Do you want to lose weight, create a regular exercise routine or start cooking at home more? Changing your behavior is hard! That’s why it’s so important to understand the keys to achieving behavior change: autonomy, self-efficacy and competence (Bandura 1977; Ryan & Deci 2017). Behavior change efforts can help support your efforts in all three areas—helping you feel in control and providing support.
Lee Jordan, MS, NBC-HWC, SHRM-SCP, a certified health coach and behavior change specialist in Jacksonville Beach, Florida, and adjunct professor at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, reviews research about the effectiveness of behavior change apps.
New Behaviors
Change is a uniquely difficult decision. Beyond deciding to do something new, you are also choosing to give up something. That’s really the hard part. Loss aversion is a cognitive bias that states how the pain of losing something is twice as powerful as the pleasure (benefit) of gaining something (Kahneman & Tversky 1979). The change decision is further complicated by time. The benefit of the new behavior invariably takes time and sustained effort.
Using willpower often fails as well. Trying to change often becomes a forceful inner struggle between higher-level cognitive control processes and lower-level automatic or habitual tendencies. Attempting to overcome unwanted habit loops by effortful self-control often fails. This type of willpower corresponds to extrinsically motivated behaviors—that is, norms, rules or ideas that originally came from outside of the person. This expectation to engage in a specific behavior because it’s directed or expected by others often results in a guilt, anxiety or stress response if one fails to follow through (Ludwig, Brown & Brewer 2020).
Conversely, autonomously (self) motivated behavior is accompanied by more pleasant, affective experience than nonautonomous behavior and includes feelings of interest, curiosity and enjoyment (Ryan & Deci 2017; Stanko-Kaczmarek 2012). Interestingly, autonomously motivated behavior change has proven to be more successful than willpower-based efforts when it comes to weight loss, exercise and smoking cessation, among other types of changes, which lends support to its sustainability (Ludwig, Brown & Brewer 2020).
Behavior Change Apps Research
So how can you motivate yourself to adopt healthy behaviors? Significant peer-reviewed evidence supports using apps to make changes. Below are a few highlights:
- There is strong evidence for the efficacy of mobile phone apps for lifestyle modification with type 2 diabetes (Wu, Guo & Zhang 2019).
- The Calm app effectively offers mindfulness meditation that reduces stress and improves mindfulness and self-compassion in stressed college students (Huberty et al. 2019).
- Digital behavior change interventions may increase physical activity and physical functioning and reduce sedentary time and systolic blood pressure in older adults (Stockwell et al. 2019).
- Mobile app–based interventions could be useful for improving various health promotion behaviors, including diet and physical activity for the general healthy population. Most of the app interventions reviewed focused on monitoring health status and behavior change, as well as providing feedback or health-related information (Lee et al. 2018).
As you use the app, ask open-ended questions that invite you to be clear, active and in a state of discovery. Below are some sample questions.
- What is the opportunity?
- What is exciting to you about this?
- What do you want to explore?
- What is the challenge?
- What is your next step?
Choosing the Right App
To determine which app and tech is best for you, ask yourself the following guiding questions:
- Which app will keep you highly engaged?
- How many times a week or a day will you use or interact with the app?
- How does the app cultivate autonomous motivation?
See also: Using Behavior Change Apps
The post The Power of Behavior Change Apps appeared first on IDEA Health & Fitness Association.