So, we know that brief motivational interviews with personal feedback result in student willingness to revisit their drinking behavior. Likewise, we know that such reviews often result in a willingness to dial back their frequency of use and/or the amount they drink. In addition, it is not uncommon that the practitioner who conducts such motivationally enhanced intercessions with students find them willing to continue the conversation about changes even when having met their mandated obligation because they come to trust the practitioner. What is needed now is an evidence-based approach to helping students develop an action plan to make changes and to do so with a degree of certainty that they will be successful…and without a waning of commitment, especially when confronted with real-time challenges to their best of intentions; enter Implementation Intentions.
Implementation intentions is a ten-dollar psychological term for the familiar If…then logic statements so commonly studied in an undergraduate philosophy 101 course. They are the self-regulatory behavioral equivalent to the conditional statements used in debates where logic is used to make a debater’s point…If P, then Q…if it looks like a duck, sounds like a duck, and walks like a duck, then chances are good that it is a duck.
Implementation intentions employ a when, where, how reasoning when developing a plan intended to increase the likelihood of one’s behavior change plan resulting in success while at the same time inoculating the changer against the cues and triggers that so often sabotage the best of intentions to change. “When” am I likely to encounter a threat to my change plan? “Where” is this likely to happen? “How” will I act on it rather than react to it?
Obviously, the more specific the details are regarding the answers to these three questions, the more likely the implementation intentions are to shield the changer from a lapse if not a relapse. If I know I am most likely to drink 4+ drinks on a Saturday night (when) AND this is most likely to happen at the TKD (TippaKegaDay) frat house (where), THEN I will go/do _____ on Saturday nights for the remainder of this semester.
The literature seems to suggest that successful changers are not so much those who have the “strongest” willpower but rather those who have so structured their lives as to reduce the frequency of encountering the cues and triggers associated with the behavior they now seek to change. Of course, this seems like common sense…those at all familiar with A.A. have heard the saying, If you don’t want to get hit by the train, don’t stand on the track, and AA’s exhortation to “change people, places, and things” has been around since AA’s inception in 1935. That said, implementation intentions are also very much like a practice used in business when considering project management – conducting a pre-mortem. Essentially, a premortum seeks to consider all likely sources of sabotage or disruption that can preclude success in a considered project. Instead of looking at what went wrong “after the fact” (a post-mortem) management considers what “could” go wrong and then takes steps in advance of implementing the project to prevent such from happening.
So, back to our success when engaging students in revisiting their high-risk and dangerous drinking. The next logical step after having gained (1) student trust by employing brief motivational interviews with personal feedback AND (2) their willingness to revisit their personal drinking behavior is to (3) help them identify a nonetheless brief and noninvasive strategy for developing a specific behavioral plan designed to help them accomplish their objective. To this end, I suggest that implementation interventions may be just such an approach.
What do you think?
