Bridging The Knowledge-Action Gap: Simple Steps To Turn Health Advice Into Action

“It’s not what you know that counts, it’s what you do with what you know.”

Although this quote is true throughout life in general, it particularly applies to health and wellness.

To bring this concept to life, let me introduce you to Bria. Bria’s story is a familiar one, and as you follow along, you might even find yourself nodding in recognition.

Like Bria, many of us know what we should be doing to maintain or improve our health, but putting that knowledge into practice often proves challenging.

Despite having this wealth of information, we struggle to turn what we know into action.

This disconnect is known as the Knowledge-Action Gap: The discrepancy between what we know and what we practice.

Why Does This Happen?

On an individual level, there are many reasons why people don’t act on the information they already have.

However, there are 3 common reasons why majority of people struggle to turn health advice into action:

1. Information overload

In the age of information, access to health advice is at your fingertips. You’re constantly bombarded with tips, guides, and studies about how to live a healthier life.

However, you often find that a lot of that information is contradictory, which makes it extremely difficult to know what’s accurate and applicable in your own life.

When faced with too many choices or conflicting advice, you feel overwhelmed and may struggle to make decisions and take action.

2. Prioritizing immediate gratification

The benefits of the critical actions you need to take for a healthy life (like eating well, getting enough sleep or exercising regularly) are usually long-term.

However, people often prioritize immediate rewards over long-term benefits:

• Snoozing your alarm and sleeping in feels so much better than getting out of your warm, cozy bed to exercise.

• Grabbing fast food is so much easier than planning and preparing a healthy, balanced meal.

• Watching another episode of your favorite TV show instead of sleeping when you know you should feels so good in the moment.

Since the benefits of healthy living seem too abstract or distant, the immediate pleasure or comfort of unhealthy behaviors often outweigh future benefits of healthier choices.

This cognitive bias often leads to choosing behaviors that offer instant rewards, even if they’re detrimental to health in the long run.

3. Lack of immediate consequences

People often underestimate the consequences of not taking action on health advice because they often don’t show up immediately.

Without visible or immediate consequences, it’s easy to dismiss the need for lifestyle changes, even when you know they’re essential for long-term health.

Because these effects are so gradual, they fail to create the sense of urgency needed to motivate immediate action.

It then becomes easy to procrastinate—continuously telling yourself that you’ll get to it “tomorrow” or “next week”, only for that day never to arrive.

Turning Knowledge Into Action

What differentiates those who put their knowledge into practice from those who don’t, is how fast they turn acquired information into action.

The goal is to ensure that the gap between what you know and what you do is as narrow as possible.

The “Triple A” method is a simple 3-step framework you can leverage to bridge the knowledge-action gap:

Step 1: Awareness

First, you need to realize that knowing isn’t enough. Passively consuming all the health tips you can makes little difference. Putting that information into practice does.

Knowledge is power only when it’s put into practice.

Second, identify how wide your knowledge-action gaps are and what the underlying causes could be.

Once you figure out why it’s difficult for you to turn knowledge into action, it becomes easier to come up with a solution to close the gap.

Step 2: Analyze

The first step of analyzing new information is deciding whether or not it’s useful for you.

This will depend on various factors like your health goals, current lifestyle, credibility of the source etc.

Consider how the information aligns with your specific needs and whether it offers practical steps that you can realistically incorporate into your daily routine.

If it’s not useful, discard it. If it’s useful, move on to the next step.

Step 3: Act

Once you decide which information to keep, create an action step.

Taking action can look different:

• Decide to dig deeper into the topic if you need more information.

• Choose a small, easily executable action to help you incorporate the new information into your existing routines e.g. If you want to drink more water, start by focusing on having a glass of water each morning, instead of trying to hit the goal of 8 glasses a day right away.

Taking action doesn’t mean doing a massive overhaul of your lifestyle all at once. Your only focus should be on consistently doing that one small action.

In the journey toward better health, knowing is just the beginning; taking action is what truly makes the difference.

The key to transforming your health is to consistently do what you already know.

Your Next Action Step

Choose one area that you want to work on that’ll improve your overall health and well-being.

Identify how wide your knowledge-action gap is in that area.

What is one small thing that you can start doing to begin closing that gap?

Commit to do that thing this week.

Thanks for reading! I hope you found something valuable :)

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