Grant: Doctoral Award - Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships

Lung diseases are a significant burden on individual quality of life, and on the Canadian Health Care system. Participating in exercise-based rehabilitation has been shown to improve the quality of life of people with lung diseases, and reduce health care costs. Unfortunately, many people do not continue to exercise once rehabilitation is over, losing the health benefits accrued during rehabilitation. This research uses practices developed in clinical psychology applied to health-enhancing exercise behaviour. Self-talk is a technique used in clinical psychology to understand and change people's thought processes and behaviours. Self-talk has demonstrated to be effective in improving athletic and educational performance, and it may also be suitable for changing people's thoughts about exercise, and increasing their exercise behaviour. The purpose of this research is to: 1) understand the relationships between self-talk, exercise, and quality of life in people with lung diseases participating in rehabilitation; and 2) test the effectiveness of a self-talk intervention aimed at changing perceptions associated with exercise on post-rehabilitation exercise adherence. If the self-talk intervention helps people continue to exercise once rehabilitation ends, it will offer an easy and inexpensive approach to more successfully changing long-term behaviour in programs with limited scope and funds. Furthermore, if a self-talk intervention successfully produces long-term behaviour change in lung rehabilitation patients, it may also be successful in many other groups of people, potentially leading to substantial improvements in functional capacity, quality of life, and reduced health-care costs. Self-talk is an appealing intervention technique because it is something that people already use and requires few resources to deliver.