Psychology

Smoking: Quitting Means Healthy Motivation

People were more motivated to quit smoking if counselors explored smokers’ personal values, discussed their knowledge of health risks, and supported patients as they tried to solve their problem.

That’s according to a new University study that tested a Rochester-developed theory of motivation.

During the past four years, the Smokers’ Health Project, recently awarded an additional five-year, $2.8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, invited 1,000 smokers to talk about health, diet, and smoking issues during a series of counseling sessions.

After four sessions in six months, the smokers were more likely to make serious attempts to quit and to use medications to help them stop, preliminary results show.

“The intervention was found to motivate patients to quit whether they reported wanting to or not at the start,” says Geoffrey Williams, associate professor at the School of Medicine and Dentistry and the study’s principal investigator.

The team—which also includes Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, both professors in the Department of Clinical and Social Sciences in Psychology, and Daryl Sharp, assistant professor and psychiatric nurse practitioner from the School of Nursing—is exploring how smokers see their health and how the patients’ perspective on their health may motivate change.

The project was developed to test the use of Self-Determination Theory, a theory developed by Deci and Ryan that argues that people are inherently motivated to behave in healthy ways, but other factors sometimes interfere with the motivation.

“We believe that patient autonomy is an essential factor in motivating effective change in health behavior,” says Deci. “Our approach enhanced the patients’ feeling of ‘autonomy’ or full agreement with the actions they were taking in their lives.”