How to Mix a Behavior Change Cocktail

“The world is ruled by necessity. People change their behavior only if they have to. They feel urgency only if their lives depend on it.” — Robert Greene.

If you are a healthcare, wellness, and longevity science company — you’re in the behavior change business.??

Behavior change is hard even when people’s lives depend on it.

To be successful, you have to change brain chemistry.?

To change brain chemistry, you have to activate emotions and feelings.

One of the best tools to alter brain chemistry, emotions, and feelings is storytelling. However, it’s not used as much as it should be in healthcare, wellness, and longevity, where the facts tend to dominate narratives.

Feelings and emotions are different despite people using the words interchangeably.

Emotions increase sensations in the body.

Feelings are biased, altered by experience and information, and generated from thoughts about emotions.

Just as a picture can say a thousand words, an emotion can convey a thousand thoughts and sensations.

A story can tie emotions and feelings together and help people change what they eat, think, connect with, collaborate, ideate, imagine, and act.

Storytelling can create a natural pharmacy of chemicals in your brain — the perfect brain-change cocktail.??

When you listen to a story, your brain lights up. Emotions, feelings, and thoughts change your brain chemistry.

Marketers and storytellers leverage the emotion and feeling funnel.??

For instance, when you map digital marketing models (i.e., Philip Kotler’s funnel) to The Story Spine model and the brain-change cocktail, the impact of storytelling on physiological changes and the desired results align perfectly.?

First, your story should amp up some?cortisol, which rises when we experience or feel distressed. It plays to your lizard brain and negativity bias. From a marketing standpoint, it’s the first stage of the funnel.??

The second and most popular hormone is?dopamine.?This pleasure and arousal compound helps you follow the emotionally charged events in a story. You are engaged and eager to hear and feel more.

And finally, the wonder drug of storytelling,?oxytocin. It helps inspire prosocial, empathetic, and feelings of love. According to social scientists, it helps us identify with the hero in a story.

So, we have cortisol, which helps with awareness, and dopamine, a neurotransmitter that helps with arousal. Oxytocin, cortisol, and dopamine propagated by storytelling is a mixology that produces?action,?the grand prize in marketing and healthy behavior change.??

AI-generated storytelling at scale runs the risk of marginalizing trust and authenticity and will decrease the dosage of these brain-changing chemicals, making behavior change less effective.

Trust and authenticity are superpowers in a world where it’s increasingly difficult to distinguish between fact and fake.??

Stay true to your superpowers. Write to connect intention with emotion. Hone your storytelling mixology skills.

?Vince Salvo. All Rights Reserved