Chiropractic Marketing | Chiropractic Advertising | Chiropractic Ads

Chiropractic Marketing | Chiropractic Advertising | Chiropractic Ads

by Michael Beck, DC

Make Your Marketing More Profitable

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I think in order to know how to implement plans to make your marketing more profitable, you first need to understand why you need to market yourself and your practice, and agree that you will have to sink a portion of your money and time into several sources in order to maintain a profitable business.

Inevitably every business has to put into motion a marketing plan with the intent that it will generate profitable revenue. For you, a chiropractor, revenue and profits come in the form of new patients, preferably a continuous flow of new patients.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, it’s not enough to get a degree, lease a space, slap a sign up and wait for that steady stream of patients to walk through the door. If only it were that easy…right?

Like me you’ve probably asked these questions at one time;

Where do I begin and how much should I spend on marketing?
When it comes to getting more new patients, you want to focus on the marketing that gives you the best return on your time and money.

A sizable chunk of your marketing budget should be put toward external marketing with time spent on internal marketing. For example, you can expect to spend a good portion of your marketing dollars to run newspaper ads and set up a chiropractic website. In contrast, sending out referral stream letters are more time consuming but less expensive.

Where is the best place to spend my marketing dollars?
There a many places and ways to spend your marketing money. While starting small is ideal, you should eventually get to a point where you can spread out and use multiple sources for marketing.

Once you become seasoned and gain confidence, why not branch out starting with a minimum of 5 good sources for reeling in new patients.

Some examples would be…
-newspaper ads
-internet
-internal referrals
-networking groups
-yellow pages

Why a minimum of 5? Of course your long term goal should be to have 8 or even 10 good sources of new patients…but 5 is a good number to get comfortable with, and then add more over time.

Here’s what I mean by “good source”, something that consistently produces 5 or more new patients per month, giving you 25 new patients per month, which as long as their good (meaning the patients not only convert to care but stay in your care) should put you in the $30-40k range in collections each month (this assumes your case average is good).

What is the best way to get a better return on my marketing dollars?
Want a better return on your marketing dollar? Then stop spending money on marketing that doesn’t produce results and sink that money back into the campaigns with the better results. And the only way to know what campaign is producing the best results is to track all the marketing you do. It won’t take long for your stats to show which campaign is working better.

If your stats show you that newspaper ad A yields a higher ROI than newspaper ad B, then you should be running with newspaper ad A.

Does this mean you should never run ad B? No, as long as it’s bringing in a positive ROI, you should. You want as many ‘poles in the water’ as you can afford to maintain.

If you’re budget doesn’t allow you to run multiple newspaper ads in the same month, go with the more profitable one this month and build up to working both ads the next month.

What’s considered “good results”?
When it comes to chiropractic marketing, anything above a 2-to-1 ROI is desirable. Obviously an ROI of 2:1 on all your marketing sources won’t build your practice effectively, so you’ll want to have a few 10:1 or even 20:1 marketing channels working at the same time.

In Chiropractic Marketing; A Strategic Plan is Key

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It’s a fact of life: gone are the days when we could rely on our individual reputations alone to get a steady flow of patients through the door. Sure, reputation is important and nothing beats the age-old combination of expertise coupled with great rapport to ensure that our patients keep coming back to us. Indeed, referrals will always have a part to play in building any successful chiropractic practice.

The fact is; relying on referrals is rarely going to be enough for your business to prosper. If your appointment book is full of empty slots lately, then that’s a problem you need to address quickly.

We live in ‘interesting times’ as far as chiropractic marketing is concerned. As a chiropractor myself, I know all too well how the landscape has changed over the last few years. As if you need reminding, a quick glance in your local newspaper and a search on the internet will reveal the details of many other practitioners in your local area. The reality is that this trend is only going to escalate as time goes on as more and more practitioners graduate from chiropractic college.

If that wasn’t enough, we’ve also got the ever-present challenge of competition from practitioners from other disciplines who would gladly take their pick from our patient-base.

I know that most of us are carers not marketers. Treating patients is what comes natural and it’s all too easy to get it wrong when it comes to all the marketing our practice.

I’d like to tell you the story of a highly competent chiropractor who I’m going to name the Ostrich. This guy was a talented chiropractor; a recent graduate with a network of patients he’d built up – mostly through his network of friends and through his gym. He was so successful that the time quickly came to open his own office. Why spend money on advertising when the business had grown so well through word of mouth? His was the philosophy shared by many chiropractors just starting out. The problem was he opened shop just as many of his first patients were coming to the end-stages of their treatment programs. Most of his patients were in the maintenance phase of their care and there weren’t a whole bunch of new patients on the horizon! Meanwhile with rent to be paid (on top of insurance and all of the other commitments we all face), the Ostrich was in trouble.

So what’s gone wrong in this scenario?

It’s simple: this guy’s made the classic mistake of assuming that a chiropractic practice can grow solely through word of mouth. The reality is that he had quite a few contacts among a network of people who occasionally needed short bursts of treatment for acute complaints. Those patients went away happy (and sure, they’re going to recommend the Ostrich – most likely to other people in the same network with the same type of injury) but this isn’t yet a profitable business.

Can this guy’s practice be rescued? Most definitely. What he shouldn’t do though is to go in totally the opposite direction and throw money at the problem blindly. What he needs is a marketing strategy. The moral is not to stick your head in the sand when it comes to marketing. Click here to see my model marketing plan and to find out how you can achieve real growth.

Budgeting and Marketing Tips for The Successful Practice

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This, the third installment of this budgeting series, looks at some typical mindsets and marketing issues that come up in the successful practice.

In the previous post we looked at how to set up a marketing budget for the struggling practice.

As much as I understood the problems of the struggling practice, I was also blessed to know something  about running a successful practice.

Here’s where things can get strange.  Just when you think you’ve made it over those hurdles of being a “new practice”, pulled yourself out of the struggling phase and you feel like you’ve got your feet on solid ground, you still have to work within a budget and have a chiropractic marketing strategy.

While the budget might not be the biggest marketing problem for this type of practice, keeping a consistent flow of new patients coming into the practice is an issue.

It’s not hard to get new patients, but for some reason they don’t stay consistent and the practice doesn’t grow.

The “Doing OK” and The Successful Practice
($1500-$5000+/month marketing budget)

When it comes to advertising, if you’re this type of practice, you must stay consistent with running successful ads.

Smart marketing decisions have to be made.

At this point, one successful ad in one newspaper won’t be enough. You need 20 successful ads running in 10 newspapers or other print media if you can swing it.

You might be tempted to cut some expenses to keep the income up, this may come in the form of “cutting back a bit” on advertising or moving the ads to another section of the paper.

Don’t try to cut corners by moving a winning ad into a bad section of the newspaper to save a few hundred dollars.  It’s not worth it if you lose thousands of dollars from the lower response of new patients.

Another common mistake is complacency.

The chiropractor with a successful practice might think things are going pretty good and I am getting a lot of referrals.

“I think I’ll just cut back on marketing a bit until…the end of the year, the next holiday, vacation, etc.” 

This is a good way to stall your practice out, or ever move it into the “struggling practice” I talked about in the last blog post.

You can’t ever take a month off from your marketing.

Why would you want to?

Do you want to take a month off from getting new patients?

Here’s another misnomer…

“My referrals will keep up the new patient volume.”

“Referral practice” consultants will have you believe that a large majority of your referrals come from new patients.  When in reality, it’s new patients who get well in their first few months of care that are most likely to refer your services to friends and family.

Therefore, more new patients equal more referrals.

In the Ultimate Chiropractic Ads package, I’ve laid out an example marketing plan.  The goal for this is to show you how you can begin running large ads and continue doing so in a variety of media.  From newspapers and magazines, direct mail, emails and even blog articles if you have an online presence.

Importantly, remember to keep measuring your ROI.  This helps you see which ads bring in more new patients.  This also helps you to know which ads can be used in other media.

In 7-12 months you should be getting a consistent flow of new patients.

Resist the temptation to cut back and you will reach your practice goals in no time.

A Chiropractic Marketing Budget for the Struggling Practice

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tight budget in chiropracticIn the last blog post we looked at how to set up a marketing budget for the new chiropractic practice. Today, I want to discuss how you should make your marketing money stretch if you have a struggling practice.

I know all about marketing a struggling practice, as I had less than $500 a month to market my practice, for many years.

Perhaps you feel like I did, and think that in times of hardship it is just better to conserve money and not market at all.

But a practice will not grow itself without your effort, so you must do some outside marketing to grow.

The truth is that the doctor who ends up struggling is in the worst spot for making good marketing decisions.

4 marketing mistakes of the struggling chiropractor.

1. Because of mistakes in the past, he’s hesitant to even use advertising.

2. He’s so desperate for a solution that he’ll risk large amounts of money to save himself from going out of business. This means spending money with any ad rep that comes by the office.

3. Thinking that advertising costs too much, he’ll just save his money and focus on “internal marketing” and referrals. Unfortunately, this is a downward spiral, as a struggling practice is struggling because of the lack of NEW patients.

4. Not measuring his return on investment and continuing to make stupid marketing decisions based on feelings (or bad coaching advice) instead of looking at the numbers.

You must get over these mistakes and advertise your services in an effective way. Pay special attention to #2 and #3 above. These are deadly to your business.

You can’t afford to waste money on bad advertising. Put your money where it counts, like running effective ads in the newspaper and magazines, which still works great.

The Struggling Practice
(0-$1500/month marketing budget)

If I had only $500 to spend each month on marketing, and had to pick just one form of advertising I would pick newspapers…and work the newspaper rep until I got a good ad placement for one of these ads!

This was one of the big strategies that saved my practice from bankruptcy! Getting high quality new patients and converting them to effective care plans is what I spend 90% of my time helping my clients do.

So a struggling practice’s advertising schedule would look similar to the above one for a new practice, with a slight difference. The struggling doctor is not going to ramp up his monthly marketing budget as quickly. Why? Because he’s got bills to pay. Bills that are already late. (Having been there, I know.) However, realize that if you don’t set aside something to move forward with, you’ll be back in the struggling situation. So a struggling doctors “ramp up” may looks something like this…

Never forget, new patient marketing is what drives the success of your practice. No matter what anyone else tries to cram down your throat, that’s the truth of the matter.

How To Outgrow a Struggling Practice

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A struggling practice is typically characterized by low income, low number of new patients and small weekly volume.

This may either be a long term practice that has declined, or a brand new practice that fails to really take off.

To a doctor who’s spent years in training and thousands of dollars to obtain a degree, this can be very depressing.

And to top it off, the doctor who ends up struggling is in the worst spot for making good marketing decisions.

There are 4 areas in marketing that a struggling practice must learn to overcome if they are going to outgrow this slump.

1. Because of mistakes in the past, he’s hesitant to even use advertising. Past failures are not necessarily an indication of future failures.

The point of making mistakes is to learn from them. If you eat bad food that makes you sick, you don’t stop eating food. If you’ve used bad advertising in the past, you shouldn’t stop all future advertising either.Marketing your struggling practice is not an option, but a necessity! The key is using effective marketing.

2. He’s so desperate for a solution that he’ll risk large amounts of money to save himself from going out of business.

This means spending money with any ad rep that comes by the office. Don’t loose our good judgment when you’re face-to-face with an ad rep. Get all the information you need. Ask for a good deal. And don’t make quick decisions.

3. Thinking that advertising costs too much, so he’ll just save his money and focus on “internal marketing” and referrals.

Unfortunately, this is a downward spiral, as a struggling practice is struggling because of the lack of NEW patients.Regardless of what some consultants teach, not every patient in your office is going to refer.

That’s just being realistic. So ONLY relying on referrals from a dwindling patient base is just going to frustrate you. Get referrals plus do outside marketing.

4. Not measuring his return on investment and continuing to make stupid marketing decisions based on feelings (or bad coaching advice) instead of looking at the numbers.

This one is not just a trait of the struggling practice. Many well-off practices still make this mistake, preventing even further success.

A good marketing strategy isn’t “successful” because of how it looks, how it makes your wife fee or even how many new patients it brings in. It’s successful when it brings in a good return on investment (ROI). An ad that “just brings in 5 new patients” isn’t necessarily a bad thing, if you only paid $500 for the ad and each patients ends up paying you $1500 each!

If you’re in this situation, don’t worry, you’re not alone. I was even there at one point in my practice.

But you have to get over these mistakes and advertise your services in an effective way. You should pay special attention to #2 and #3 above. These are deadly.

You can’t afford to waste money on bad advertising. So if you’re currently doing any marketing that’s not been producing in the last 3 months, then stop.

Put your money where it counts, like with running chiropractic ads in the newspaper.

If I had only $500 to spend each month on marketing, and had to pick just one form of advertising…I would pick newspapers…and work the newspaper rep until I got a good ad
placement for one of these ads!

This was one of the big strategies that saved my practice from bankruptcy!

The High Volume Myth and Chiropractic Marketing

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groupThis week I’m in L.A. at a conference, but I wanted you to see one of the most popular blog posts I’ve ever written. It was also the most controversial. Tell me if you agree or not. Read it and leave your comments below.
——————–
Have you ever been told you needed to see a large number of visits per week to be successful in practice? While it’s not going to make some of the coaches who read my blog happy (yes I do look at my subscriber list), I’m going to let you in on a little secret…

You Don’t Need High Volume To Be Profitable In Practice

I’m not certain where this got started.

It was likely back in the early days of chiropractic, where chiropractors only did adjustments and everyone charged the same price. Under those conditions, it makes sense that the more visits you see the more you’ll collect each week.

But to believe that today is simply false.

Every doctor has different prices, different therapies, different equipment.

You see, most chiropractic coaches lead you to believe that high volume (or at least more visits) is the way to go. Some even make you feel bad about your practice if you’re not seeing what the top doctors in their coaching group are doing.

Here are some of the ways the high volume lie is used by coaches to make doctors feel guilty…

-when you do an event like a P.A.D. or dinner workshop and you don’t get 60 new patients from it

-when you’re not seeing 1000 visits per week many will say you aren’t “sacrificing enough” or “you don’t have a big enough mission yet”

– if you’re not getting “x” number of referrals per week like the big guns are, you’re not “on purpose”

Number of visits per week is only part of the practice success formula I teach. Dollars of income per patient visit is a much more telling number.

Here’s how you cut through the fluff and find out how these high volume doctors are really doing. Ask them for their average collected amount per visit. Not there “estimated care plan” numbers, but the real deal. I’m about to reveal to you the secret formula no high volume coach wants you to know….

$collected each month divided by your monthly patient visits= average $ per visit

Wow, eye-opening isn’t it. (But believe it or not, this stat is does not show up on any of the coaching group’s statistics forms I’ve been a part of in the past.) Turns out most high volume doctors are making less than $30 per visit, some even lower than that.

Funny story about coaching groups and high volume real quick…

One group I was a part of did put your monthly collections number on your name badge at the seminars. They did it as a mental boosting type of thing, where you were excited to show up and get your new badge when you hit a certain goal.

The thing I really like about it was this…

No one could come up and B.S. you about their practice. A guy could come up and talk all day about seeing 300 a week, but if his “badge number” was lower than mine, his advice went in one ear and out the other. Turns out high volume guys weren’t the mentors everyone looked up to in this group, it was the “high income” guys instead.

I’ve seen moderately high volume and I’ve seen what most would consider low volume. Guess which practice was more profitable, had lower stress, and allowed me to take time off?

When I was “higher volume”, I was was flat broke making $17 per visit because I was giving away care for free. At the lower volume, I was getting $90 per visit. Maybe I wasn’t making as huge an impact on the planet as the guys seeing 1000 a week, but you know what…I was making a huge impact on the patients I did see each week.

And I was making the biggest impact of all…being there as a father for my children!

What’s really going on here is that these coaches are imposing their values, their goals in life, they beliefs on you. If you really want to see 1000 visits per week, that’s great, go for it. But don’t believe the lie that you can’t be happy without seeing high volume, or that high volume equals high income.

It urns out the low volume practice fit my lifestyle better. I wanted to help people get well, make a good living, and spend time with my family. None of those things require high volume.

What about you? What do you want out of your practice? If you want a high volume practice, tell us why? Let us know in the comments below.

Chiropractic Marketing Is A Changing

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As Bob Dylan once sang, ‘times they are are a changing’, and this is especially true in the profession of chiropractic.

Most of you can feel it, knowing that there is a wind of change blowing through our industry. Currently it may feel like a small breeze. But soon I fear it will be a strong, gale force wind.

But while some things are changing, still others remain the same. Which is good if it’s a rock solid marketing method, as I’ll soon show you below with the results of my recent survey.

Why are things changing? Two big reasons.

#1. A recent recession and still weak economy. This has caused some chiropractors to withdraw all marketing ( very dumb move if your marketing was previously working). Others had thought their low return-on-investment marketing would get them through the recession, but it didn’t. And still others sought after the magic pill that would save their practice, expecting a new marketing product would undo years of bad business management.

#2. Health care reform. (Also called Obamacare by some.) This is the biggest reason for change occurring in chiropractic. While there are still a lot of questions over this recent congressional bill, many chiropractors get the sense this bill is bad news for their practice. The ACA and ICA both seem to be convinced this is an “historic pro-chiropractic” bill, mostly because it will not allow insurers to discriminate against us. Of course some chiropractors have said to me they’d gladly take a little discrimination as opposed to an across-the-board-medicare-like system that has low payouts and excludes payment for exams, x-rays, therapies, etc.

Other chiropractors have taken a “wait-and-see” approach to this bill. After all, we have 4 years to figure things out, right? Well, if you are anything like me, being reactive is not something I like. Being proactive in growing my businesses has always been extremely successful, whereas being reactive to problems others throw at me ends in mediocrity at best.

Last week, I ran a quick survey to my list of blog readers. I limited the survey to 100 respondents and offered a package of marketing audios to those who answered every question of the survey. (Links to the audios will go out Wednesday to those who completed the survey. Thank you!)

Let’s look at some results of the survey. The first question I asked was:

Question 1. What area of marketing do you want the most help with right now

Now I expected a wide range of answers, which I certainly got. But I did not expect the answers to be strongly skewed toward what’s referred to today as “offline advertising”. Over 67% of the responders chose an answer in the offline group of marketing which contained newspaper advertising, internal referrals, MD referrals, attorney referrals and public lectures. Very few wanted help with their websites, pay per click, blogs, Facebook & Twitter. Is this because D.C.’s don’t fully understand these online methods yet? Or is it that the offline methods are continuing to outperform newer, online marketing strategies? (What do you think? Please leave a comment below.)

Question 2. What area do you currently spend most of your marketing budget on?

Big surprise here! A whopping 38% of respondents chose newspaper advertising compared to the second most popular answer (websites) being only 17%. This result was very telling of our profession for 2 reasons. First, there are many ‘salesmen’ shouting that newspaper ads are dead. If this was the case, why are so many chiropractors in June, 2010 still spending a large amount on them? And secondly, most businesses don’t continue to spend money where there is no return. Therefore, newspaper ads must be bringing in a decent ROI at least, compared to other advertising.

You may think this answer is not surprising, because after all I developed the Ultimate Chiropractic Ads, so of course the answers would be biased. But the interesting thing is, most of the people filling out the survey have never bought my newspaper ads.

So here is an example of one thing that hasn’t changed much, which is good because its working and continues to work well. Marketing that works well doesn’t need to change.

Question 3. Which form of marketing/advertising is currently most effective for you?

Here I gave the same choices as I had given in the previous 2 questions. No surprise here that the answer “internal referrals” won by a large margin. Everyone knows referrals are the easiest to convert to care and cost almost nothing to bring in. Taking 2nd place was public lectures and 3rd was newspaper advertising (which confirms the assumption I made about ROI above.)

Question 4. Which of these products, if any, would most interest you?

The answers to choose from were  weight loss, associate hiring /training, massage therapy and write in your own. This question brought a pretty broad range of answers. Write-in answers varied with 16 different answers typed in. Weight loss won, (but just barely) and all the other answers pretty much tied for 2nd place.

5. What is the biggest challenge you see facing you as a chiropractor over the next year?

This was a completely open ended question, with the ability to type in what you wanted here. This is where I saw the biggest change in our profession. Huge actually! But you’ll have to wait until Friday because I’m going to do a whole blog post just on this topic. I know, it’s annoying to wait, but sometimes it’s well worth the wait, right?

See ya Friday.

5 Chiropractic Marketing Lies We Tell Ourselves

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There are 5 lies every chiropractor has been tempted to tell himself at one point or another. Some of us have only fallen prey to 1 or 2 of these lies. Others of us have succumbed to all 5 and felt the devastating effects on our practices.

Where do these lies come from?

Many of them come from chiropractic consultants, especially numbers 1 through 4. The 5th lie is one we usually come up with on our own during desperate times.

Which of these chiropractic marketing lies have you believed? Do you agree with these or disagree, post your comments below.

1. I’ll just cut back on my marketing expenses for awhile, since I’ve got so many referrals coming in.

This one gets a lot of chiropractors. Usually the doctor is looking for ways to cut costs or maybe is just tired of having to “market my practice.” It’s not that marketing has been a failure, as much as it takes a bit of work to measure return on investment (ROI) and keep track of what’s working. Plus, there’s the added task of trying something new occasionally. Why not just take a few months off and let the referrals keep coming in?

Of course the problem is that many of these referrals come from the “marketed to” new patients. For example, a new patient comes in from a chiropractic newspaper ad and after starting care refers their husband in to you. The husband refers a coworker. The coworker refers their spouse in. By this time, you may have forgotten where this process started. Don’t cut the referral generator off at the source.

2. Marketing isn’t professional.

Thankfully this lie isn’t believed near as much these days. During the Mercedes 80s, chiropractors could get new patients simply by putting a sign on the door and getting on the best insurance plans. Who needed marketing?

Chiropractic schools sometimes give off the aura that marketing is not professional. How many marketing classes did you get in school?

Times have changed. Insurance doesn’t pay what it used to, nor are you going to get flooded with new patients by joining the local networks. And everyone has to agree that chiropractic school does not prepare you 100% for the business of chiropractic. What profession doesn’t market themselves? Hospitals have billboards, newspaper ads, and more. Dentist advertise in the phone book, newspaper, TV, radio, etc. Attorneys, medical doctors, surgeons, orthodontists — if they are successful and growing, they advertise.

3. I want MD referrals, and MDs won’t refer to me if I advertise because it’s unprofessional.

I first heard this one from a prominent consulting group. They wanted me to pay them $40k to show me how to get more referrals from MDs. And of course I’d need to tone down my other marketing, since it wasn’t professional like MD marketing. Plus this consultant would show me how to get so many MD referrals that I would never need to spend money on marketing. A pipe dream for sure.

Back on planet earth, every business has to market their services. Certainly there are sleazy, hyped up ads, but not all marketing is like this. Marketing and advertising does not have to be unprofessional. Many MD’s and D.O.’s will refer to you because of your marketing. I ran newspaper ads for years, and never met the big medical practice down the street, yet I got referrals from them for years. Why? Only thing I can figure is they read my ads in the paper on the different conditions we help.

4. If a marketing strategy or tool is good, it will bring me 100’s of new patients per month.

We’ve all heard of the proverbial marketing “magic pill.” Problem is that it’s a fairy tale. Everyone knows this. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and doctors expect the next thing they buy will produce 100’s of new patients. What if you only get 10 new patients for $1000 spent?

Two different perspectives can occur here.

#1. One doctor says wow, one marketing tactic got me 10 new patients, that’s awesome!

#2. Another doctor says “man, I needed 20 new ones this month to remain profitable. This only brought in 10. Guess that strategy didn’t work well at all. Time to trash it and try another one.”

Some of you may be thinking #2 is a made-up doctor, no one with this thinking really exists. But trust me, I see it every week. See the blog post “Chiropractic Math and the Struggling Practice” for an in-depth example.

Now we mustn’t over do this and say all marketing is equal because there isn’t a magic pill. There is certainly a dividing line between effective marketing strategies and crappy, waste-of-money marketing strategies. There are tools which will bring you 20 new patients a month, but even then you should not focus 100% of your money and time on that one strategy. One month you may only get 5 new patients instead of the normal 20, so make sure you have multiple streams of quality new patients coming in.

5. If money gets tight this month, I’ll cut the most expensive advertising out.

What’s wrong with this one?  After all, when things get tight you’ve got to cut something out, right?

That’s true. But it doesn’t follow that you base what your going to cut out simply on how much things cost. If it did, then you should cut out your rent first. And your payroll. Plus your salary.

You should determine what you’re going to cut out based on what’s effective. If an ad has been working in the newspaper, why would you stop running it because it’s the most expensive marketing cost you have? Better to cut out all the little things that don’t work, like maybe yellow page ads or poorly done static websites.

The cost of advertising tells you nothing about how many patients it brings in. For that you need to figure ROI and compare your returns across multiple marketing strategies.

Make sure not to cut the advertising that is actually keeping you alive. Cutting off the hand that feeds you will only result in a downward spiral that makes it very difficult to come out of.