Healthful Decisions

In common parlance, to say that you are making a decision implies that you are consciously deliberating. So I ask: Are most of your health-oriented practices the results of your conscious deliberations?

Some health decisions certainly are decisions in the deliberative sense.  This is particularly true for “big” decisions.  Most of us think deeply about whether to have a knee replacement or tooth implantation.  But such decisions are few and far between.  “Little” day-to-day health “decisions” most often occur automatically and unconsciously.  We usually do not deliberate about whether to have a second piece of cake.  Despite the fact that eating the cake is an enacted decision, we rarely think of it as a decision at all.  Over situations and over time, however, the automatically, unconscious enacted decisions determine our health no less than do the truly deliberative ones.  To be healthy then, we must understand both our consciously directed and unconsciously directed health-oriented choices.

According to our definitions, let’s think about one aspect of big decision making and one aspect of little decision making.

Big decisions depend largely on how we perceive our future selves.  Odd as it may seem, we often are indifferent to the person that we might become.  Derek Parfit (1971) suggested that the alienation of our current from our future self can be so extreme that we perceive future selves as if they were strangers.  In that case, when a knee replacement or tooth implantation decision does not seem pressing we might not think about how it would affect us in the future at all.  Daniel M. Bartels and Lance J. Rips (2010) make the obvious inference that alienation from the stranger who will become our future self can lead to major later-life negative consequences as a result of our failure to make even minor current-life sacrifices.  For instance, one might avoid causing the future self to endure a knee replacement by gradually losing weight now, or avoid a future tooth implantation by assiduously implementing enhanced dental hygiene starting today.  However, to make the lifestyle changes necessary the current self would need be a deliberative decision maker.

Little decisions can be affected by how we perceive our future self, but they also are very reactive to moment by moment present experiences.  Therefore, you must mindfully focus on how to handle the current setting and what you are thinking and feeling in the here-and-now.  The future self is relevant when you can anticipate a near-term health-oriented opportunity or challenge.  If you are going to a buffet tonight and typically spend far too much time at the dessert table, you can imagine your future self enacting counter-strategies, such as filling up on salad and water before approaching the cakes.  That deliberative decision, of course, means nothing if you fail to enact the strategy at the buffet itself.  Thus, your deliberation must prepare you to control your environment (to seat yourself far from the dessert table and not to linger near it), thoughts (I can have the orange instead), and feelings (If I eat the cake, I’ll feel guilty all night) so that the deliberated decision becomes the enacted health-enhancing decision.

References:

Bartels D. M., & Rips, L. J. (2010). Psychological connectedness and intertemporal choice. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 139, 49–69. 

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0018062

Parfit, D. (1971).  Personal identity.  Philosophical Review, 80, 3-27.

 http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2184309