The Mortal Mamba

In my observation there are 3 categories of people :

• Bucket A : Knowledgeable and practitioner Those who have knowledge about health and follow decent health practices.
• Bucket B: Knowledgeable and non-practitioner Those who have knowledge about health but fail to adopt health practices.
• Bucket C : Non-practitioner Those who don’t have knowledge about health (and hence fail to adopt health practices).

Bucket A is an ideal case. People who are in Bucket C should not be blamed for their poor health practices but they can always be transformed to bucket B with education and awareness. 

The problem lies in bucket B – they are the people who have the basic knowledge about health but still don’t adopt them. 

Why are there people who have knowledge about health but fail to follow the health practices ?

Everyone knows that sugar is bad for health but a lot of us tend to ignore it. A large number of people tend to smoke even though they know it is harmful for health and can cause cancer. Almost everyone knows that one should exercise and it has tremendous health benefits. But a large number of people don’t follow such practices. 

Some of the reasons I can think of :

Results are in future

Whatever be our health practice – good or bad, the consequences of it lies in the future and hence it is tough to relate today’s decision to a consequence that is going to happen10 years later. Effects are not visible on a day to day level but on a time scale of a few years the health has been greatly affected. It’s similar to the compounding effect. 

Human biases  

Some of the biases like confirmation bias play an important role in our decision making and reasoning. We tend to look for the examples that confirm our pre-existing beliefs and tend to ignore the examples which contradict our beliefs.

Example – It has been widely informed that exercise make people healthy or eating sugar is bad for health but some people are quick to indicate towards a person they know who used to regularly exercise and still fell for bad health or a person who used to consume a lot of sugar and still lived a long life (e.g warren buffett – who is coca-cola addict and 93 years old). Humans fail to understand that what they are observing in their day to day life is just a very small sample of data and there is always a possibility of biases. 

Adopting a tough start

Sometimes people start to follow a health practice but they eventually quit after a while. One of the reasons is the tough start. Rather than going on an iterative easy task they adopt an extremely challenging task. The simple solution could be to start easy and then gradually buildup the discipline. Example – “do exercise 5 days a week” instead of “do exercise once a week”. Once a week is a good start but it seems less appealing and hence no one takes this route in the beginning.

Will power in play 

We are naturally wired to seek comfort whereas health practices generally put people into the discomfort mode for a small period of time. E.g the pain & fatigue of exercise , bad taste of eating salad, resisting the temptation to eat pizza, etc. Sometimes their will power is strong enough to put them in positive mode, while sometimes they give up – It is natural for humans to have a fluctuating level of motivation. 

Lack of good triggers 

As mentioned in the previous section, the fluctuating motivation of humans can affect their health practices but it is important to get back on track as quickly as possible. Example – consuming a cheat meal or eating out could be okay once a week, but if it starts happening more than that then it could be an issue. Generally the presence of a right trigger (e.g some periodic reminder, some motivational buttons, some form of tracking mechanism, some form of scorecards, etc) helps get back on the track quickly.

Improper feedback loop 

Human body is a very complex machine and when we follow a healthy practice we try to change the outcome of the human body. Also, the body of one person might respond differently as compared to another person (e.g some people are not at all sensitive to coffee, some are highly). Sometimes the outcomes are easy & straightforward to interpret (e.g doing exercise can cause weight loss) but sometimes they could be tough to interpret and this sets up an improper feedback loop and eventually people quit.

Example – suppose someone is doing exercise but their visible fat is not reducing – may be because only their visceral fat is getting burned initially , and this person might infer this outcome as if nothing is happening to their body and they might quit it. Suppose, someone switched their high carb diet to high protein diet and they observed some acne, they might infer this as to be caused by high protein (maybe it was caused by protein or maybe it was just a coincidence). 

Environment and peers 

Often our activities are influenced by our society – which includes our peers and surroundings. It is possible that if someone has a close friend or relatives who have bad health practices then they might also be susceptible to follow those.  

Intrinsic motivation  

Some people have a natural motivation towards keeping themselves healthy and they proactively seek resources and knowledge to keep themselves healthy. Maybe they have acquired this motivation due to some experience in their life or maybe it was present naturally. A subset of people from Bucket B might lack some of this intrinsic motivation. 

In an upcoming post I will share how we can deal with these problems.