Steps to Behavior Change
Since your health affects your physical, emotional, social, and spiritual / philosophical well-being whatever health-behavior changes you decide to make should include all these dimensions. You will have a better chance of making a lasting, psychologically acceptable change in behavior if you approach the change in steps rather than trying to do it all at once. Let`s look at one common-sense approach to behavior change. It`s a five-step process that is flexible enough to adapt to your own situation.
Step 1 : Establish your tentative goal
When you decide to attempt to change your behavior (for example, by reducing the number of calories you take in daily), you are likely to do so on the basis of some idea of a tentative goal-let`s say, to lose fifteen pounds in three months.
Why do we say this goal is “tentative”? At the beginning of your campaign you may not completely understand your own current behavior patterns. You may not know what social, psychological, and physical effects your proposed behavior change will have on you. The change may be deal for you, and you may adapt readily to the new pattern. Or it may prove too challenging, and you may want to modify the goal: For example, you may finally decide to spread your fifteen-pound weight loss over five months, rather than three.
It`s particularly difficult to predict what the emotional and social impact of your behavior change will be. For example, after attempting to cut out all desserts, you may discover that never having desserts makes you feel so deprived and frustrated that you are tempted to go back to your former behavior. And turning down dessert might hurt someone`s feeling`s-such as a mother os hostess who prides herself on her cooking.
Step 2 : Assess your current behaviors and attitudes
Once you have established your tentative goal, you should assess your current behavior patterns. By taking stock of your current status and collecting information about yourself, you can develop a specific and realistic plan for the future.
If your tentative goal is to lose fifteen pounds in three months, you should collect information about your eating behavior that could reveal to you how you might best go about achieving the weight loss. One approach might be to keep a diary of your eating patterns for five days in a row. You would list everything you eat and determine how many calories you are getting. You would also note when you eat, in what situations, and specifically what you eat. This information would give you a picture of your eating patterns-the complex of personal habits you have developed that are associated with eating. Through self-monitoring, you would have a more specific idea of how your eating patterns contribute to your weight problem: You might, for example, discover that snacks-soft drinks, potato chips, candy bars-are adding hundreds of extra calories a day, and it may be this extra calorie intake that is keeping you heavier than you want to be.
As you keep this diary, you need to realize that a subtle force is probably at work within you : the force of reactivity. That is, you may be changing your eating habits simply because you are keeping track: You may cut back on snacks during the assessment period because you are more conscious of snacking. Because of this tendency, you might get a biased picture of your eating habits, and you would have a difficult time getting a meaningful assessment. You can counteract the reactivity effect by keeping your diary for a longer time, or perhaps by getting someone else to keep track of your eating habits.
Step 3 : Redefine your tentative goal
Once you have the results of your assessment, the next step is to redefine your tentative goal. Is it really going to be possible for you to lose fifteen pounds in three months, given your eating patterns, your psychological makeup, and your social environment? If not, then goal should be measurable: You should try to choose a change that you can observe and document.
Step 4 : Select and implement a change mechanism
The mechanism or procedure you choose for changing your behavior is the essential part of this whole process. In our weight-loss example, there are basically three procedures you could use to lose weight. You could eat less; you could exercise more; or you could choose to combine exercising more and eating less. Your assessment would have told you which approach might be most likely to produce the results you want. You may have discovered that you don`t feel well when you greatly reduce your calorie intake, so may decide to focus on exercise instead. Or you may have learned that you dislike exercise, but that you can reduce calories by giving up your 4 P.M. snack and selecting low-calorie foods at meals.
Step 5 : Evaluate the behavior-change mechanism
This last step, evaluating your progress, is crucial to successful behavior change: Without it, you never know whether your program is working. Evaluation can also give you ideas about how you might modify your program to improve your result.
With a weight-loss program, the evaluation can be relatively simple-are you thinner? If not, why not? With a program designed, say, to increase your self-confidence, in contrast, evaluation may not be so simple. How can you measure an increase in self-confidence? Perhaps you could keep track of the number of times you have spoken out in class or carried out some other assertive behavior.
Reference :
Marvin R Levy, Mark Dignan, Janet H Shirreffs, Essentials of Life & Health, Fourth Edition, Random House, New York, 1984.
