Two Minds Blog

People with diabetes often find it challenging to maintain their blood sugar levels, in part because diabetes is a complicated disease. When the kidneys don't produce enough insulin fast enough to adjust for changes in digestion or activity, blood sugar can fluctuate rapidly, even over the course of a single day. To manage this, people with diabetes often need to make changes in multiple areas: adopting a low-carbohydrate diet, managing the timing and amount of exercise they get, keeping track of the times when their blood sugar rises and falls, potentially giving themselves a dose of insulin around mealtimes, managing stress, and other preventive measures as well.  But despite all of this complexity, the people who manage their diabetes most successfully are often the least  obsessive about the fine details. When my Dad was first diagnosed with diabetes, he checked his blood sugar often (using finger sticks; continuous glucose monitoring [CGM] devices weren’t yet a thing). Bu...

Leventhal, Diefenbach, and Leventhal's (1992) "common sense model" of self-regulation. My 2018 paper describing Two Minds Theory (TMT) cites work by my colleague and coauthor Dr. Paula Meek, who conducted studies of patients experiencing the symptom of breathlessness due to chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder (COPD). Paula's research used a model by Howard and Elaine Leventhal (with Michael Diefenbach) that was an early iteration of the dual-process approach also used in TMT. She found that people who focused their attention on different aspects of the feeling of breathlessness then in turn had different interpretations of what that symptom meant for them, and that those interpretations changed their perception of the symptom's intensity. This example illustrates a back-and-forth between perceptions and thoughts, which is characteristic of Leventhal's model. Leventhal's dual-process model, sometimes called the "common sense model" of self-reg...