Flex API
Flex API is our intelligent behaviour change program generator - designed to help you build flexibility into everyday life.
By prompting you to try new actions and think in fresh ways, Flex API helps you disrupt unhelpful habits and grow your capacity to adapt and thrive.
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Grounded in the Do Something Different methodology, developed by Professors Ben (C) Fletcher and Karen Pine, Flex API combines behavioural science with AI to make lasting change simple and achievable.
What it is.
Flex API creates personalised Do’s - small, targeted actions designed to gently push you beyond your comfort zone. Each Do helps you experiment with new ways of thinking and behaving, gradually breaking the patterns that keep old habits in place.
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Unlike traditional programs, Flex API looks beyond the obvious behaviours. In a program focused on weight loss, Do’s don’t always target diet or exercise. Instead, they might invite you to change how you commute, shop, relax, or socialise — addressing the everyday routines that quietly influence your wellbeing.
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As Onmi’s implementation of the Do Something Different approach, Flex API can draw on contextual data to personalise each Do. This allows us to localise your experience, delivering the right prompts at the right time, for change that truly fits your life.
Do’s stimulate you to engage in novel activities that expand your behavioural repertoire.
Habits are often made up of a chain of actions and thoughts. This is important because one behaviour (or thought) automatically cues the next one in the chain. The bad habit will probably have started earlier than you think because the habit chain may be quite long. For example, you might always drive the same way home after work, and you might pass the shop that triggers a thought about eating biscuits, you buy biscuits meaning to be good about when you eat them. Then you go home and turn on the tv and get a coffee. The eating of the biscuits that is likely then will have started with a habit chain going back many apparently independent decisions, such as which route to drive to get home. Do's break the habit chains earlier than you might otherwise do.
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The Do’s work because they interrupt the sequence of conditioning; they change the small lifestyle behaviours that trigger the unhealthy habit chain and try to instigate a new chain of events.[1] Through experimenting with new behaviours, you might be better equipped to weaken your existing habits and also encounter new experiences that could challenge current thinking.[2]
Do Something Different model of behaviour change. New actions lead to new cognitions. There is no cognitive route from old habit to new action. [3]
Our inspiration
Nearly forty years of research at the University of Hertfordshire has reshaped the way we understand behaviour change.[4] This pioneering work, led by Professor Ben (C) Fletcher, founder of FIT Science, and Professor Karen Pine, Professor of Developmental Psychology, gave rise to the Do Something Different approach - the foundation of Flex API.
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Today, Professor Fletcher collaborates with Onmi to continue advancing this research through the development of our next-generation behaviour change programs.
Bringing about changes in modifiable behavioural risk factors is very difficult.
From a behavioural science perspective, one reason why health messages are not making an impact is the habitual nature of human behaviour. A significant barrier to changing behaviour is people's pre-existing personal and lifestyle habits that render them resistant to change.
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Although a minority of people will heed health advice and change their behaviour because it is good for them, others will have the intention to change, and understand the need to change but will nonetheless persist with their pre-existing behaviours.
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This is not due to a lack of knowledge; most of us know what is healthy and what isn’t. And if we are not certain, there is an abundance of information available at the click of a button. So why do we find it difficult to make these changes even though we understand their importance?
Habit machines
Think about what you have done so far today. How often were you actually thinking about what you were doing? Were you mainly doing what you’ve done before? How much was a habit? We aren’t in control of ourselves as much as we’d like to be. Most of the time, we are not in control at all.[3]
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We all have many habits. Some are useful and good for us, like washing our hands, brushing our teeth and putting on seat belts. Others aren’t as good, like repeatedly checking our phones, or eating unhealthy snacks while we watch tv. So how does our brain create these habits?
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Habits are generally formed by repeating a behaviour until it has become more or less automatic.[5] By repeating the behaviour in a consistent context, we forge a direct link in memory between the context and response.[6] Therefore, we learn to associate the behaviour triggered by that setting; this process is termed ‘context-dependent repetition’. This reinforces a mental context–behaviour association, such that alternative options become less accessible in memory.[7] Eventually, the mere perception of the context automatically triggers the corresponding behaviour.[8],[9]
References
[1] Pine, K., 2014. Time to shift brain channels to bring about effective changes in health behaviour. Perspectives in public health, 134(1), p.16.
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[2] Page, M.P., and Page, N.C. (2011). “HOT topics: habits, opportunities and thoughts in pro-environmental behaviour change,” in Going Green: The Psychology of Sustainability in the Workplace, ed. D. Bartlett (Leicester: The British Psychological Society),65–71.
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[3] Do Something Different Ltd. (2015) The Architecture of a Habit
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[4] https://dsd.me/healthcare/the-evidence/ [accessed 02-12-2019]
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[5] Nilsen P, Roback K, Brostrom A et al. (2012) Creatures of habit: accounting for the role of habit in implementation research on clinical behaviour change. Implement Sci 7, 53.
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[6] Neal DT, Wood W & Quinn JM (2006) Habits-A repeat performance. Curr Dir Psychol Sci 15, 198–202.
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[7] Gardner B (2014) A review and analysis of the use of ‘habit’ in understanding, predicting and influencing health-related hebaiour. Health Psychol Rev 9, 277–295.
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[8] Neal DT, Wood W, Labrecque JS et al. (2012) How do habits guide behavior? Perceived and actual triggers of habits in daily life. J Exp Soc Psychol 48, 492–498.
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[9] Quinn JA, Pascoe A, Wood W et al. (2009) Can’t control yourself? Monitor those bad habits. Pers Soc Psychol Bull 36, 499–511.