Facilitating Behavior Changes

Facilitating Behavior Changes Posted By:
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I recently listened to a very good speaker on helping patients with behavior change. Dr Judson Brewer is an addiction psychiatrist who has researched mindfulness and behavior change in patients. He has published several books on these topics, which are geared toward both healthcare providers and patients. The books provide evidence-based, practical, and specific tools for helping patients change unwanted behaviors. He also has an app that patients can use for learning to control anxiety, smoking cessation, and improving eating habits. As helping patients make behavior changes is a challenge most of us face as healthcare providers, I wanted to elaborate on these helpful resources.

One thing that may be helpful is Dr Brewer's free course for healthcare providers. This course explains his approach to behavior change and the evidence behind it; it is based on mindfulness and understanding the brain's reward system and its impact on habits. He explains what mindfulness is, how it works to help patients, what the evidence is, and how we can use it to support patients.

Several studies have been done to investigate the efficacy of Dr Brewer's programs: for smoking cessation, in-person training with his program "Craving to Quit" was shown to be 5-times more effective than the American Lung Association's "Freedom From Smoking" program; for changing eating habits, his program "Eat Right Now" was shown to reduce craving-related eating by 40%. He also has a program for managing anxiety; participants in his "Unwinding Anxiety" program experienced a 47% reduction in the Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 (GAD-7) scale, and in a clinical study of physicians with moderate to severe anxiety, GAD-7 scores were reduced by 57% 3 months after program initiation.

These are great results, and his programs may be helpful to facilitate behavior change in your patients. For additional information, Dr Brewer has several TED talks on the topics of mindfulness and behavior change that are worth checking out.

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Filed under: Miscellaneous , Curbside Consultations

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