Professionals in the field of health and wellness. Your patients are likely interested in knowing why they don’t follow through with exercising, changing their eating habits, and losing weight and what you can do to change this. The purpose of this article is to help you in both your professional capacity and your personal life. The process of getting people to admit they want to improve their health behaviors may seem easy at first, as you have seen in your work.
It leads to high disease rates, lost productivity, poor mental health, and spiraling healthcare costs because people quickly revert to old habits. To motivate people to practice the lifestyle behaviors necessary for healthier living and disease management, we in health promotion and healthcare have been taught to promote “better health” and “disease prevention.”
Generally, what we’ve learned and how we’ve been taught to prescribe “behaviors” come from a medical framework that ignores human motivations, behaviors, and decision-making. Inertia and hectic schedules make it hard for people to overcome the benefits of future health, such as disease prevention.
Health behaviors are not compelling enough to overcome the numerous other daily goals and priorities they continually compete with when motivation is linked to distant, clinical, or abstract goals. Especially for women, weight loss can be an impetus to diet and exercise, but it is often built upon self-rejection; while it is effective at encouraging intentions, it rarely motivates behavior long-term. Patients’ ability to manage their health and take charge of their health decisions is essential in this new era of healthcare, says this dentist in Charlotte. In spite of this, patients are at risk of failing their self-management efforts due to distractions and alternative choices that are a constant part of their busy daily lives.
Changing your lifestyle to optimize your health seems like a good idea. People will only see a small benefit of exercising if they do not remain motivated to do so over time. Our approach might even be considered a very costly one, one that would be costly for everyone if we promoted the wrong reasons for a behavior change. For our organizations, it’s expensive, since they are investing their resources in promoting short-term reasons to change (not a great return on investment).
When people don’t follow through with the advice we give, we feel discouraged and ineffective, and maybe even quit enjoying our work (a recipe for burnout). Those who want to change are often disappointed when they are not successful in maintaining their desired behavioral changes, so as a consequence, they become ambivalent about and resist investing in themselves again.
Health professionals care about health-related reasons for making lifestyle changes, but not about which reasons patients will find most compelling and relevant. The things we want our patients to achieve from behaviors such as physical activity are the things that matter to us, no matter if they are good or bad.
Physical activity is not explicitly relevant to most of our most important daily roles or priorities, however, so these goals may be ineffective for many. Physical activity and other self-care behaviors are not infused with the kind of significance that consistently motivates most people to prioritize and maintain them. People are more likely to sustain behaviors that are crucial to their daily lives in an immediate and noticeable way, based on research and other scientific evidence. This simple concept is supported by marketing practices that promote ongoing customer behavior.
The purpose of No Sweat is to help people become healthier, happier, and fitter by finding real and sustainable ways to feel better, live better, and improve their health. In order to get healthy or to start exercising, most people drop out within six months of starting. Professionals working with patients, businesses that encourage employees to exercise for wellness, and the government, which funds Medicaid and Medicare, are all in desperate need of new behavioral solutions that are based on research and can work for years to come. There is a very large market for scientifically supported, simple, and time-tested health and fitness solutions like No Sweat. I do not recommend replacing medically necessary behaviors with my approach, however.
Although there is a very real and compelling medical need, my approach can serve as a strategic ally-as an “in”—to enhance motivation. A patient-centered approach and philosophy are inherent in this approach. As a result of No Sweat, I hope you will identify new ways to motivate your patients and that you will recommend the article to your clients and patients. It is especially important for people who lack motivation or are ambivalent about maintaining self-care behaviors such as exercise, sleep, and diet changes. People who feel uncomfortable or unconfident about prioritizing self-care can also use No Sweat.
