Grant: Planning and Dissemination Grant - Institute Community Support

Unhealthy eating, lack of physical activity, sedentary behaviour, and smoking are linked to the main causes of death in Canada (e.g. cancer, heart disease, stroke, and diabetes). Population health approaches to health behaviour change often involve raising awareness and promoting motivation to change. While important, even when awareness increases and motivation is high, life can get in the way. This can lead to a gap between what people know and want to do, and what they actually do. Since the early 90s, research has focused on how to bridge this intention-behaviour gap. The best-evidenced strategy to date is the formation of 'implementation intentions', which goes beyond goal setting to moving motivation into health behaviour change. Implementation intentions involve forming very specific plans in a very specific way to 'program' your brain to automatically react to specific situations so that when you encounter those situations, you are more likely to act on your good intentions instead of having to make the decision on the spot, potentially getting side-tracked. This elegant, social science-based 'brain hack' is remarkably effective when done correctly. It is inexpensive, easy to deliver, takes little time, based on people's own life context and could be delivered at population scale. We recently finished a Cochrane review of health studies that randomly assigned people to form implementation intentions or not. We found 118 studies involving over 33,000 people worldwide, and showed that this technique works. However, much of the evidence is from small studies (< 200 people) with short-term follow-up (< 6 months). The promise of this strategy for population health is clear and now is the time to test it at scale. We will bring together key international experts that developed the evidence behind implementation intentions to plan a first-in-Canada large-scale evaluation with long-term follow-up of implementation intentions for health behaviour change.