Behavior Change

This semester, we have learned how Health Psychology and Community Nutrition concepts can be integrated in order to produce behavior changes in individual and community health. Although these concepts can be incorporated together, they also have separate, specific ways to identify if a behavior change is needed or wanted from a specific individual or community. For example, individual behavior change is usually identified and performed by the individual. As the Transtheoretical Model of behavior change states, an individual must go through the stages of precontemplation, contemplation, and preparation before putting a behavior change into action and maintaining it. This is different in the community setting. While individuals need to be invested

and interested in the behavior change, the intervention is conducted after a needs assessment is done on a population. In a community such as Simmons, I believe that a behavior change intervention such as meditation would be beneficial. This would help lower stress levels in the population that we found to be prevalent through Simmons in Health Psychology discussions.
Although I did not choose meditation as a health behavior change for myself this semester, I do think it would be effective in reducing stress at Simmons.

The act of meditation brings along mindfulness, which is maintaining a moment by moment awareness of thoughts, bodily sensations, and the surrounding environment. As a part of my health behavior change, I did a yoga routine every Sunday to focus on flexibility outside of the gym portion of my goal. Mindfulness through yoga was helpful to my stress levels, so I have no doubt that meditation would lower Simmons students' stress levels. As we learned in class, mindfulness can also help people relax and manage pain levels. I believe focusing on meditation instead of yoga would be more practical for students since yoga sometimes requires a larger space than a dorm room and supplies like a mat. Meanwhile, meditation is more private and requires little space or

supplies.
In order to draw out this activity out for the population, a SMART plan will have to be made to define a specific, measurable, attainable, reasonable, and timely goal. The specific goal of the intervention for Simmons students that I propose is to have students decrease stress levels by listening to a meditation guide for fifteen minutes every night before going to sleep. This meditation guide could be through an online resource or a CD. The intervention will take place in students' dorms, common areas, or homes as they listen to the meditation guide. This goal will be measured by students recording daily start and end times of the behavior and rating their stress levels before and after the behavior by using a scale of one to ten, with one standing for “incredibly stressed” and ten standing for “very calm/relaxed”. At the beginning and end of the behavior change, students will be given surveys that help them reflect on their daily stress levels and what to effect they believe meditation will influence/ influenced their stress levels.
This goal is attainable because it will only take a small amount of Simmons students' days.

They will also have access to the resources they need to meditate via the internet or a CD. Students might have to find motivation in order to complete the change, battle environmental factors, and build on skills and abilities regarding meditation, but if educated on the power of mindfulness, students might be more willing to go through with the behavior change. Most importantly, if students experience guided meditation for themselves and find it helpful, they will be more likely to continue the behavior. This goal is reasonable and worthwhile for students because it will help them lower stress levels and possibly set up a nightly routine to relax. This also might impact how well students sleep, which also could end up affecting student grades. If students are more relaxed and well-rested, they will be able to go about their days with better mental health. Meditating will fit intro students' immediate goals by helping academic performance and mental health while also giving students a tool to use in future jobs and life circumstances. Finally, this intervention will be concentrated time-wise for thirty days in the population, and as mentioned before will consist of students meditating for fifteen minutes every

night.
While a outlined plan for a health behavior change intervention is crucial, we have emphasized this semester how outside factors might help or hinder an individual's progress. Factors that might help or hinder student progress in this intervention could be environmental, such as not being comfortable enough in their surroundings to meditate. This might specifically effect students living in dorms with roommates. This factor could also help students, however, especially if roommates decide to meditate together before bed. Social support such as this is important in any behavior change. A student might also need to develop meditation skills such as tuning into one's body and environment. I am personally someone who, if in the wrong mindset, can get anxious from meditation due to my increased awareness of everything around me. Meditation might also be difficult for someone who is not used to relaxing and/or someone who has never fully developed skills for healthy relaxation techniques. Building off of this, a student's motivation to continue with the behavior might be effected by their experience with meditation before the intervention or during the intervention. If a student does not feel that meditation will not help them or wants to resort to other unhealthy relaxation techniques such as smoking or drinking, their intention to participate will be hindered. A positive outlook on meditation and its benefits, however, could help students continue throughout the intervention.
In order to determine whether there is an actual need for this intervention, we will need to conduct a needs assessment. A needs assessment will be able to help us evaluate a population's knowledge, attitudes, and behavior. The first step of a needs assessment is to define the problem in the population as you see it. In this intervention, the problem is that students are chronically stressed by school and stress has become the norm in the population. The second step helps define what is meant by the community affected by this problem, which in this population is undergraduate students who live on or off campus. Quantitative and qualitative data would be collected next in order to learn more about population stress levels and attitudes towards meditation, mindfulness, and relaxation, and knowledge of stress and meditation. We would collect this data mostly through surveys and behavioral observation of the population. After gathering this data, the next step would be to analyze and interpret the data. This would be done by graphing quantitative responses such as weekly stress levels of students and how commonly students have meditated in the past/are currently meditating. Qualitative responses will be combined into a list and/or bar graph and analyzed. Qualitative data questions would most likely focus on the population's knowledge on stress and meditation, how they feel about meditation, and how they feel that stress impacts their daily lives. This data would be interpreted and analyzed by a team of Simmons students who make sure to look at the data fairly. The findings of the assessment will then be shared with administrators of the college like the dean of students, dean of the undergraduate program, and the president. If the data collected shows that there is a need for Simmons to help reduce undergraduate stress levels, administrators will ideally buy-in to make the new program available for the community.
If approved, this intervention could be implemented at a low-cost in the Simmons community. Simmons could give students a pamphlet detailing the benefits of meditation and a CD with a simple meditation guide. Simmons could also give students an incentive for participating in the intervention, such as entering students into a raffle if they prove they stuck with the 30 day program. Using social marketing for the intervention via social media and targeting social support by giving students an opportunity to meditate at the college together might also help. I believe that this intervention would be successful because giving students the resources for meditation is more likely to get them to try a behavior versus just speaking of the behavior. Social support is also known to increase adherence in a behavior change. A formal evaluation on whether we reached our goal of decreasing student stress would be done through surveys and whether or not the program changed knowledge and behavior.
Health behavior change, whether on an individual or community level, is crucial to helping someone start and adhere to a behavior. In the proposed plan above, I hope to see students feel less stressed and perform better in classes as a short-term impact. The long-term impact on student wellness would hopefully be development of a healthy coping technique to use in the presence of stress in the future, better quality of sleep, and an increase of student success after graduating college.