Amil Nabhani, Health and Social Psychology

The neuroscience of breaking your bad habits: Find out how to train your brain to create better habits and then commit to it. Habits are deeply wired in the basal ganglia area of your brain. If you want to change, develop a strategy to break out of your bad circuit. You have to put conscious effort and patience into the process and find out how to replace your old behavior with a new one while still giving yourself a reward for choosing the new behavior. Everyone's enthusiastic about changing just to give up later, including me many times. Commitment and patience is key.

Are you curious about the career paths that a graduate of the Master's in Health and Social Psychology can follow? In just 30 seconds I will tell you more about my future ambitions and how I want to realise them.

Do you aim for a career in the field of Health and Social Psychology? In which field would you like to start working? Share your thoughts with me in the comments section below! I am happy to think along with you.

In this episode, I am telling you what to expect from the "Self-Regulation" course in period one. Enjoy and as always stay tuned until next time.
Transcript:
Do you ever find yourself worrying excessively, eating or drinking too much, or buying everything you see? This course is, broadly speaking, about the ways in which self-regulation occurs, why it is sometimes lacking, and how it can be improved. So much money is spent on pills to reduce physical and psychological pain: Pills to improve sleep, pills to reduce anxiety, pills to lower blood pressure, and so on. But the truth is that health is strongly related to lifestyle habits. Instead of taking pills, you should, for example, hit the gym more often, stop smoking, reduce alcohol intake, take good time for rest, and develop adaptive ways of managing stress. As psychologist Albert Bandura once wrote: “Self-management is a good medicine. If the huge benefits of these few habits were put into a pill it would be declared a scientific milestone in the field of medicine”

This is a video where I summarise for you an empirical study of problem 5 "Pavlovian powers" from the Bad Habits course in 59 seconds. Enjoy!
Transcript:
"Obesity is a major health problem and its prevalence is rising, not only in the United States but also in the Netherlands. According to research, 40% of the Dutch adults are currently overweight or obese.
Overweight is becoming more common in children, but we know nearly nothing about the eating behavior of overweight children.
Learning theory predicts that overeating follows from learned associations between the smell and taste of palatable food on the one hand and intake on the other hand. After series of tests and observations, it's observed and concluded that overweight children fail to regulate their food intake when they are confronted with temptations like the intense smell and taste of appetizing food, whereas normal-weight children decreased their intake after both cues.
Their overeating is not related to psychological factors like mood, self-esteem, and a restrained eating style, but it was related to cue-elicited salivation flow.
"

If you want to read the full article: Jansen, A., Theunissen, N., Slechten, K., Nederkoorn, C., Boon, B., Mulkens, S., & Roefs, A. (2003). Overweight children overeat after exposure to food cues. Eating Behaviors, 4 197-209