40130726.
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The contribution and interplay of implicit and explicit processes on physical activity behavior: Empirical testing of the Physical Activity Adoption and Maintenance (PAAM) model. (2024). BMC Public Health. https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-024-18589-5
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