Self-affirmation and self-control

To promote healthy lifestyles, such as eating a healthy diet, exercising regularly, reducing alcohol consumption or quitting smoking, health educators typically rely on persuasive communication. Such communication frequently makes people aware of the risks associated with their unhealthy behaviors. For these communications to have a positive impact on long-term health and wellbeing, people need to accept this information and then change their behavior. However, this does not always happen. In this chapter, we consider the problem of responding adaptively to health-risk information from a self-control perspective, and discuss how a simple intervention – self-affirmation – could facilitate self-control and subsequent health-behavior change in response to this information.