Start Talking to Yourself

My book Don’t Rest in Peace emphasizes that activities are the keystones for healthful lifestyle change.  You might recall that to qualify as an activity, relevant behaviors must be rational, organized, comprehensive, and long-lived.   Accordingly, activities need to begin with considerable thought and effortful processing.  In order to move from ill health to good health, you must engage your mind deliberately and consistently.  I say deliberately and consistently because we all have fleeting, semi-conscious intentions to do what is best health-wise, and those kinds of intentions produce no significant, enduring results.

Meaningful changes only occur when you work diligently toward them.  I advise that you begin your healthful lifestyle change project by thinking deeply about who you are and where you are, literally and figuratively.  I have said that you are a composite of your history, temperament, personality, and environments.  Accordingly, you must consider how each singly and combined causes you to behave as you do.

The deliberative process requires you to talk to yourself—aloud, silently, or in writing.  Language facility makes us human and it is language that has enabled us to outperform all other earthly creatures and to create the world that we experience today.  You need to turn the language advantage toward yourself to make salutary self-directed changes happen.

When it comes to self-talk, psychologists differentiate “change talk” from “sustain talk,” the former being what you say to encourage yourself to behave differently and the latter, to maintain your current behavior.   Evaluate how much time you spend and how convincingly you perform the two types.  Are you predisposed to cataloguing all the reasons that a healthful change is unattainable?  

You need to maximize your change self-talk and minimize your sustain self-talk.  That often is easier said than done because most of us have “status quo bias.” 

Georgios Gerasimou (2016) suggests that we be on the alert for two of these biases.  The first occurs when we see alternatives as qualitatively similar and the second when we see alternatives as qualitatively different.  Think, for instance, about whether you reject changing your diet because you conclude that one diet is as good or bad as another (the first status quo bias) or whether you conclude that two diets are not feasible alternatives to each other (the second status quo bias) and should not be compared.  In either case of status quo bias, you have taken the easy route of no change, talking yourself out of expending the effort required to become healthier. 

The status quo biases are merely two of many destructive thought processes that undermine your health.  You can learn about many more in my aforementioned book.

Reference:      Gerasimou, G. (2016).   Asymmetric Dominance, Deferral and Status Quo Bias in a Behavioral Model of Choice.  Theory and Decision, 80, 2, 295-312.