Week 23: Health enhancing behaviour

Having touched on ‘why do people conduct behaviours that are harmful to their health despite knowing the risks’, we proceeded to look at the opposite side of the argument: why do people undertake health enhancing behaviours? What motivates them? This week’s reading contained two papers on the Self-motivating Model (SMM), identifying the different stages of motivated individuals and this model was tested on motivating people to eat their five-a-day and engage in more physical exercise. It has been found that the majority of people were in the extrinsic motivation category, when they were motivated by external reinforcement, personally held values to identified behaviours. The group of people more likely to continue with health enhancing behaviours were those intrinsically motivated (‘true’ self-regulation) when they were behaving as such for their own pleasure. Educational sessions within the research were aimed to help patients to reach self-regulation state. 

This made me reflect on myself and others in an educational setting: when others often refused to believe that I did not do as expected because they saw me as an intrinsically motivated individual. Relating to last week’s Motivational Interviewing, this made me think if it is possible to combine this and the Model in my future consultations. MI being the technique used to help patients find their motivation to engage in a health enhancing behaviour e.g. quit smoking and SMM as the model to monitor how motivated the patient is. As I wished to become a Pre-registration tutor a few years after I qualify, I am looking forward to applying this model to help my students, as much as my cello teacher taught me in a similar way to learn music ‘because we enjoy it’.