Promoting Health: Positive Actions and Behavior Change

A person might be ill in one respect but well or healthy in others, it means that illness and health there are not opposite, so illness is not a lack of health and being healthy does not mean a person is well in all respects (psychologically and physically). WHO defines health like a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. In the last 60 years, psychologists use the Disease Model, making miserable people less miserable. However one of the challenges of psychology nowadays is to discover how to promote health to get better people’s lives, it calls positive psychology. So the aim of this essay is to know how to promote health.

Martin Seligman proposes different techniques, like doing something altruistic, think of someone you loved and write a testimonial and then read it to him or her, or design a beautiful day and then use savoring and mindfulness to enhance the pleasure. All of these actions improve people’s well-being. But illness is not always something that just happens to us, the choices we make have profound consequences for the health of our bodies. People often unnecessarily increase their risk by engaging in behavior that can damage their bodies and health. For that reason, health psychologists must develop techniques to alter that behavior.

One option to change people’s behavior is called The Theory of Planned Behavior; this model proposes that whether or not we choose to behave in a certain way depends on our attitudes and beliefs about that. If a person has an attitude to do something, if he or she has social pressure to do it (normative beliefs and subjective norms) and if he or she feels in control of the action in question (perceived behavioral control), the person will do the action. So if the psychologists persuade a person to change the attitude, the normative beliefs, and the perceived behavioral control, the action is going to change.

An example could be persuading a smoker that most people don’t smoke is likely to deter him or her from smoking. Similarly, highlighting the positive outcomes likely to emerge from stopping – such as living longer, feeling fitter, saving money and not having smelly clothes – may also help someone decide. Finally, it can help if the person can be persuaded that it is well within their ability to stop smoking. This might involve telling them about other people’s successes, or offering them aids, such as nicotine patches or gum.

In conclusion, there are different techniques to promote people’s health. For one hand, improving people’s well-being doing positive actions like doing something altruistic or writing to someone you loved. For the other hand, avoiding risk actions using The Theory of Planned Behavior. The objective of health psychologists in all the techniques is to increase the health at the same time that illness decreases.