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?

An Interview About My Book and other Endeavors

HealthRally Motivation!

Esther Dyson sheds some light on what we are up to at HealthRally in her piece Health Care's Frequent Flyers:

Then there’s HealthRally, which uses insights from behavioral economics to motivate people to achieve their own health and wellness goals. The basic insight is that owing something to your friends is a far more powerful incentive than getting something for yourself.

The user signs up and recruits friends and family to sponsor a reward of their choice for a specified goal. (We can imagine a wish-list revenue opportunity here, where vendors can offer specific motivational products or services.) From then on, the sponsors have an implicit right to check on the user’s progress, offering support or criticism far more compelling than any stranger could. It’s relatively easy to fail on your own, but if your friends have put up real money, it’s much harder.

While the service is currently designed for individuals, companies could also use HealthRally to enhance their corporate wellness programs. By providing matching financial rewards, for example, a company could leverage its employees’ natural support networks and provide a valuable boost to the pot.

Esther recently shared with me that she was able to motivate herself to floss each night by allowing herself to cut five minutes off her morning swim she does each day. Now that's creative motivation!

Friends Rule in Social Health: Social Alliances Outweigh Shared Interests

Your brain is more responsive to your friends than to strangers, even if that stranger has more in common with you. According to new brain imaging research, social closeness outweighs shared interests, as was previously assumed. This has important implications for how we choose what type of support network might best serve us as we work towards a tough health goal like losing weight or quitting smoking.

Should you join a peer support group of weak ties? Or build a social support network of close friends and family?  This research would suggest the latter and this is exactly the approach we've taken at HealthRally. Not only will your brain respond more powerfully to your friends' support and suggestions but in the end they are the one's who really have a vested interest in seeing you succeed.