The Abstract
2022 saw, for me, one of the hardest events of my life. The culmination of years of trauma, depression, and anxiety finally came crashing down and I checked into a mental health facility for a partial hospitalization program (PHP). For those who don’t know, a PHP has you come 6 hours a day, 6 days a week for 14 days to participate in group therapy. Honestly, it was a game changer for me. I learned techniques to deal with difficult feelings like shame or fear. After PHP I was able to keep up using all of my strategies while I went through their less rigorous program, IOP (intensive outpatient program), which is 4 weeks of 3 hours a day, 3 days a week. I meditated and did yoga everyday. I drank enough water, I took all my medications, walked, and I set small, achievable goals to gain momentum each day. I was the happiest I had been in a very long time.
But then the real world hit again when I went back to work full-time and I lost my ability to do the things that I needed to do daily to keep me happy and healthy. I staggered on for a few months trying to make it work, but finally I realized I needed to make some changes in my day-to-day routine if I was going to have the success I had while I was in the program.
This is where Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) came into play. ABA is research-based, scientific approach to behavior change. As a Board Certified Behavior Analyst (BCBA) I live and breathe behavior change for my clients. I’ve seen and helped change many behavior problems, as well as teach my clients new skills. Why couldn’t I do the same for myself? I decided to take the principles I knew and apply them to my life. This is my journey through change using the application of ABA.
The Assessment
The first step is to gather information and assess the situation. Now if I were working with one of my clients, I would use a research-based assessment that looked at communication and social skills. I would develop their treatment plan to include common goals that promote communication or social skills, but I would include individualized goals that are socially significant (bring more skills and opportunities for new experiences to the client’s life) to my client like learning how to ask for a favorite item or building up their pretend play skills.
To really get started, I have to take a good look at myself, but there isn’t a CATBA (Carla’s Ability To Be Awesome) assessment in real life, so I took a deeper and more personal look inward in order to see what factors are impeding my success. I am able to pick some goals that I know would be socially significant to me. In the most basic terms, I want to be “happy and healthy”.
Reflecting back on times when I felt happy and healthy these are the observable things I did:
- hobbies
- meditation
- yoga
- walk
- eat meals
- took medication
- good hygiene
- went to work
So these are the things I’ll measure and assess. These things made me feel good as a person and I want to increase the frequency in which I engage in these behaviors to hopefully increase my happiness.
But how do I measure these?
I will utilize Excel to track observable measures of the factors that I want to assess. First, I have hobbies and will simply put a 1 if I engaged in one of them that day for at least 15 minutes. I have a meditation app and will put a 1 if I follow one of the classes for the day. This is the same for yoga, medication, hygiene, and the meals I eat. I will also record how much sleep I get and how much money I spend on eating out. For walking, I will record my steps as well as the hours I work daily. I’ll do this for up to a week to establish what is called a baseline. A baseline is the data that comes before the intervention. It shows me where I am before I put anything into place to change my behavior. A baseline is great to have and look back on weekly (or more often) to see progress. Weight loss and other big changes can be hard to see on even a weekly basis, but small changes in the data can keep your spirits up when the data reveals change.
So that’s where I am. I’m getting my baseline. I’m at the beginning. In the next week I’ll share the baseline of all the different measurements I’ve chosen and you can see, truthfully, from where I will start.
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