lifestyle change

Dramatic Relief is another technique for lifestyle change that has been adopted by anti-obesity and healthy living campaigns. It has also been used frequently in anti-smoking campaigns. Dramatic Relief can be used no matter your goal, and is designed to help move you from the Contemplation stage to Determination and towards Action. Dramatic Relief works by creating an experience of increased emotion which is followed by a relief from that emotion if a step towards life change is taken. Dramatic experiences can include anything moving such as testimonies, psychodrama, and media campaigns. These type of ad campaigns use uncomfortable emotions, such as fear, disgust, or guilt, so people are motivated to do something not to feel this same way again.

It is the idea used in “reverse thinspiration,” or when someone puts a picture of themselves at their highest weight on the refrigerator. It’s the reason we call loved ones after watching a sappy movie or go clean the kitchen after reading an article about salmonella. It’s hard to imagine driving your kids through a fast food restaurant and not portioning their servings after driving by one of these billboards:

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit. Aristotle

Habits are extremely powerful and, by nature, something that we do without thinking. Aristotle’s quotation can be illustrated with the simple explanation of saying “excuse me” after you sneeze. As a child, you had many things to learn about sneezing; your parents probably had to teach you to put your hand (or elbow) over your mouth, to use a Kleenex, not to sneeze on other people, and to say “excuse me.” Sneezing is automatic, but everything that follows is learned. Ideally, from the time you were able, every time you would sneeze, your mother would follow up with “say excuse me” to which you would oblige. Also, at some point your mother would explain to you that this is appropriate social behavior, although she probably said you need to ‘be polite’ to have friends.