I came across this little bit of wisdom, probably whilst using the bathroom at a friend’s and perusing her magazines. The brief article purported that changing all (or most) of your bad habits (smoking, nutrition, exercise, nail biting, or whatever) at the same time was found to be more effective than tackling the habits one at a time.
How can that be? I don’t know what study they quoted, or how scientific it was, but I’m curious. For some, I see that working- you don’t kick an alcohol and drug dependency by continuing to hang out with the same friends and frequent the same bars, so a complete lifestyle change including new friends and new hobbies would be more effective than trying to wean yourself off heroin but still smoking pot and drinking.
But for more common bad habits, like poor diet and exercise, the usual wisdom is don’t overwhelm yourself by trying to train like a marathon runner, or eat a really restrictive diet. You’ll burn yourself out too quickly, and slip back into the old bad habits easily.
A little more googling and I think I found the study the article referred to- it addressed exercise, sodium intake, and smoking. A summary of the study and its results can be found here.
What I find curious is this-
So, tackle 3 behaviors at once, but you’ll probably only succeed in changing one behavior? How would trying to tackle more at once result in a better success rate for only a single behavior? Why wouldn’t treating the single behavior be as effective or more effective?
The subject is distracted from giving up A by the fact he’s also giving up B & C. He will eventually backslide on most of the things he’s trying to give up, but one of the three changes (we don’t know which one) might stick.
The study shown was for three bad habits which were related to poor health, “to stop smoking, reduce their sodium intake and increase exercise.”
Your OP includes such things as nail biting, and the really bad habit of “whatever,” (which is also one of the hardest to kick, from my personal experience), which does not necessarily follow from this study, even if the study were valid. (Since the on-line article is a brief summary, it’s impossible to judge from that source.)
Even so, the data doesn’t look that impressive.
For the goal of changing two of the three behaviors, there wasn’t a difference between simultaneous group and the control group, and only 3 percentage points difference for quitting smoking.
I would say that the article is reading too much into the study.
{anecdote} A friend of mine gave up heroin cold turkey. This was five or so years ago, and he has been fine since. However, he still smokes cigarettes. He originally tried to stop heroin and tobacco simultaneously, but he couldn’t. For him, cigarettes were a reward for not using heroin.{/anecdote}
[another anecdote] In the early 1960s, a local physician came to our Health class to tell us about alcoholism and AA. The doc was a recovering alcoholic himself. One of the things he told us was, “I don’t know a single recovering alcoholic who doesn’t smoke like a chimney.” Smoking was much more accepted in those times, and the medical understanding of addiction has changed since then. [/another anecdote]
