Friday Reading Report: Tools for Change

When we finally decide that it is time to make a change, we discover that change is hard.  When we decide to change our eating habits, change is really hard, because food is not just stuff we eat because it fuels our bodies, but for a lot of cultural, social, and emotional reasons as well.  Good news!  There are some tools to make it less difficult.

The fancy name for what we are doing with these tools is cognitive behavioral change.  I kind of like to call them Jedi mind tricks.  Some of them are pretty self-explanatory, but I’ll add comments anyway, because I’m like that.

Tools:

Negative reinforcement:  I don’t like this one, so I’m listing it first and getting it over with.  Essentially, we set up a punishment for ourselves if we don’t do the thing we want to learn to do.  Say we want to eat fewer desserts.  Negative reinforcement of that goal would be to make ourselves scrub the toilets when we eat cake or to take away our television time for buying a candy bar.  In my opinion, life is punishing enough all on its own; we don’t have to help it.  However, if someone finds this tool useful, I won’t argue.  Or I won’t argue too much.  Maybe.

Reward:  Now this one, I can get behind.  It is the opposite of negative reinforcement.  In the eating dessert example above, maybe we make it an entire week without dessert.  We win a prize of our own devising, whether that is a pedicure or a new book or a lazy day in bed.  The only thing to watch out for when we’re changing eating behaviors is that we can’t reward ourselves with, you guessed it, food.

Self-monitoring:  This tool, in many ways, underlies all the tools.  It comes down to paying attention.  When we track what we’re doing, we open up the avenues to change.  Some people find it helpful to record what happened before the behavior in question, what the behavior was, and what the results or consequences were.  Maybe I had a really rough day.  I bought a pint of ice cream and ate it all.  Then I felt sick to my stomach and irritable the whole next day.  If I discover that this is a pattern, I can work to break it.

Environmental Management:  This one is simple and powerful.  We set up our spaces to encourage our best behavior and discourage our worst.  Maybe that means that we don’t keep cookies in the house (who am I kidding?  Who keeps cookies?  We don’t buy them in the first place.).  Maybe we spend a little extra time packing up healthy snacks for work or a little extra money on the good kind of salad dressing, the one that makes it feel like we’re living large even if most of lunch is lettuce.

Alternate Behaviors:  When we can’t modify our environment, we have to find other ways of coping.  Maybe one of our coworkers has a candy jar full of M&Ms right there on the corner of the desk, singing a chocolatey song to us every time we go by.  One alternative to snarfing them all might be to choose a different path to the bathroom.  Another might be to make sure that we have our hands full whenever we have to pass the desk.  Of course, the environment might be modifiable after all; we could ask that person to keep the candy out of sight.

Social Support:  That last idea, about asking the coworker for help, falls under social support.  This is also where we ask our friends and family to help.  It might be awkward to ask Granny not to bake a cake for our birthday, or to suggest that girls’ night involve more dancing and less drinking, but the people who love us should be willing to help us.

Cognitive Coping:  This is one of those umbrella tools.  Maybe a Swiss Army umbrella, that has a can opener and a scissors.  Point is, it is a series of skills.  One is self-talk.  We want to increase the positive self-talk and decrease the negative.  Most of us can use more encouragement.  Another is challenging our beliefs.  Sometimes we unconsciously believe that we are weaker or less amazing than we are.  Yet another is goal setting with reasonable aims.

Managing Emotions:  Ah yes.  A real challenge.  Chocolate may be magic, but we can find other magic that is better for our health.  Maybe we reframe situations or find other ways of self-soothing when we are upset.  Walking and naps are often good choices, but we can be creative in our use of bubble bath, music, and dog-petting.

Relapse Prevention and Recovery:  Sometimes we blow it.  It happens.  Having a plan to get back on track when we do blow it can make all the difference.

We can do this.