Health Benefits of Behavioural Modification

Healthcare professionals have acknowledged the efficacy of thousands of medicines and supplements in alleviating the sufferings brought about by diseases. However, taking medications isn’t the only way to cure or prevent certain health conditions. Healthcare strategists have recommended behavioural modification for the benefit of a person’s well-being.

Sometimes, an individual’s negative behaviour costs them their health. Take, for example, excessive alcohol consumption, tobacco use, and an unhealthy diet. By altering an individual’s negative behavioural pattern and fostering positive change, they can keep these negative behaviours at bay, ultimately leading them to a healthy lifestyle.

Research shows that behavioural modification has the following health benefits:

1. Helps with Insomnia

Lack of sleep can make you feel restless the following day and weaken your immune system in the long run. While taking sleeping pills helps you sleep soundly at night, it doesn’t address underlying issues that caused your insomnia. In other words, pills will only give you temporary relief.

With Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I), a healthcare professional helps you identify the thoughts and recurring behaviours that caused your sleeping problems. This way, you will know which behaviours to work on to promote sound sleep.

2. Reduces Risks of Smoking-Related Health Issues

Chainsmokers or heavy cigarette smokers find it hard to quit despite knowing the consequences of smoking. For those who want to quit smoking, seeking healthcare advice for behavioural modification may help.

The 5Rs of Smoking Cessation

• Relevance - Letting the patient specify the relevance of quitting smoking.
• Risks - Laying out to the patient the dire consequences of smoking if they choose to continue with their habit.
• Rewards - Making the patient realise and point by themselves the benefits of quitting smoking.
• b- Helping the patients identify the challenges they may face as they try to quit smoking.
• Repetition - People don’t always succeed in smoking cessation after the first intervention. So, every time a patient fails in their previous quit attempts, repeating the 5Rs can help.

After these, the clinician will let the patient set a quit date. According to research, it is more effective to slowly reduce the number of cigarettes the patient smokes than to quit abruptly. That is why the patient must set a quit date for the behaviour modification to have long-term effects.

3. Motivates Individuals to Do Exercise

Regular exercise is one of the best methods in promoting wellness because it is cost-effective, noninvasive, and nonpharmacological. Still, many individuals, young and adults alike, don’t engage in the recommended amount of exercise. And it is because they lack the motivation to do physical activities.

One of the ways healthcare professionals have discovered to motivate people to do exercise is through behavioural modification while integrating technology along the process. The use of digital devices helps establish goals, track progress, set regular reminders, see feedback, and also encourage accountability.

4. Enhanced Relaxation

Relaxation is one of the most important stimuli of health improvement. When you do away with the behaviour that causes stress, you can sleep soundly at night and carry out daily activities with more energy and gusto.

Being healthy doesn’t only mean that you are physically capable of doing particular tasks. It also involves the ability of your mind to cope with the challenges and stressors of life. For this reason, behaviour modification is also great for improving one's mental health. Being in a state of relaxation calms your mind and helps prevent anxiety.

Meditation also aids the brain in making positive physiological changes, which as a result, improves brain function and memory.

5. Eliminates Medication Nonadherence

Medication nonadherence poses harm to the health of individuals. It may result in poor therapeutic outcomes, worsen the disease, and eventually decrease the patient’s quality of life. However, some individuals still don’t take medications as prescribed by a doctor. Common reasons for this include:

• Expensive drugs
• Fear of side effects
• Forgetfulness
• The belief that the drug is not effective

To prevent such instances, clinicians must help the patients pinpoint the reason for their nonadherence so that they can address it. Here are the three steps healthcare professionals take in the behaviour modification process to help prevent medication nonadherence:

• They educate patients about the positive effects of the drug prescribed to them and its safety and convenience.
• They help patients make a medication routine so that they won’t forget to take the necessary drugs.
• They encourage the patients to identify their family members or close friends who can remind them every time they need to take medicines.

Discover Innovative Ways to Healthcare with StratHealth Ltd!

Our primary goal at StratHealth Ltd. is to help healthcare providers and companies have innovative technologies and strategies like behavioural modification for improved healthcare delivery. If you are in the healthcare sector and believe that your organisation needs a boost, call us on 020 8128 4420 or send an email at peter.ellis@strathealth.co.uk. We guarantee you that our expert advice will give your organisation the push it needs to move forward in the health industry.