Columnist Dr. Cheryl Christy

Author's note: This column is intended for educational purposes only. It aims to highlight gaps in health knowledge, provide support and empower organizations to guide their members in creating effective health and wellness programs.

Much has been written about the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986. NASA managers inverted standard safety logic, demanding engineers prove the launch was unsafe rather than proving it was safe. Under pressure from tight schedules, senior executives overruled their own dissenting engineers and cleared the flight. Six months earlier, an internal memo from an aerospace engineer to NASA laid out a potential catastrophic failure of the O-rings in freezing temperatures. The overnight temperatures were projected to be in the low 30s for the Challenger flight, placing the O-rings at risk of freezing. Management told NASA the cold-weather data was inconclusive and failed to prove the flight was unsafe. The rest, as they say, is history.

In 1996, sociologist Diane Vaughn wrote a book on the Challenger disaster in which she coined the term normalization of deviance. The normalization of deviance is “the gradual process where a clear violation of safety rules or proper standards becomes accepted as normal practice.” This happens when the shortcut, workaround, or failure to follow protocol or standards of practice does not immediately result in harm to others. Over time, unsafe practices can become normalized due to the following key causes:

• No immediate harm. When you break a protocol and nothing bad happens, you feel safe doing it again, as in skipping safety checklists or turning off patient chair or bed alarms.

• Work pressure from a tight schedule, or too much responsibility shared by too few workers, encourages shortcuts.

• Perceived weak rules that appear too slow or difficult to follow, so teams invent workarounds, as in using a co-worker’s password.

• A lack of open communication inhibits people from speaking up when they observe risky behaviors.

Consider the daily application where standards of health are lowered despite clear evidence pointing to probable harm if health standards are not adhered to. Failed standards of health can become normalized practice, resulting in eventual poor health. Good health standards should include physical activity, healthy eating, adequate hydration, appropriate follow-up with health care professionals for preventive care, lab tests and stress control.

Lowering health standards can present as a 10-pound weight gain that turns into 50 pounds, addictions, or inflammation that turns into chronic disease. But a more serious danger occurs when a slip in a standard of health is perceived as not a big deal even though it violates your own standard — a form of normalization of deviance.

You can overcome this behavior by scheduling intentional “breaks” from your standards to give yourself room to breathe, as in a diet cheat meal, a rest day from your workouts, or rethinking your schedule. Do not let the breaks become a subconscious, unintentional slide into lowering your standards of health that becomes accepted as the new normal.

Set your standards. Follow through. Your health will thank you for it.

Dr. Cheryl Christy is a Baldwin County resident and registered nurse with nearly 30 years of experience. She holds master's degrees in nursing education and nursing practice and a doctorate in nursing practice. She is a member of Sigma Theta Tau, Phi Pi Chapter, a certified lay counselor and the author of "Voices for Healthcare," a health care blog.

Read her previous column titled "Incivility and health" on www.GulfCoastMedia.com. Her blog can be found at https://substack.com/@dnprn.