Saturday, February 6, 2016

Behavior That Facilitates Healthful Change


To speak of behavior that facilitates healthful change at first seems rather redundant and obvious, since healthful change usually presumes behavior change.  However, focusing on the behavioral aspect of change is worth your consideration.

The rationale for a primary behavior focus, implicit in Nike’s “Just Do It” slogan, is that behavior sometimes steers thought and emotion long enough to make a healthful change happen.  The psychoanalytic notion of “change of function” (Hartmann, 1950) is one of many possible mechanisms.  In change of function, one forces herself to behave in a manner counter to her typical emotions and thoughts.  Imagine, for instance, that you hate (emotion) vegetables, consider them boring “rabbit food” (thought), and consume virtually nothing that has been incapable of independent ambulation.  Then, one day, your relatively young mother suffers a debilitating stroke that shakes you to your core.  Totally out of character, you schedule yourself for a long-delayed complete physical examination that discloses extremely elevated cholesterol and lipid levels.  In her post-labs meeting with you, the physician advises more vegetables and less meat to reduce your stroke risk.

You are not happy.  You try to dismiss the doctor’s recommendations, but the more you study stroke, the more you conclude that the doctor has an important point.  So, you force yourself to eat a few more vegetables and a little less meat.  You read more, converse with more people, and experiment with ways to make vegetables more palatable.  Although you REALLY miss burgers and steaks, you continue to force yourself along a path of reduced meat consumption.  To your surprise, you incrementally acquire a taste for vegetables prepared your way.  In time, you not only lose you excessive meat cravings, but come to prefer some vegetables.  You have undergone a change of function: by behaving in a manner contradictory to your norm, you have changed how you feel and how you think about eating in general and vegetables in particular.  Because your behavior no longer is at odds with your emotions and thoughts, you have developed a powerful pro-health habit that can endure.

Our last three blogs have emphasized how emotion, thought, or behavior can lead us toward physical and mental health.   Because our actions are determined by multiple interacting factors, when it comes to healthful lifestyle change, one cannot merely focus on emotion, or thought, or behavior.  You must consider all three, and integrate them synergistically in ways that facilitate your best intentions.  Sometimes emotion leads, sometimes thought, and sometimes behavior, but eventually all three need to be aligned to produce the healthiest you.  For instance, in our current example in which a vegetable-eating conversion (behavior) led, the individual who eats less meat should find as many ways as possible to enjoy vegetables (emotion) and to reflect, read, and talk about vegetable’s benefits (thought).



Hartmann , H. (1950).  Comments on the psychoanalytic theory of the ego. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 5, 74–96.

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