Healthy Habits

Meet Kare-N®. A completely automated “pocket-coach” designed to help your patients and employees adopt new habits. Kare-N® engages users with fun-facts, reminders, and friendly check-ins to keep them accountable. Periodically, patients will be asked how they are feeling, and directed back to your facility for appropriate care when necessary.

“I think of nurturing a habit like nurturing a tiny plant. My job is to keep it alive. That’s all. And as long as it’s alive, I can bring it back to full size quickly and easily.”
– BJ Fogg

Have an idea of a new habit that you want to work on? You’re set! Maybe this habit is something that you’ve been thinking about changing, or something that your doctor or loved one has suggested.

Each day, when you do a specific action in your life that already exists (your anchor), that action will prompt and flow into reminding you to do the new habit that you’re working on. We’ll check in to see if you’ve done your habit, and remembered the all-important reward: to celebrate working on your habit. By celebrating, you are allowing yourself to feel a natural, positive emotion to help you through the rest of your day.

The work involved in managing your health condition can seem overwhelming. However, by breaking up everything you need to into small actions, we can start to practice including these new habits into your day-to-day routine.

Everyone has good intentions to start a new, healthy habit. However, when we choose habits that are too big or complex, like immediately changing your wake-up time to be an hour earlier, or working out for two hours every day, those ‘habits’ are hard to sustain. Instead, by choosing a small, easy, quick habit to start with, we remove a lot of the barriers that make the habit difficult to continue in the long term.
Those small habits also fit into our everyday routines more easily. As you keep working on those small habits, you’ll find that your routines are changing around those healthy habits. You’ll also have the experience to start chaining more healthy habits together.
Once we succeed with a couple of small things, that success creates the confidence for us to manage the larger things in our lives.

“Using triggers to create new habits” (Examined Existence)
“Tiny Habits” (BJ Fogg)

Helpful Tip: Anchor
Our goal is to fit the habit you’re working on into your usual routine. Not only does this help to do the habit more easily, identifying something in your usual routine lets you flag a moment to prompt you to do the habit. It is important that something in your usual routine should be an easy action that you’re already doing – otherwise, you’d be trying to build up two habits at the same time. This prompt is the anchor for your new habit. The anchor is an action in your current day-to-day life that will remind you to practice your new habit.

  • Example: Tony wants to get his body feeling active when he wakes up. His new habit is to jog in place when he wakes up. Every day, he rolls from bed and takes his first step. As soon as he stands up – his easy anchor – this is his flag to start jogging for a minute. He’s accomplished his daily habit!

Helpful Tip: Celebration
Working on a new habit is tough, which makes celebrating each accomplishment vital. Picking an easy, fun way of celebrating in the moment will help your brain to connect that celebration with your habit. This way, you’ll make it so the celebration helps to encourage the habit. Plus, it’s a great way to carry that feel-good and positive attitude with you to the next things that you have to do.

Kare-N's Proven behavior change methodology works to keep patients engaged and on-track to meet their goals. Kare-N’s humanized “voice” gives the feeling of talking to a friend. Choose from a library of programs that can be customized to fit the needs of any department. Categories include:

Nutrition
Physical Activity
Stress Management
Mindfulness
Sleep
Smoking Cessation