- Want to create or join a league? Join FitFeud now
- Already a user? Sign In
FitFeud Corporate Wellness Blog
An Outbreak of Wellness: Stalking the Viral Cause - Part 1
This is a guest post by Bob Merberg. Bob is the founder and host of the Employee Wellness Network (tEWN™), a social media website for professionals on the leading edge of corporate health and wellness program development. The author of The Health Seeker's Handbook, Bob has been helping employers deliver effective worksite wellness programs for more than 20 years. He currently serves as Wellness Program Manager for a Fortune 500 company that is nationally recognized for its innovative approach and proven effectiveness.
This is the first post of a two part series. Read An Outbreak of Wellness: Stalking the Viral Cause - Part 2.
//
Imagine you could plant a virus in a few employees that would spread from person to person – but instead of spreading disease, it spread health and well-being.
As far-fetched as this scenario may seem, it is closer to reality than you may think. According to researchers Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, many health problems and behaviors – including obesity, depression, and smoking – are strongly influenced by social networks. In this context “social networks” doesn't refer to social media websites like Facebook, but, essentially, to your friends, your friends' friends, their friends, and so forth.
If health problems like smoking and obesity are “contagious,” then smoking cessation and weight loss also are contagious. In fact, the premise of Connected, the best-selling book by Christakis and Fowler, is that, ultimately, your social network affects your health and lifestyle. And, in turn, your health and lifestyle affects members of your network. At a workplace, your health is influenced by the health of your coworkers. What's more, your health is influenced by your family, and holds influence over your family's health.
Christakis and Fowler describe the depth of this influence as three degrees of separation – your friends (one degree), your friends' friends (two degrees), and your friends' friends' friends – a concept painfully familiar to Kevin Bacon fans.
According to the researchers, then, people you don't even know affect your risk of becoming obese. They found evidence of this in reviewing data on more than 12,000 subjects from the Framingham Heart study.
If your friends are obese, your risk of obesity increases by 45%. If your friends' friends' are obese, your risk of obesity increases 25%. And – get this – if your friends' friends' friends are obese, your risk of obesity still increases by 10%, even though you probably don't know them and they may live hundreds of miles away.
The exact mechanisms of how these things spread differ depending on the health issue, and include things like role-modeling and the shifting of norms. For example, being overweight becomes more acceptable as members of your network get heavier. And as more people you know readily eat fast food, you're more likely to follow suit.
Weight loss, just like weight gain, can spread through networks like a wave. But there's less evidence of the spread of weight loss because, in the decades studied, the tide has been going in the other direction.
I've often thought about social connections as they relate to smoking, especially for employers that still offer designated smoking areas outside their facilities. When you see 10 smokers lighting up in a smoking area, you can be sure that the employer has unwittingly forged a smokers' support group. Imagine the bonds you would form “enjoying” a cigarette two or three times a day with your nine smoker buddies. If you quit smoking, you'd sever your connection to this group. While employers' most effective approach may be to go smoke-free, in effect bulldozing the support group, another means to success is getting one member to quit. This influences the other members and plants the virus of belief that they, too, can quit. Indeed, Christakis and Fowler report that smoking cessation is like “the obesity epidemic in reverse.” If a coworker in a small firm quits smoking, you are 37% more likely to quit smoking.
The smoking example points to a finding in this research that is critical to understanding the dynamics of employee wellness: Health behaviors occur in clusters within networks. You can see a narrated video of how smoking cessation flows through clusters in a network here.
Part II of this series will include the types of health issues that spread through networks and six critical considerations related to health connectedness. Read An Outbreak of Wellness: Stalking the Viral Cause - Part 2.
Comments
We'd love to hear what you think about this post. Please comment below.