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People do not want to get sick, become disabled, or die young. At the same time, many people have trouble giving up unhealthy lifestyle choices or adopting healthy behaviors or goals. To help people overcome the struggles associated with improving and maintaining good health, researchers and practitioners have developed a variety of health behavior change interventions. Unfortunately, reluctant audiences are often unwilling to enroll or remain in structured, standardized interventions. In addition, behavior change recommendations often have low generalizability outside of the context of the intervention program and recommendations (and health behaviors more broadly) may resonate differently among different sub-groups of the population depending on how they are framed. What can be done to increase the efficacy of health behavior change interventions? Our objective in this special issue was to integrate novel research targeted towards improving health outcomes, while simultaneously improving process models to understand motivation, self-control, and other likely levers for effective behavior change, with examples from laboratory and field-based interventions. In this editorial, we first give an overview of how we operationalize health, and then discuss the role of context in health behavior, including (a) the advantages of systematically examining the role of context,(b) how we, as a field, can study context effects in a way that is generative for theory development and testing, and (c) the implications of studying context for different types of interventions.