This issue is about the psychology of habituation.
Every year at the beginning of the year, many people resolve to start something new. There are many people who make resolutions to start something new at the beginning of each year, but fail to keep trying.
It's not uncommon for people to want to know in detail how and when to take XX, which is one of the health issues they are concerned about.
I used to work as a health advisor before I became a medical professional, and there were a certain number of people who wanted to know the details of health foods.
I don't know if knowing about them will make them habits or not, but I can get some hints from the research on habituation.
The content of the study is something that could be used by medical professionals to teach new good habits by changing their habits.
The Study
The researchers conducted a qualitative study to investigate the cues people choose, how they make them, and what influences their decisions.
Thirty-nine participants were asked to take a vitamin C tablet every day for three weeks, after which they were interviewed.
Quantitative measures of habit strength and memory were taken for illustrative purposes.It was found that the choice of execution was primarily influenced by the desire to minimize effort, such as keeping relevant objects close at hand or in plain sight.
In addition, we found that memory strategies included reliance on a single cue and a broadly defined plan that did not specify a cue.
Furthermore, for many participants, identifying the optimal cue required trial and error.
The reason for this is believed to be that people were rarely able to predict in advance the best approach for them.
In conclusion, for behavior change interventions that rely on ever-present behaviors, the provision of educational information on which approaches are suboptimal and what is most effective can be fruitful.
There is also a need to assess a person's existing beliefs about how to best remember a particular behavior.
This is because such beliefs may reinforce or inhibit the chosen cue.
Finally, the intervention needs to account for the fact that early memory failures are part of the process of developing reliable memory strategies and are to be expected.
Discussion
The study was conducted on people who were not taking vitamin tablets and kept taking them for the duration of the intervention, and the results showed that the tablets were taken in situations related to a person's daily activities.
This means that proposing an outlandish intervention method to transform a person's daily life is likely to be impossible, no matter how good it is.
I have experienced that even if you offer an "easy" and "zero cost" method to a person who has no muscle training habit due to the recent muscle training boom, it is useless to suggest a training method that does not fit the person's daily activities.
In order to avoid this, it is necessary to understand the person's habits to a certain extent and start suggesting actions that can be done within those habits.
In this study, we found that people who were not in the habit of taking pills were taking them in a way that could be done in conjunction with their existing behavior, such as always taking them after coffee, always taking them before breakfast, or taking them after brushing their teeth before bedtime.
There seems to be a belief that people don't really want to spend that much energy to change their behavior, so not being able to make it a habit doesn't mean that they are lazy.
If medical professionals are going to do this, they need to either create a pattern of forceful interventions, such as making a habit of doing it when they visit a medical institution if they don't do it at home, or they need to think of behavioral changes that they can make based on their daily activities.
As an example of what I've done, I've been able to practice setting a ballet barre lesson at XX time and stretching at XX time for an hour every day.This was easy for me to change my behavior because this time was a gap and I was just playing with my phone.
If I had to do it earlier in the day, I would not have been able to continue.
Stawarz K, Gardner B, Cox A, Blandford A. What influences the selection of contextual cues when starting a new routine behaviour? An exploratory study. BMC Psychol. 2020;8(1):29. published 2020 Mar 30. doi:10.1186/s40359-020-0394-9
Summary
The reasons why people do not change their behavior are
The reason why people don't change their behavior is that they have become accustomed to and prefer methods that fit their existing behavior.
Practicing is an experiment, but people don't like to experiment that much.
If you want to change someone else's behavior, you need to do it yourself.
If people who want to encourage others to change their behavior don't understand these things, it will become a phenomenon similar to the homework assignments at school, where you just give them an assignment and make them do it reluctantly.
In order to prevent this from happening, how can you practice it? How does it feel to practice? It seems that counseling is necessary.
