11/11/2023 0 Comments Healthy habits synonym12, 13 Participants in one study repeated a self-chosen health-promoting behaviour (for example, eat fruit, go for a walk) in response to a single, once-daily cue in their own environment (such as, after breakfast). 11 Habits are also cognitively efficient, because the automation of common actions frees mental resources for other tasks.Ī growing literature demonstrates the relevance of habit-formation principles to health. 10 Therefore habits are likely to persist even after conscious motivation or interest dissipates. 7 – 9 Once initiation of the action is ‘transferred’ to external cues, dependence on conscious attention or motivational processes is reduced. Decades of psychological research consistently show that mere repetition of a simple action in a consistent context leads, through associative learning, to the action being activated upon subsequent exposure to those contextual cues (that is, habitually). While often used as a synonym for frequent or customary behaviour in everyday parlance, within psychology, ‘habits’ are defined as actions that are triggered automatically in response to contextual cues that have been associated with their performance: 5, 6 for example, automatically washing hands (action) after using the toilet (contextual cue), or putting on a seatbelt (action) after getting into the car (contextual cue). Advice for creating habits is easy for clinicians to deliver and easy for patients to implement: repeat a chosen behaviour in the same context, until it becomes automatic and effortless. We propose that simple advice on how to make healthy actions into habits - externally-triggered automatic responses to frequently encountered contexts - offers a useful option in the behaviour change toolkit. Opportunistic health behaviour advice must be easy for health professionals to give and easy for patients to implement to fit into routine health care. Brief advice on how to change, engaging automatic (‘System 1’) processes, may offer a valuable alternative with potential for long-term impact. 4 However, the effects are typically short-lived because motivation and attention wane. Psychologically, such advice is designed to engage conscious deliberative motivational processes, which Kahneman terms ‘slow’ or ‘System 2’ processes. 2 Furthermore, even when patients successfully initiate the recommended changes, the gains are often transient 3 because few of the traditional behaviour change strategies have built-in mechanisms for maintenance.īrief advice is usually based on advising patients on what to change and why (for example, reducing saturated fat intake to reduce the risk of heart attack). 2 However, many health professionals shy away from giving advice on modifying behaviour because they find traditional behaviour change strategies time-consuming to explain and difficult for the patient to implement. Patients trust health professionals as a source of advice on ‘lifestyle’ (that is, behaviour) change, and brief opportunistic advice can be effective. take every opportunity to prevent poor health and promote healthy living by making the most of healthcare professionals’ contact with individual patients.’ 1 The Secretary of State recently proposed that the NHS:
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |