Maintenance

The goal during maintenance is to adopt necessary attitudes and establish an environment that will enable a new behavior to become a lifelong practice. There may be strong issues to work against for a given individual to ensure that they will not relapse. As we know, many new health behaviors do not survive long term. Individuals must take on new attitudes, knowledge and beliefs to be successful. Have you tried to change a lifestyle behavior? Discuss among your group what your experiences have been-what strategies worked or did not work for you? We have discussed in this module how deeply held our belief systems are so it may take a very long time for individuals to change their beliefs about smoking or alcohol use, for example. However, success stories are all around us. There are great numbers of people who have quit smoking, some very quickly, because it suddenly became important for them to do so.