Skip to main content

DARN: A Simple and Effective Way to Increase Your Motivation to Change


Change is not easy, especially when trying to break bad habits or desiring to keep the good ones going beyond a few days. Most people blame this on lack of motivation. Researchers have written at length about types of motivation such as intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, but most of these discourses fall short of realistic ways to enhance motivation. In this context, DARN offers a simple yet practical tool to increase one's motivation to change. DARN is an acronym which stands for: Desire, Ability, Reasons, and Need. These represent four types of self-talk that people contemplating change engage in (Miller & Rollnick, 2013). Use this approach to ask yourself evocative questions that tap into your intrinsic motivation. 

Desire: Desire is wanting to have something or wanting a change. Examples include, “I want to exercise more” or “I would like to eat healthy.” Ask yourself the following questions to elicit your desire to change.
  • What am I hoping to accomplish by this change?
  • How would I like for things to change?
  • How do I want my life to be different six months from now?

Ability: Ability is your perception of your ability to bring about the change. Questions to elucidate ability include:
  • How likely am I able to flex my schedule to incorporate this change?
  • What do I think I might be able to change in my daily schedule?
  • If I did decide that I wanted to add this change, how could I do it?

Reasons: Help yourself find the reason for change using the following questions:
  • What are some of the advantages of adding this change?
  • Why do I want to make this change?
  • What might be the good things about making this change in my life?

Need: Need signals a sense of urgency or importance for change and is elicited by questions below:
  • What needs to happen?
  • How urgent does the need for making this change in my life feel to me?
  • How important is it for me to make this change?
  
Example of a "DARN" Worksheet
D:  What do I want to change?
I want to exercise more.
A: How likely am I able to change?
I can add exercise to my daily routine as I have done it before.
R: Why do I want to make this change?
Exercise is going to improve my mood and improve my physical health.
N: How urgent or important is this change?
I need to do something soon to get back in shape and to get my energy level up.

DARN are the components of motivation and the stronger your DARN is, the more committed you are for changing your behavior.

To learn more about evidence-based self-management techniques that are proven to work for depression, check out Dr. Duggal's Author Page.


HARPREET S. DUGGAL, MD, FAPA

REFERENCE

Miller, W. R., & Rollnick, S. (2013). Motivational interviewing: Helping people change (3rd ed.). New York, NY: The Guilford Press.





Labels:

Comments

  1. Self Help MotivationDecember 18, 2019 at 7:05 AM

    Thanks for sharing such great information with us. Your Post is very unique and all information is reliable for new readers. Keep it up in future, thanks for sharing such a useful post.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

10 Poor Listening Styles to Avoid

When we talk about communication, we mostly focus on speaking, writing, and reading. Listening is seldom emphasized as a primary form of communication, even though listening enables us to satisfy an individual’s deep psychological needs – to be understood, to be affirmed, to be validated, and to be appreciated (Covey, 2020). We mostly listen not to understand but to prepare response, judge, or interpret information through our own motives and frame of reference. These poor listening styles can be subsumed under these 10 categories (Covey 2014, Harvard Business Review Press, 2019): 1. Spacing out or ignoring is when you zone out because you are too preoccupied with your own thoughts. This does happen to all of us, but you don’t want to be labelled as a spacey person if this keeps happening to you.  2. Pretend or removed listening is where you may be multitasking and give the speaker the impression that you are paying attention using fillers like “yeah,” uh-huh,” “right,” “cool” or...
Post a Comment
Read more

The 6 Facets of Impostor Syndrome and its Relation to Depression

A lot has been written recently about impostor syndrome, also called impostor phenomenon in scientific literature. Most pop psychology descriptions of this condition, which impairs professional performance and leads to burnout, skew towards making this a syndrome of perceived fraudulence or fear of being seen as fake. However, the fact is that people with impostor syndrome describe a myriad of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors and none of the existing scales capture all the facets of this complex and multifaceted syndrome (Mark et al., 2019). Also, contrary to popular belief, impostor syndrome is not limited to highly successful individuals and depends more on how people respond to specific achievement tasks when there is an element of being appraised.  The six facets that define this phenomenon are discussed below: (Bravata et al., 2019; Clance & Imes, 1978; Walker & Saklofske, 2023). 1. Fake: This attribute is the closest to the original conceptualization of imposto...
Post a Comment
Read more

Value-Based Goals: The Antidote for “Success Depression”

A disconnect between your present accomplishments and your core values may make you suffer from success depression  wherein despite “having it all” (e.g., successful career, stable relationships, healthy children, etc.), you still struggle with depression and view your accomplishments as hollow (Zettle, 2007). The cure for this malaise is to clarify your core values and have goals and actions that are driven by these values. Psychotherapist Russ Harris describes values as our heart’s deepest desires for the way we want to interact with the world, other people, and ourselves. They are what we want to stand for in life, how we want to behave, what sort of person we want to be, and what sort of strengths and qualities we want to develop (Harris, 2009). Values are subjective; what one may consider as a value (e.g., being famous) may be considered as being cocky by another person. Moreover, values do change with time. For instance, you may value social popularity and raising a fa...
Post a Comment
Read more