Most people believe that they control their lifestyle. According to a survey, almost three fourths of people believed that if they eat right, do not smoke, and get regular checkups, they have a good chance of preventing cancer. An even larger number, more than 80%, believed that they can significantly reduce their chances of having a heart attack. This has motivated many Americans, especially older Americans, to work toward improved health and well-being. Older Americans are also more likely to engage in preventive health behaviors, which are health practices that promote wellness and prevent or reduce morbidity and mortality. Although the trend toward healthy living is encouraging, improvement is needed among college-age students.In a recent study, comparisons of health behaviors by age groups led to the following conclusion -
While those aged 65 or more have the best overall records for practicing good health and safety behavior, change for the better is being led by those in the middle years. And we still have not found the way to motivate young adults to start good health behavior.
A Self-Help Plan
A self-help approach assumes that individuals can manage their lifestyle changes and can learn to control those features in the environment that are detrimental to health. In other words, expensive, long-term, professional help is not a prerequisite for everyone trying to make a lifestyle change.
A fundamental assumption underlying lifestyle change programs is that behavior is a learned response. For example, we are not born with a taste for some foods and a dislike for others. And using seat belts is not a function of heredity. Like most other behaviors, health behaviors are learned responses to both obvious and subtle influences. This learning begins at birth and continues throughout life. It is important to remember that this is just as true for behaviors that promote wellness as for behaviors that diminish it.
Examples of obvious influences that help to shape behavior include parents and family, role models, advertising, and social norms. In many instances these influences are combined to form a single powerful influence on behavior, such as an advertisement for cigarettes using “ideal” masculine or feminine models, depending on the brand of cigarettes and the target population. Advertisers are successful not only at marketing products but also at influencing people to think they need various products.
Subtle forces also shape behavior. A good example is subliminal advertising, a technique in which messages, words, and symbols are embedded or hidden in the pictures, sounds, or words used in advertisements. Theoretically these messages, though not directly observable, can be perceived by the subconscious mind in such a way as to influence behavior.
Much of our behavior is also motivated by psychological needs. An infant whose main source of attention and stimulation comes during feeding time may learn to associate food with the deeper psychological needs of love and affection. A parent who consistently uses food to appease an unhappy child may be inadvertently establishing a preoccupation with food that will endure far beyond childhood.
Sometimes, behavior is motivated in response to force or coercion. Reactance motivation, a theory of behavior that has been associated with drinking among college students, suggests that telling people to abstain completely from doing something often produces the opposite reaction. For many people it isn’t difficult to recall instances in their own lives in which they behaved a certain way primarily because they were told that they could not or should not behave that way. Coercion in particular leads to the arousal of reactance, which in turn tends to reduce compliance.
These examples help to explain the myriad complex forces that contribute to behavior and illustrate why successful lifestyle change is so difficult to achieve. Although easier said than done, the hope and promise of any lifestyle-change program is that bad habits can be unlearned and new habits can be learned.
The self-help approach to lifestyle change puts you in control of your health, requires your involvement, and permits you to determine what you do and how and when you do it. However, to be successful, this approach requires considerable time and thought devoted to planning. Successful lifestyle change is almost impossible to achieve without a plan. The self-help plan that follows applies principles of behavior management and should turn your health goals into reality.
First, Take An Inventory
The first step in any lifestyle-change program is to evaluate personal health habits and practices. A good way to start is simply to make a list of your health-promoting behaviors, things you do to maintain or improve your level of wellness. Make another list of health-inhibiting behaviors, things you do that may be detrimental to your health
If your lists are specific and identify behaviors that relate to wellness in its broadest sense (that is, the physical, social, emotional, and psychological aspects of health), comparing the two should give insight and information about your lifestyle.
Detailed, comprehensive lifestyle questionnaires, such as the one that accompanies this text can provide even more information about specific health practices and behavioral tendencies that can be targeted for change. Many of these questionnaires are similar to those you might complete for your physician. Regardless of the tool you use, remember that the goal is to learn more about yourself.
Two reasonable questions to ask at this point are “Which behaviors present the greatest threat to my health?” and “Which behaviors should be targeted first for change?” The answer to the second question is strictly individual and depends on the frequency and intensity of various behaviors, genetic predisposition to certain health problems, overall health profile, personal motivation, and perhaps the answer to the first question. Each activity has an assigned weighted score based on a 10 point scale indicating its importance in preventing disease and promoting health. Smoking, with a score of is viewed as having the greatest effect on health. Getting 7 to 8 hours of sleep each night, with a score of has the least effect on health. However, a low score on the prevention index does not minimize the importance of an activity. All activities have a significant influence on health.
Second, Start With Right Attitude
If you have the right attitude, there are few limits to what you can do. Answering the questions in may help determine whether you are ready to start a lifestyle-change program. Most people make two serious mistakes when starting a lifestyle change. First, they expect miracles by setting unrealistic goals. Setting goals that are too ambitious often guarantees failure. For many people the fear of failure easily discourages future efforts at a lifestyle change.
Second, people often view lifestyle change as a temporary goal rather than a lifetime change. Perhaps more than anything else, this attitude accounts for the high recidivism (the tendency to revert to the original behavior) rate of many programs. Recidivism is high for most lifestyle programs. Two of the best examples are weight-loss and stop-smoking programs. In weight-loss programs, for example, people typically set a goal, diet until they reach their goal, revert to their original eating habits, and invariably regain the lost weight. The proper way is to change eating habits so that they will endure for a lifetime. When people try to change some aspect of behavior, they have to deny themselves something that feels comfortable or that provides some source of enjoyment or pleasure. Denial often triggers a preoccupation that worsens the health behavior being changed. This is the reason dieters often become more obsessive-compulsive about food during a diet. It is important to remember that the real test of a program’s success is not how many people reach their goals as it is how many people successfully maintain that goal for at least 2 years.
Striving for moderation may be more reasonable than setting goals that require abstinence or a complete reversal of behavior. For example, rather than giving up ice cream completely, a dieter can limit it to smaller portions or substitute low-fat ice cream. Rather than starting a fitness program with a 5-mile jog, an individual can start with a I-mile walk. For many people, moderation requires a higher level of learning and adjustment than abstinence. In moderation, success depends on controlling behavior, learning to live with certain stimuli, and still having the discipline to break the behavioral cycle. In abstinence, success depends on complete avoidance, usually by removing the stimulus, such as a smoker throwing away all cigarettes. A key factor in choosing either moderation or abstinence when changing. health-inhibiting behaviors is the amount of control a person has over the environment. For example, improving study habits in a college dormitory may be difficult because one person cannot control the noise and distractions of other students. In this case, study habits would be improved in a controlled environment, such as a library.
No single strategy for lifestyle change is right for everyone. The key is to get involved in planning your personal program and to use your imagination to create the most suitable plan. If you start thinking about failure, you can practice a technique called thought stopping, in which the negative thought (”I can’t improve my study habits, I’ve always failed in the past”) is replaced with a positive one (”I will do better”).
Third, Develop Plan of Action
People should follow basic principles of lifestyle management when structuring a plan of action, including
- assessing behavior
- setting specific and realistic goals
- formulating intervention strategies for lifestyle change
- evaluating progress
Tags:assessing behavior, health, helath and wellness, lifestyle change, personal health habits, reactance motivation, right attitude, wellness Wellness and Fitness