For years, many public health campaigns that aimed at changing habits have been failures.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
On health care, virtually every political error that could be made was made.
The vast majority of large scale change efforts fail. Which means that the probability that you have actually experienced a failure, and your people know that and are pessimistic, therefore, about trying something again, is very high.
People try to change too much at once and it becomes overwhelming, and they end up falling off the program. So gradually changing bad habits makes much more of a difference than trying to change them all at once.
How most consumers collect and interpret health information has changed.
Make no mistake about it. Bad habits are called 'bad' for a reason. They kill our productivity and creativity. They slow us down. They hold us back from achieving our goals. And they're detrimental to our health.
What campaigns are for is weeding out the people who, for one way or another, weren't making it for the long haul.
In other words we have marketed our way into this health crisis.
I've always been interested in public health approaches because it seems to me we have this yearning for silver bullets, and that is not in fact how change comes about. Change comes through silver buckshot - a lot of little things that achieve results. That's a classic public health approach.
A small behavioral change can also lead to embracing a wider checklist of healthier choices.
A change in bad habits leads to a change in life.