On a physical sense this is pretty obvious. The expenditure to catch back up to something after you've fallen behind is greater than it would have been to just put the little extra effort in to keeping up in the first place. This is only then exacerbated by age, time, increased life demands or responsibilities...

The parallel into the psychological sense is pretty tight. Once we start falling behind, if there is a desire to catch up, we start to look for short cuts and call them "efficiencies". If there is less desire than there is need, we begin to rationalize not putting in the extra effort at all. In both cases we lose. 

I believe that the tide of influence is stronger flooding from physical habits into psychological patterns than the ebbing from psychological to physical.