How to change behavior related to sitting and physical activity? Professor Stuart Biddle

Professor of Physical Activity & Health Dr Stuart Biddle from the University of Southern Queensland, Australia. His main research interest are in health effects, psychology and behaviour change related to sedentary behavior and physical activity.

Timestamps:
3:00 New scientific findings in behavior change in physical activity domain
4:50 What aspects behavior change framework needs to have?
6:30 Why Behavior Change Wheel is such a great tool?
10:25 Is Behavior Change Wheel applicable for individuals?
12:15 Inactivity Psychology – is there a need for a new field of research?
15:05 Differences in the psychology of sedentary behaviour compared to physical activity
17:50 Importance of monitoring of sedentary behaviour
20:45 Self-monitoring of physical activity and sitting time
24:15 What is the relationship between habit and motivation?
31:44 Why active choices need to be more attractive and easier?
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This podcast episode is sponsored by Fibion Inc. | The New Gold Standard for Sedentary Behaviour and Physical Activity Monitoring

Learn more about Fibion: https://fibion.com/research
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Excerpt of the episode:

Host: 00:06:24
And, and you, you said about the behaviour change wheel, what do you see at is its' biggest advantages?

Professor Stuart Biddle: 00:06:34
Well, first of all, it does start with you know, pretty simple conceptualization that behaviour is a function of motivation but also opportunity and people's capabilities. So that's the so called combi model. And within the motivation element, they recognize the typical reflective forms of motivation, like planning and thinking and goal setting and what have you. And that's formed the cornerstone of much of the psychology of physical activity. But at the same time, they recognize more automatic forms of motivation and less conscious forms of operating. And, and I think those are important. You know, we go into the supermarket and we pick things up. Not always that consciously we're, persuaded by signs and affective responses and, and gut reactions as we are, when we buy other products or indeed when we become physically active or sedentary.

So I think that combination of more reflective and more automatic forms of motivation is a good recognition of developments in that field. But the other thing about the behaviour change wheel is it does put things in, in the wider context of, of intervention functions. You know, we could do environmental interventions, we could do interventions that, that operated a level of incentivizing people or reinforcing people. And that takes place within the wider policy framework. So it's quite a nice layered approach. And I believe it was developed to help policy makers, and even politicians see the, the core elements of behaviour change in a language that people can understand. So it's got pretty good practical appeal as well.

Host: 00:08:42
Yeah. And do you see it more fitting for exercise behaviour change or sedentary behaviour? Or does it fit to many things of behaviour change in general?

Professor Stuart Biddle: 00:08:56
Yeah. Should fit across a number of behaviours and that, and it has been applied in that way. If people are interested, in this particular framework, and there are other frameworks by the way, but if they're interested in that, then you know, articles and there's a book on it and there's a website you can, you can see that it's been applied to you know, nutrition, smoking, physical activity and so on. So, the underlying principles of changing people's behaviour is the key. And the, the behaviour itself, the physical activity. In this case, all sedentary behaviour could be applied. So we did a project that, that's come to an end now. But when just before I left the U K five years ago to come to Australia, we would, we were just getting a grant looking at reducing sitting in the workplace and we use the behaviour change wheel to really inform elements of that intervention. And we wrote that up as a separate paper around the development of the intervention and then followed it up with a paper on the outcomes of the intervention. So, you know, in that sense, it can be a, it can definitely be applied in a, in lots of different ways.