Eat healthier. Exercise more. Take your medication. Quit smoking. Chances are, everyone you know has made a health vow like this.
Chances are even better they failed.
“Setting long-term goals is a uniquely human trait,” said Elliot Berkman, PhD, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon who studies health behaviors. “Yet, paradoxically, we are really quite bad at achieving them.”
New Year’s resolutions are routinely abandoned. At least 80% of diets fail. Smokers try as many as 30 times before kicking the habit. And in what some call an “ignored epidemic of medication nonadherence,” up to half of chronic disease patients either don’t take their prescribed drugs as directed or don’t take them at all.
“If nonadherence were listed as a cause of death, it would be around the sixth most common cause in the United States, killing about 125,000 people annually (that’s more than Alzheimer’s),” said Fred Kleinsinger, MD, a family practice doctor in California who has researched the subject. “Millions of people are dying, and billions of health care dollars are being wasted because people don’t take their damn medications.”
It’s enough to make you wonder: Why do rational people, with good intentions, consistently not do what’s right for their own health?
