Can AI and CBT really help you get healthier?
You won’t leave your apartment without a quick glance to make sure your fitness tracker is strapped to your wrist. Or maybe you go OCD on your phone every night recounting how many steps you’ve taken that day. There’s no doubt that tech is motivating millennials to move more, but what good does all that moving around do if your office is like a Snacks “R” Us? Hint: not much.
Overhauling your wellness habits — exercise, eating, thinking, and all — requires more than 10,000 steps a day. It requires a lifestyle reboot. Thankfully, there are apps for that. But while tons of apps out there will walk you through changing your unsavory patterns, one stands apart from the rest in that it gets to the root of your behavior. It’s called Noom, and it’s deep.
One of the key differences between Noom and other nutrition-based wellness apps is that Noom doesn’t restrict what you do at all — it focuses on identifying individualized thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that contribute to your bad habits, and then it helps you change your habits for the long haul.
CBT helps you understand why you're doing what you're doing
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a treatment method used by psychotherapists. Here’s an example of how CBT works. Say you sit down with a snack every night to watch TV, even though you’re not hungry. Or maybe a single drop of rain is enough to make you call it quits on going to the gym. Instead of nixing your bad habits altogether, which works for like a week, CBT teaches you to identify the triggers, thoughts, and feelings that make you do them in the first place. The idea is to understand your actions as the foundation for changing them.
Like we said, it’s deep. Its fitness and food trackers even use AI to suggest personalized eating plans, articles, workout inspiration, and it lets you connect with fellow Noomers on the same path as you. Power in numbers!
Aside from the apps, trackers, AI, and CBT, the last trick to making sure your wellness routine sticks is to laugh. That’s right, share your victories and laugh at your defeats. It’s called the humor effect and it’s yet another psychological phenomenon that helps information stick in our brains and get used in a productive way.
So work out, eat good food, and then laugh your app off. Sound like a game plan?
Topics Health
