Why many health intentions fail

Most of us know what it takes to live a healthy life: eat balanced meals, exercise regularly, and get enough sleep. Sounds simple right? But knowing and doing are two very different things. Even with the best intentions, sticking to healthy habits or breaking unhealthy ones can feel like an uphill battle. Why is it so hard? Motivation, no matter how strong at first, tends to fizzle out over time. Add to that the daily obstacles we face – busy schedules, unhealthy snacks, or environments that encourage convenience over effort – it’s no wonder that many of us struggle to keep up the good work.

Starting a new habit is one thing. Keeping it up is another. Motivation might kickstart the journey, but sustaining it is a whole different ballgame. This is the real challenge in behavior change: how do you help people maintain healthy habits over time? How can we help people make healthier choices that truly stick? Or in other words, how can we bridge the gap between healthy intentions and real action?

How Behavioral Science drives better health outcomes

This is where Behavioral Science comes in. Instead of relying on willpower alone, Behavioral Science uncovers the deeper reasons behind behavior and motivation. It provides insights into how people think, decide, and act, and how those actions ultimately result in habits that are sustained, interrupted, and or even regained. These insights help us to design strategies and tactics to overcome the hurdles people are experiencing, making healthy choices easier and more rewarding.

Take the challenge of improving physical activity or nutrition. Simply telling people to ‘exercise more’ or ‘eat healthier’ rarely works. But by applying behavioral insights, we can design more effective solutions to help people make better choices. For example, Behavioral Science adds nuance to the process of building healthy habits by considering the entire psychological, physical, and social context. A healthy habit requires more than a cue, it requires thinking through how that cue fits into someone’s lifestyle, where, what, and how the cue is executed. It also requires thinking through how a behavior is rewarded and tracked, and how people might habituate or even be demotivated by a tracker. Then, there is also the nuance of recovery, and how to re-activate someone once a habit was lost, whether it is missing a day or missing a year. Habits are not simple. They are not only about what happens in an app or product, but also about what happens in someone’s daily life and inside their head. These are different types of engagement that we refer to as ‘Little e’ engagement (how people interact with an app or product) and ‘Big E’ engagement (how they adopt the desired behavior in the ‘real world’). [1]

For example, we worked with a digital health start-up that was struggling to retain users despite having over 30 million downloads. To tackle this, we introduced the framework of Little e engagement (in-app behaviors) and Big E engagement (real-world behaviors) to help their team align their product design with both digital and real-world behaviors. This led to redesigning their meal plans to require just five ingredients to make cooking easier, and features were updated to allow for more flexibility so users weren’t penalized for missing a day of healthy eating. By aligning business goals, user needs, and desired behavioral outcomes, the start-up managed to support healthier habits better and keep their users engaged.

Making it fit into everyday life

The key here is to create personalized, context-sensitive solutions. Behavioral Science allows us to tailor strategies to fit different needs. Whether it’s helping someone remember to take their medication with smart reminders or supporting mental well-being through accessible, engaging tools, it’s about creating interventions that are easy to adopt. By addressing both individual needs and external influences, we help people improve their behavior in a way that fits their lives instead of forcing them to change overnight. 

At its core, Behavioral Science ensures that health interventions aren’t just a quick fix. They’re designed to create lasting, meaningful changes that fit seamlessly into everyday life. Whether it’s a health app encouraging consistent meditation sessions, a wearable to track and support physical activity, or a program designed to help with medication adherence, the goal is the same: making the path to better health as smooth as possible. 

In the end, it all comes down to having a deep understanding of the behaviors that need improving. Behavioral Science doesn’t just offer the frameworks for understanding why people act the way they do – it brings a powerful toolkit for designing products and services to drive meaningful change. So the value of Behavioral Science? That lies in addressing the complexities of human behavior and turning them into actionable, sustainable solutions. 

Are you ready to add nuance?

If you’re ready to design products or services that empower people to live healthier, more fulfilling lives, we’re here to help. Let’s build science-driven solutions together. Contact us to learn how we can support your (digital) behavior change initiatives.

P.S. We developed a 150+ item inventory to assess the behavior change potential of digital tools. Are you curious to learn how well your app does on integrating behavior change techniques across your users’ journey? We already rated some exercise apps, and while they performed well at onboarding, they struggled to implement the science of habit formation. Read more about our Behavior Chance Score here, or reach out via hello@nuancebehavior.com. 

References

[1] Cole-Lewis, H., Ezeanochie, N., & Turgiss, J. (2019). Understanding health behavior technology engagement: Pathway to measuring digital behavior change interventions. JMIR formative research, 3(4), e14052