Moving forward with health behaviour change interventions: Considering the plurality of motivational forces driving health behaviours and motivational conflicts

Health behaviours change is a major challenge to prevent premature deaths, such as those caused by physical inactivity and unhealthy diet behaviours. However, health-behaviours change interventions have shown modest or no efficiency across studies and meta-analyses. This finding is likely the consequence of a common feature of the main theoretical frameworks that (i) focus mainly on motivational forces facilitating the new targeted health behaviours, and (ii) omit the motivational forces that prevent the competing unhealthy behaviours. They also overlooked the motivational forces preventing the targeted health behaviours and those facilitating the competing unhealthy behaviours. We therefore argue in favour of (a) a more comprehensive approach of the motivational forces underlying the individual’s health behavioural change; (b) the development of combined interventions, targeting simultaneously the appropriate preventing and facilitating motivational forces, regarding the individual baseline profile; and (c) the consideration of the motivational conflicts resulting from opposing motivational forces, by training people to mobilize the adaptative conflict resolution strategies. Finally, we call for future research and interventions to adopt a new agenda to evaluate and promote health behaviour change by: (i) characterizing baseline individual motivational profiles; (ii) characterizing preferred conflict resolution strategies; (iii) intervening on the appropriate motivational forces and conflict resolution strategies; (iv) evaluating the intervention’s efficiency.