088 Dan Pardi: How To Find The Health You’re Looking For

Dec 6, 2016

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"Knowing without doing is the same thing as not knowing. What matters is if the knowledge that you have will give you an effective health practice for the long term." - Dan Pardi

There is power in knowledge and with the right health and wellness information, we can make the right decisions in accordance with our own needs.

This week, entrepreneur, researcher, and developer of Loop Model to Sustain Health Behaviors, Dan Pardi, explains Self Determination Theory and motivation, the human connection, and his latest project, humanOS to help us find the best health information.

Find The Health You're Looking For

"You have more control over your health than anyone else." - Dan Pardi

There are many sources out there that claim that they have the answer to all of your health problems, but they truly don't. These novelty, quick fix methods, products, and services may look appealing, but they aren't sustainable for long-term health results.

To find the best help for your health needs, you first have to clarify your own health problems. Rather than trend hopping by focusing on what you just read in the latest health magazine about a new diet, research and find out for yourself what your body needs.

It can be so confusing with so much information out there in books, magazines, and the internet. However, sources like humansOS, that Dan and his team are putting together, help us find the best, most credible sources of information.

Truth vs. Fiction For Health Research In a recent interview on humanOS radio with Dr. David Katz of Yale, Dan mentioned: “As well-intentioned as someone might be, I frequently find myself getting frustrated, not when somebody’s passionate and wrong about an issue, but when people can be overly confident and dismissive of mainstream medicine’s consensus in favor of their own opinion which can often associate with their own financial reward.”

Once you have a proper perspective and mindset, you make good decisions for yourself. It's better late than never to embrace your responsibility to find the best method and motivation for you stay true to yourself and progress your health journey.

One challenge we all face today is the fight against the modern lifestyle. We used to be hunters and gathers, but today we're consuming high processed foods and sitting around too much at home.

An unhealthy lifestyle doesn't only lead to chronic disease, but can impair our daily performance and relationships as well.

All the technology in the world won't help you, but you can use the power of technology to fight back against misinformed studies to do your own research.

Begin Your Own Research

To ensure that you are finding the best information out there, look closely at who this researcher is and what their study is all about.

Who are they associated with?
Do they declare their method?
Do they offer a too good to be true solution?

If this source appears to provide a quick fix, be careful.

Do they have a realistic perspective?
Does their method clearly explain how it will help?
Is their research comprehensive?
Does their campaign have an overall, large framework.

Once you've found a legitimate piece of information on health, how can you incorporate it into your daily life?

Try to clarify the problem that you're trying to solve.
Find the right ideas that can help you.
Understand those ideas deeply.
Turn those into health and wellness skills.
Maintain those health skills for life with good information.

Human Motivation "Our job isn’t to motivate other people, it’s about creating the condition in which people can motivate themselves.” - Dan Pardi Self Determination Theory - (SDT) is a theory of motivation. It is concerned with supporting our natural or intrinsic tendencies to behave in effective and healthy ways. SDT has been researched and practiced by a network of researchers around the world. The theory aims to understand motivation by looking at the core categories of human needs:

Physical, which is things like thirst, and hunger, and sex.
Psychological, which is the desire to be competent in anything but particularly things that are important.
Autonomy, which speaks to the notion that we like to have freedom to determine our own path.
Social needs, which is the sense of belonging to a group, recognition from others, and even the sense of power in your own life.

Controlled vs Autonomous Motivation

SDT is a behavior model that tries to understand what human motivation is. Motivation has many different categories that can be placed into two different groups: Controlled Motivation and Autonomous Motivation.

Controlled Motivation

Controlled motivation is caused by external rewards such as a prize for accomplishing a goal. But you can also be punished by having something taken away from you if you don't complete the goal or feel guilty for not accomplishing it.

Autonomous Motivation

Autonomous motivation is when a person is compelled to do something because the activity takes on some personal importance or it becomes a part of the person's belief system and it even becomes part of the person's identity.

Your not motivated by external rewards, but you do something because it's a part of your identity and who you are as a person.

Dan gave a great example that someone who has controlled motivation runs for the physical reward. However, a person who has autonomous motivation will run in the rain despite all rational thinking because exercise no matter what is part of who they are.

Using humanOS to Your Advantage As a mission, humanOS helps people master their health. Understanding that this is necessary is actually critical to one's success of long-term help. Why? Because all the technology in the world won't be healthy for you. The technology can't just be available, you have to pick it up and use it and you have to use it the right way. HumanOS helps you benefit from the worlds best health technology and health information.

How did you make humanOS so clear and easy to use?

Explain why something is really worth your attention compared to something you shouldn't really pay attention to.
Some untested therapies claim to have the ultimate answer for everything, but they're not validated.
Having mindfulness or awareness about health can put you in a better position.
If more people are aware of their own health and what works and what doesn't, we'll become a healthier community overall.

Listen As Dan Uncovers

Why clarifying the exact health problem is missed by more than half of people seeking change
Novelty seeking vs. taking a deeper dive into what you know to be helpful
How do we get to the deeper understanding to creating skills for sustainable change
How to not get lost in the research and data for your health
Why Dan became frustrated by the ocean of misleading health information online and decided to do the academic work to create a trusted source based on science: humanOS.
Understanding the human behavior model
Why Dan was inspired from his father's early death from lifestyle
Dan's Ancestral Health Symposium Talk
Self Determination Theory
Internal motivation, autonomy, vs. external motivation, reward, punishment, validation
How to leverage different types of motivations for sustainable health change
Learning for efficacy vs learning for recognition
How does something go from interesting idea that you recognize to something that has a direct impact on your blood work?

About Dan Pardi

Dan Pardi is an entrepreneur and researcher whose life’s work is centered on how to facilitate health behaviors in others. He is the developer of Loop Model to Sustain Health Behaviors to help people live a healthy lifestyle in a modern world.

He does research with the Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences Department at Stanford, and the Departments of Neurology and Endocrinology at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Dan specializes in building systems for health, behavior optimization and habit building, energy homeostasis, cognition, decision making, and physiology (sleep, exercise, and inactivity).

Dan also works with Naval Special Warfare to help the most elite fighters in the world maintain vigilant performance in both combat and non-combat conditions. Formerly, Dan served as Board Chairman of the Investigator Initiated Sponsored Research Association, a global non-profit aimed to promote best practices in the arena of academic research grants.

Resources Mentioned On the Show

What You'll Hear On The Show

1:50 Josh discusses today's show topics
3:50 Introduction to Dan
4:45 Clarifying the health problem first
8:00 How can we transition from novelty information to applying what's best for us?
13:40 How can technology and resources like humanOS build a bridge for a healthier lifestyle?
18:00 What is self determination theory? How does it connect with humanOS?
19:00 Two different types of motivation: controlled and autonomous
25:00 Connecting research with motivation
26:50 Why do we need rewards to motivate us?
28:40 How does human connection motivate us?
32:00 Using studies for further learning of human behavior
33:30 Why some forms of exercise like Cross Fit are scaring people away
36:00 How do you cut through dogmatic sources of information and beliefs about health?
40:00 How did you make humanOS so clear and easy to use?
46:30 Who do we trust in the ocean of misinformation? How to take action
50:20 When can people start to utilize humanOS? What's next for it?
54:00 Takeaways from today's show

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