Here’s an incentive: good health

So, you want to quit smoking? Or maybe you want to shed a some pounds?

Well, it turns out that a little financial incentive can motivate you to achieve your health-related goal-- whether it’s losing weight, exercising more regularly, quitting smoking or making other positive life changes.

According to a 2008 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), dieters who had a financial incentive to lose weight were nearly five times as likely to meet their goal than those who had no potential for financial reward. On average, participants who received financial rewards lost more than 13 pounds in 16 weeks, compared to an average loss of only 3.9 pounds in the control group.

"Incentive approaches based on behavioral economic concepts appear to be highly effective in inducing initial weight loss," the researchers wrote.

Financial incentives can also help people quit smoking. In a separate study, the same team of University of Pennsylvania researchers found that smokers who were given a cash reward were three times more likely to kick the habit than those who only received educational information.

It may come as no surprise that money is a powerful incentive to change your behavior. But that’s not all. Research also suggests that if you publicly announce your goal, you’re more likely to stick to your commitment.

So, tell your friends and family members about your goal and stake some money on achieving success. It’s a win-win: you’ll be motivated to succeed and if you achieve success, and they’ll see returns on their investment (a healthier you). Now that’s a powerful combination!

Beyond Workplace Wellness

As Ron Leiber points out in his New Year's Day article Incentivize Yourself to Good Health in 2011, the power of financial rewards has come to corporate America. 

Two things have happened recently that will probably bring more incentives to more people. First, the new health care law explicitly grants permission to employers to offer rewards of at least 30 percent of the total cost of health insurance to employees. Those winnings, often in the form of lower premiums, will go to people who join wellness programs and hit certain health goals.

Right now companies are experimenting with new ways of leveraging financial incentives to improve the health of their employees because of the real bottom line benefits.  In a recent meeting with one of the wellness incentives thought leaders, Ken Shachmut at Safeway Health, he mentioned to me that he is taking a broad approach and looking for new arrows to add to his quiver to help his employees improve their chance of success and enable them to reach their wellness targets. My recommendation was to look beyond the enterprise, to the real social network that surrounds their employees and figure out how to get them engaged. In short, try the HealthRally approach. He liked it.

What's your social wellness goal for 2011?

Social wellness means getting healthy together.  While accountability and group support are very potent strategies for behavior change, the rise of social networks now make it possible to get connected and healthy with your close friends and family who can support you through a long process - inspiring and motivating you to succeed. So while you sit around and read your activity feeds over the holidays and wonder if you should make a new year's resolution, you might just consider combining both of these activities and chose a goal which you and your friends can achieve together. So what's it going to be? 

1 Million Social Health Influencers and Counting

Stowe Boyd recently commented on two talks Clay Shirky had given recent about research that shows how our vast social networks impact our health.

"In a nutshell, it turns out that the activities of the ‘third neighborhood’ influence you in ways you may be completely unaware of.  These are people that you do not know, but are (dis)connected to you by two removes: the friends of your friends’ friends. Christakis and Fowler found that obesity, smoking, and many other medical factors strongly correlated with the prevalence of corresponding activities in these large social scenes."

He goes on to describe how Clay would like to see the emergence of new tools that would let us
understand how our friends of friends of friends, which is likely to be on the order of a million people, plus or minus, influence us.  Boyd calls this our social scene — the group that actually influences your thinking, moods, buying and health behavior — and comments how this is in completely untapped and untappable with today's tools.  Stowe and Clay have highlighted an important need.  Fortunately, personalized social health analysis tools on the draw boards will soon allow each of us to understand new ways that we can improve our health by giving us a view how our social scene's impact our lifestyle choices.

Connect, Cultivate, Succeed

Tweet your health goals and you are more likely to reach them.  Right? Well, not necessarily so, say the co-authors of Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and the How They Shape Our Lives in an article they published yesterday, Do Tweets Change Your Behavior? While tweeting may help some, to instigate new behaviors using the web, they highlight the following as important elements to success:

• It's not just the number of ties that matters online, it is also the nature and quality of these ties.
• We must learn how to cultivate online interactions that are, or feel, real
• We need interactions where something is actually at stake, such as the health status of the connected individuals

At HealthRally we believe the authors, Nicholas Chrsitakis and James Fowler are right on target. We are focused on building tools that help you bring together your close friends in a private social network where they can inspire and support you in your quest to achieve your health goal and even super motivate you with rewards.  Strong ties, real interactions, with something at stake. It's a powerful formula for success.

So what motivates you?

Wellness and getting healthy is more about motivation than information.  Yes, accurate health information is important but when I started to get healthy I basically had known for a long time what the problems were and what I needed to do about them.  It was a lot more about deciding to taking charge and doing something about it than knowing how to change. So I took a broad look around for motivation, and I found it nearly everywhere.  I found it in the eyes of my wife, my family, my friends, the people walking down the street, and even my wallet. There was a better way to do this, so I took the challenge and went for it.

So what motivates you?

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