Mechanisms of self-control on health behavior change / 中华行为医学与脑科学杂志

ABSTRACT

Self-control brings important effects on the process and maintenance of health behavior change in individuals, but its mechanism is unclear.Healthy behavior change could be divided into goal-oriented behavior initiation stage, combating habit rejection stage, and habit acquisition and maintenance stage.Established theories of health behavior change mainly focus on the conflict between the goal-directed behavior initiation phase and habitual behavior.It is also indicated that disgust is the key mechanism to restrain the implementation of goal-oriented behavior, but ignore the mechanisms in the action implementation and new behavior acquisition phases.In fact, goal-directed and habitual behaviors work together to ensure that individuals adapt efficiently to their environment.However, when goal-oriented behavior becomes habitual, old habit and new goal-oriented behavior begin to compete, causing conflicts and aversion.The core phase of self-control functioning is just in the confrontation with habit rejection phase.On the one hand, self-control directly assists individual goal-directed behavior habituation through conflict sense adaptation.On the other hand, intensive management and stimulus control indirectly assist goal-directed behavior habituation through the relief of conflict sense.Further exploration of the theory and clinical practice of self-control affecting healthy behavior change is needed in the future.