5 Steps for Integrating Alcohol, E-Cigarette, Marijuana & Opioid Use Prevention with Healthy Lifestyle Behavior Promotion

Addressing multiple health risk behaviors is essential to enhancing the mental and physical wellbeing, performance and happiness of today’s youth.

Youth and young adults are at risk for co-occurring substance use/misuse, physical inactivity, poor nutrition, lack of sleep and daily stress.

Addressing all key risk factors by linking substance use/misuse prevention with promoting protective healthy lifestyle behaviors within single prevention interventions is critical to cost-effectively addressing broader youth health needs.

Prevention Plus Wellness (PPW) programs are founded on an evidence-based model using five steps for successfully integrating the prevention of substance use/misuse with the promotion of healthy habits for all youth and young adults.

These five steps include:

1. Teaching how healthy behaviors protect against substance use and improve mental and physical wellbeing, performance, happiness and self-image.
2. Teaching how specific types of substance use interferes with participating in healthy behaviors and improving self-image and achieving personal goals.
3. Giving youth opportunities to reflect on their current health risk and protective behaviors, including substance use and healthy habits and creating concrete actions to improve them.
4. Giving youth opportunities to set and monitor behavior goals to avoid substance use and increase healthy habits.
5. Rewarding and supporting youth for setting, monitoring and achieving healthy behavior goals to increase their self-regulation skills and self-efficacy.

These five steps are used in all PPW interventions targeting alcohol, e-cigarette, marijuana and opioid use/misuse prevention.