How many health messages do YOU receive?

Everyone of us is exposed to health communications. Whether we pay attention or not is a whole different story. This past week I spent 24 hours counting the communication messages I was exposed to. I had to separate them into health messages and non-health messages. I had a hard time counting the non health messages simply because there were so many of them. However, spending 24 hours of being extremely cognizant of all the health messages in my life was eye opening. In one commercial break during Extreme Home Makeover (yes, I love that show) there were 4 health commercials and 4 non health commercial. That is ONE commercial break!!!!! We learned about the Communication Persuasion Matrix which includes and one of the categories is exposure. I can tell you one thing, all of us are definitely being exposed to health messages. The challenge comes in fulfilling the other steps of the matrix; getting our attention, interest, understanding, yielding, and behavior change. I challenge you to just pay attention for 20 minutes to see how many health messages you are exposed to. Then think about how many you regularly pay attention to and how many affect your health behaviors? I guess it depends on how important the issue is to you. You pay attention to things that you care about and you ignore things that you think don’t pertain to you. Then how do you get a person to pay attention to something that they should care about but don’t? Ah, the challenge of creating a successful health message….