The things that we repeatedly do is what shapes our lives and ultimately our selves. When we do something repeatedly it eventually becomes automatic and almost mindless in its action, i.e. it becomes a habit. And we all know how hard it is to break a bad habit once it’s stuck and make a good one out of scratch. Considering a huge part of what makes our life is actually an accumulation of all of these good and bad habits, it wouldn’t be too far-fetched to say that learning the art of making and breaking habits can take us a long way in being in control of our lives and ourselves.
One of the broad theories in psychology deals with emphasizing the behavioural aspects of individuals; it also explores the way behaviours are formed and not formed. And one of the foundational concepts here is the process of Operant Conditioning. It is a method of learning that employs rewards and punishment as a way to instigate and inhibit behaviour. It is quite a simple and straightforward concept that we can all make use of it in our daily lives when we find it hard to make or break a habit.
Before we explore how to implement this into our daily lives, we also need to understand exactly how our habits work. If I take the example of bad habits, usually the reason we find it so hard to quit a bad habit is that it provides some sort of instant gratification or a perceived reward in a way. It may be helping you release some stress (like smoking or drinking), put off some difficult task (such as scrolling through social media), or an instant boost of energy (like drinking too much coffee or energy drinks). Whatever the bad habit is, if you look closely you would recognize that it is either giving you something pleasant at the moment or taking away something unpleasant.
Our good habits also work this way, and we find it hard to create a good habit because more often than not the benefit of that habit (or the reward/reinforcement) is not instant. It’s easy to say drinking loads of water daily have all these benefits for your skin, health, and mind. But these benefits takes time to show itself, which makes it easy to fall out of it. If you recognise where I’m going with this pattern, you can see that the way to make a good habit stick or easy to follow is to find some sort of reward for it that you can receive instantly.
Conversely, if a bad habit is followed by something unpleasant (a punishment of sorts) then it becomes easier to quit. So what we need to do is to design our lives in a way that makes it easier and pleasurable to do good habits and harder and unpleasant to do the bad ones. And this is pretty much what the concept of operant conditioning explains.
In the operant conditioning terminology, rewards do not mean something grand nor do punishment mean something harsh. It simply denotes some consequences that may be pleasant or unpleasant to the person in a situation. In fact, most significant responses we make in our daily lives are said to be examples of operant behaviours; we may read because it provides knowledge or entertainment, and we may drive a car to avoid the trouble of walking long distances.
There are four main processes in operant conditioning. Behaviour therapists use the concepts of reinforcements to increase a particular target behaviour of the client. In simple words, we respond the way we do because we experience some gains (positive reinforcement) or because we needed to avoid or escape unpleasant consequences (negative reinforcement).
Positive reinforcement is when something of value to you is “added” as the consequence of certain behaviour. It can be anything from treating yourself with a bar of chocolate if you write a certain number of words of your essay, to a child getting praised by a parent for completing his homework. Negative reinforcement, on the other hand, involves avoidance of an unpleasant situation. How this works is that you do the target behaviour just to avoid an unpleasant stimulus. For instance, you may do the dishes just to avoid listening to your mom’s nagging.
While reinforcements are used to increase a certain behaviour, punishments (sometimes also known as aversive control) are used to decrease the target behaviour. Similar to reinforcements, here positive punishment refers to the ‘adding’ of an undesirable (or aversive) consequence to behaviour in order to decrease or eliminate it. And negative punishment refers to ‘removing’ a reinforcing stimulus (like deducting money from a worker’s salary for missing time at work).
These are the four procedures that form the basis of operant conditioning. In sum, reinforcements are used to increase a target behaviour while punishments are used to decrease them. In other words, when you want to make a new habit, try using reinforcements on yourself and when you want to break a bad habit, make use of punishments.
This is of course easier to do when we apply it for someone else like a parent to his/her child or a therapist to a client. But we can also make use of this for our own selves.
Here are some examples where you can make use of these concepts for yourselves in your own lives:
Positive Reinforcements
— The key here is to make your reinforcements something that is actually valuable/significant to you, or something that you actually want. It doesn’t matter how big or small, it just has to be something that you know you would really want.
For instance:
- When you finish your essay, you can watch two episodes of the show you wanted to watch.
- If you finish your work in the morning, you can have the whole afternoon to go out with your friends.
Negative Reinforcements
- If you are someone who really hates loud noises, keep an obnoxious alarm clock to wake up to so that you can train yourself to wake up before it rings.
- If you want to wake up early, schedule a social media post to be published automatically about half an hour after the time you want to wake up stating that you had decided to wake up at this time but did not wake up. If you care enough, you would want to wake on time just so you can delete that post before it goes live.
Punishments
- If you want to stop drinking too much coffee then make a rule that each time you drink coffee, you’ll have to do 100 jumping jacks (this will only work if you hate doing jumping jacks).
- If you want too quit another bad habit then, keep an accountability partner (with a friend or a family member) and tell them that if you do your bad habit again, you’ll pay them 50 bucks. If you don’t want to lose your money, you’ll probably eventually learn to stop doing it.
- Pick a favourite item from your possession and decide that if you don’t do what you set out to do, or if you do something that you don’t want yourself to do, you will discard that item.
Remember, these examples may or may not work for you in the exact same way. These are just what it is called, ‘examples’ to give you ideas to find your own kind of reinforcement or punishments that would work on you. And how do you know if it would work on you? You try them! It’s all about trial and error.
No Comments
Leave a comment Cancel