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Understanding Behavior Change

Mardoche Sidor, MD and Karen Dubin, PhD, LCSW

What is a behavior? How do we understand it? How well do we understand it? And how much might we be missing from the superficial understanding that has been perpetuated in clinical care despite the advances in the Science of Behavior?

Before we go any further with our line of inquiries, why are we making a big deal out of behaviors anyway? What’s in it for us? Why are we chasing it, and why talking about it so much?

Well, the answers to this second line of inquiries are more pressing. For unless we have a strong reason for a deeper understanding of behaviors, we may not have the intrinsic incentive that it takes to embark on such a journey. As such, let us walk through some of the answers together:

  1. Health: To make any slight improvement in our health, a change in behavior is required. We may have to implement new behaviors like eating healthier, including more water content food; drinking more water, like a minimum of 3-4 liters a day; or starting some form of exercise, on an average of three times a week, for 20 minutes each time. We may have to implement additional new behaviors, like, improving our intake of oxygen, including performing regular diaphragmatic breathing for both a boost in energy and a sudden change of state and mood. But we may also have to let go of some unhelpful behaviors. For example, we may have to let go of snacking and of the misled belief that we need to snack between meals; we may need to let go of our need to have sugar in every single meal we have; and we may need to let go of ingesting food with empty calories regardless of how yummy they taste.

  2. Relationships: Let’s say we want to improve our relationships: A. what are some new behaviors that may be required? Here are just a few examples:

    • Listening (not just hearing) when being talked to

    • Building in some regular quality time with the other

    • Starting a healthy, loving relationship with ourselves, which often requires some regular practices, at least in the beginning.

    B. What are some old behaviors that may need to go if this relationship is to be improved?

    • Letting go of judging the other

    • Letting go of having to find faults at all times and in every single thing

    • Letting go of displaying a temper when discussing something

    • Letting go of lying

    • Let us now take just one more example:

  3. Finances: Who does not want to improve his or her finances? Does that also require some behavior changes? If so, which ones?  Let us take a look:

    • What are some new behaviors that may be required?

    • Regular saving, however small, as long as it is done regularly and consistently

    • 24-Hour Making Decision Rule, applied when buying anything that may be simply feeling based with no objective need

    • Start and maintain a regular budget with both flexibility and discipline

    • What are some old behaviors that may need to go if finances are to be improved?

    • Giving up the habit of buying to accumulate things

    • Giving up the habit of spending without thinking

    • Letting go of the habit of a financial diet followed binge spending

Do you agree that behavior permeates every single aspect of our life? Do you agree that the above exercise is also valid for all other areas of our life, including and not limiting to, our career, our spiritual life, our business, to name a few?

Now, this was just at an individual level. What about at a societal level? What about when we look at things from a public health perspective? Do you think behaviors also make or break how well we may be doing in society and what type of legacy we are likely to leave behind? Well, let us look at the area of health population for example: The consensus has been for some time now, and it has been replicated, that most of our major chronic health conditions could be prevented with only 4 behavior changes. What are these 4 behaviors?:

  1. Smoking cessation

  2. Drinking cessation or cutting down

  3. An active lifestyle over a sedentary one

  4. A healthy diet.

As a side note, these four behaviors help prevent major health conditions and help with the management and prognosis should conditions have already been established. As you can see, understanding and being able to make behavioral changes is paramount for all of us, all the time. In fact, as clinicians, we are not only called to help facilitate behavioral changes for our patients and clients but also for ourselves because part of applying the standard of care in clinical practice requires some behavioral changes from our part, to start with.

Another area at the community or societal level is related to the environment. Regardless of what your philosophy may be regarding the environment, can you already see how much its fate depends on which behavioral choices we make, which behavior changes to undergo, including which new ones we adopt, and which old and unhelpful ones we let go of?

A second important aspect in behavior change is the regular measuring of one’s progress. One is to decide how often progress will be measured, but that ongoing and regular measurement is essential. The idea of measuring progress can apply to almost everything that we are working towards.

The next important aspects of behavioral change for us to become most familiar, to learn, and to master, are as follows:

  1. We somehow know what to do, but we fail to act accordingly. We try to deal with that by reminding ourselves of what we ought to do, telling ourselves what we ought to do, all to no avail

  2. A change in the environment can be significant, which explains why “Prompting,” which is the “P” in “MAP” as presented above, is such a key asset in behavior changes

  3. There are many ways to change the environment, and two crucial ones of them are to reduce friction, while increasing the level of motivation

  4. When establishing a new behavior, a new habit, we can ask ourselves from time to time, “where might there be too much friction here in the process of this behavior change?” This is a question worth asking on a regular basis. In other words, friction tells us how much the desired behavior is aligned with a type of behavior we’re already doing. The more alignment, the less friction, the easier it is for us to perform the behavior. The reverse is also true. The less aligned, the harder it gets to perform or to be reinforced.

  5. We’ve been speaking about motivation throughout our Behavioral Modification Certificate Course, we have agreed so far that there are several different pathways towards motivation, and important for all of us is to have as clear of an idea as possible of what motivates us, what our motivators are, and what our motivating factors are. For this, a recommendation would be a motivation pool, or a list of motivations to pull from or to make use of.

  6. One key motivating factor is loss aversion. Loss aversion is the concept used to explain how we are likely to do something to avoid losing something rather than doing something to gain something. This concept can be a powerful motivating factor used for and by anyone of us, and it is very easy to use. Here some steps we can take in making use of this motivating factor:

 Once you’ve done that, and as you continue to remind yourself of what is a stake, your motivation will likely be at the required level for you to act accordingly. Please note this is only one way to motivate yourself. Also, note that this method is through the use of our Normal Blueprint, and when making use of our Natural Blueprint for behavior change, loss aversion no longer applies. The reason for this is that in our Natural Blueprint, the concept of loss, or contrast, or opposites, does not exist. When working from our Natural Blueprint, there can be only harmony, everything is from an inside out perspective, and one is operating from a much higher level of Consciousness. All this helps explain why behavior change is effortless when operating from our Natural Blueprint, as opposed to effortful, and strifeful, when operating from a Normal Blueprint. Having said all this, while we can learn to bypass the Natural Blueprint, part of the process does entail, at least for most of us, mastering the Normal Blueprint, and then going beyond it and operating from our Natural Blueprint. This explains why mastering the skills of CBT, Behavior Modification, NLP, or of Goal Achievement, to name a few, are still valid as part of the process towards our Natural Blueprint.

In sum, our behaviors or habits assure the type of results we get, which in turn either shapes or reinforces our identity, which in turn, further supports our underlying beliefs, whether it is a belief that serves us or not. Beliefs or habits being at the center of who we are can both be complex to understand or change, depending on which Blueprint we are looking at (Normal vs Natural), or depending on which thought systems we are operating from (Illusion-Based vs Reality-Based). However complex behavioral changes may seem to be, there is a process behind it all. Once this process is learned, implemented properly, and mastered, things start to make more and more sense and become easier and easier.

SWEET’s Behavioral Modification Certificate Course has been designed with this in mind. We are about to complete our 1st Edition and we will start our 2nd Edition on January 11, 2021, and are adding 4 additional weeks to it. We strive to go from information to learning; from learning to implementation; from implementation to skills; from skills to m
astery; and from mastery to empowerment. This is what SWEET is all about. This is what SWEET stands for, to Support Wellbeing through Empowerment, Education, and Training.

 We are thrilled you have joined this cause for yourself, for your loved ones, for your patients and clients, and for the field. Please let us know how we are doing our part. Let us know what else we can do to help. And we look forward to continuing to serve.

As ever,
Karen and Mardoche

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