What Can Get Us Off The Couch
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Fuse/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) — It’s one of the most important and most challenging aspects of public health and medicine — getting patients to actually change an unhealthy behavior.
A possible answer might have been found as researchers worked to encourage people to be less sedentary — linking thoughts of behavior change to the patient’s most dearly held values.
The study, which appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, involved 67 people who received an activity monitor to wear on their wrists. Then they talked about their personal values, in order of importance.
While their brains were imaged with MRI, some were presented with scenarios that made them think of their highest-ranked values.
The most sedentary and obese were given messages about why and how they should be active before they were reinforced with these messages for one month.
After a month, researchers found the subjects who had been “primed” with thoughts of their most cherished values had become less sedentary, and images of the area of the brain responsible for behavior change, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, showed it was more active.
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