Behavioral Change Project Reflection Paper

Behavioral Change Project Reflection Paper
Summary
I have two goals for this behavioral change project: sleep before 12:30 am and stopping surfing the Internet with the cellphone on bed before sleep. These two bad habits gradually developed from last year and I have attempted to change it several times before this semester. For example, I tried to replace using cellphone with reading and leave phone at the other room, but it did not work for a long time and I could persevere for less than a week. I wanted to change these two undesirable behaviors because of two reasons. First, after I got into the habit of staying up, I often felt sleepy and sometimes lacked concentration during the daytime. Second, I missed the time when I still maintained the habit of not staying up. During that period, I was more energetic and I could handle my workload better because of enhanced concentration capability. Since at the beginning of the

When I first adopted the reinforcement-based strategy, I had the concern that I might not be motivated to meet my goals if the contingent relationship ended and no positive reinforcement would be provided. However, during the recent two weeks, I found that I started to enjoy the outcomes brought by the desired behavior not only the positive reinforcement I got from my success. My mood was better and I often felt a sense of achievement. I also felt that I came back my past energetic periods when I was able to manage my time efficiently and kept concentrating on the tasks at hand. Despite the possibility of placebo effect, my behavioral change did influence my subjective feelings and my cognitive thinking. This influence to some degree created a sustainable and positive cycle for me: behaviors change enhances my subjective feeling and the improved subjective feeling motivates me to persevere with the behavioral