I recently chatted with a VC invested in 15 healthcare apps that use Behavior Modification to facilitate patients through permanent behavior change for enhanced health. He said although many of his apps use it, there’s no scientific evidence that Behavior Modification works. Hmmmm… And the reason you’re still using it is… “There’s nothing else to use.”

I contend that current Behavior Mod approaches are not only faulty, but seriously harmful to a large population of people who need to consider permanent change.

CAN’T CHANGE BEHAVIORS BY TRYING TO CHANGE BEHAVIORS

Behavior Modification cannot permanently change existing behaviors. In diet, smoking cessation, and exercise maintenance alone, there is a 97% failure rate for ongoing adoption of altered behaviors. You see, it’s not possible to change a behavior by trying to change a behavior.

If you’ve ever tried to keep lost weight off, or habituate a new exercise routine, or stop smoking, or… you’ve probably tried to modify your current behaviors by doing something differently without making the necessary structural changes to hold it in place.

Conventional thinking usually explains the WHAT and WHY. But permanent change needs the HOW – HOW your brain causes your behaviors, and where the inflexion points are so you can intervene and generate new ones (or lead your patients and clients through to their best choices).

This essay explains what behaviors are, where they originate from, and the elements necessary for permanent change. For this, I must take you briefly to the source – into your brain – to not only explain why you behave the way you do or resist new behaviors, but HOW to actually elicit the behaviors you want. I’ve made the brain explanations brief. But if you want to understand precisely how to facilitate permanent change from the source, it’s worth the effort. Enjoy.

BEHAVIOR

There are two major problems with Behavior Modification:

1. Behavior 2. Modification.

I suspect most people haven’t considered what a ‘behavior’ denotes. Behaviors are the way we exhibit our identity, our beliefs, our history/norms/life experience.

In short, behaviors represent us. They’re our beliefs in action – the demonstration, the expression, the external actions that portray our internal essence and morals. Like an autobiography is the written representation of a life but not THE life. Like going to church represents us practicing our faith but not FAITH. Behaviors are the visible depictions of each of us.

Behaviors don’t occur without a stimulus, some sort of input. Nor do they operate in a vacuum – they don’t arise from the sea like Venus. And they are always, always congruent with our beliefs. You know, without asking, that someone wearing a bathing suit to a wedding most likely has different beliefs than the other guests. It’s not about the bathing suit.

Behaviors are automatically and unconsciously triggered from our neural circuits – the end result of a series of automatic and meaningless chemical signals that face congruency checks before taking form into action. In other words, behaviors are the result of risk-averse neural activity – not actions that show up on their own.

Sample

Below is a greatly simplified summary of what happens in our brains that ultimately lead to behaviors. It’s here you’ll understand what’s needed to make permanent changes and why Behavior Modification isn’t able to accomplish it.

HOW TO CHANGE BEHAVIORS PERMANENTLY

Here are three of the key elements involved in how we choose to behave differently  – the modification portion of change. It’s systemic.

SYSTEMS CONGRUENCE. Systems are the glue, the conglomeration of mental, physical, emotional, physiological, neurological elements make us human. I am a system. You are a system. Your family is a system. And everything we do, think, notice, are curious about, follow the unique rules of our individual, idiosyncratic, and historic systems. And our individual systems define our status quo.

Ultimately the job of our status quo is to maintain Systems Congruence, or balance, so we can wake up every day being who we were yesterday – to know to brush our teeth each day and be kind to the colleague we don’t like.

One of the important things to know here is that systems don’t judge our behaviors. Whether we’re fat or controlling or mean, our neural systems only work with electrochemical signals and have no meaning. So it doesn’t care if you lose weight – just that it remains congruent.

All day, trillions of signals enter into our brains and trigger us to behaviors that have met our Systems Congruence criteria. Indeed, our brains check all incoming signals for incongruence before behaviors are agreed to and triggered, making sure we remain in balance. Without doing so we’d be at risk for incongruence.

Any time you try (and try and try and…) to behave in a way that unconsciously causes imbalance within you – when you push against an existing habit or action to try to get a different behavior – you’ll experience resistance or sabotage because you’d be trying to disrupt your system.

Unless we change the system that holds our problematic behavior in place, it’s not possible for permanent change to occur. For any proposed change, to maintain congruence, your system must agree, Buy In, in a way that matches your beliefs, identity, and norms. And it’s physiologic, chemical, automatic, and unconscious. Our brains do this for us every second of our lives.

Behavior Modification attempts to replace this process, trying to change the final output (like trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube) without making the changes in the system that would hold the new in place permanently and maintain Systems Congruence.

When something ‘new’ hasn’t been vetted and agreed to, your putting the system at risk and generating an imbalance. And the system will ultimately reject it.

INPUT. Any new input for change will only become a permanent behavior if it’s congruent with the person’s system. To change a behavior, it’s necessary to 1. find an existing neural circuit, or generate a new one that accepts and triggers the new request, and 2. input a message that will be acceptable.

Let me give you the simple version of how I lost weight and kept it off. My original message to myself was:

‘I want to lose weight.’

While the words requested a different behavior, they’re merely behavior-change focused and didn’t get to my specific neural circuits to trigger a change or get agreement from the rest of the system that had maintained it for some time. In other words, that input message caused me to do what I’d always done and end up maintaining the weight because there’d been no circuit change to trigger different actions.

After failing for decades (pictures of skinny women on my fridge, dozens of diet books) I changed the input message to include my identity and beliefs, precise action required, and precise goal.

Starting with a newly expanded ‘identity’, I became a ‘healthy person’ and gave myself a new rule that I had to be healthy mind, body, and spirit. With that rule, I began studying nutrition and discovered I was eating foods that were unhealthy for me and changed the way I was eating entirely. Here is the message I eventually came up with:

‘I am a healthy person who seeks to find the best nutrition and exercise protocol to get to the best weight for my body’

That did the trick, and I’ve eaten my revised food plan (and kept the weight off) for 30 years.

TRIAL LOOP. This one needs some patience. Here you’ll need to try different input messages to find the one that incorporates the right systemic elements that will cause a permanent change. But note: if at any point a risk is determined to put the system out of balance, it will reject the new behavior. Not to kick a dead horse, but Behavior Mod does not address this at all – the reason behavior change attempts fail so often.

I’ve developed a model for this to lead you through the steps if you’re interested in the entire process.

There are plenty of uses for this. Think of enabling patient Buy In for obesity or cardio clinics, to help patients design a work-out regimen for heart health. Or for diabetes sufferers to design a healthful food plan for life. Or athletes trying to change an inferior swing, or develop a new pattern to their feet differently to run faster. What about helping yourself meditate daily or organizing your life. Or to get more sleep.

We can help people alter their behaviors in a way that’s not only congruent with who they are, but helps them make their own best choices. But not with Behavior Modification alone.

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Sharon-Drew Morgen is a breakthrough innovator and original thinker, having developed new paradigms in sales (inventor Buying Facilitation®, listening/communication (What? Did you really say what I think I heard?), change management (The How of Change™), coaching, and leadership. She is the author of several books, including her new book HOW? Generating new neural circuits for learning, behavior change and decision making, the NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell). Sharon-Drew coaches and consults with companies seeking out of the box remedies for congruent, servant-leader-based change in leadership, healthcare, and sales. Her award-winning blog carries original articles with new thinking, weekly. www.sharon-drew.com She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.