Reinforcement in Review

So it has been a few weeks since I started this and I have met my step, water, and yoga goals each week and am looking forward to moving them forward. But right now I want to talk about my reinforcement.

I found myself this weekend not wanting to engage in my reinforcement and that’s a problem. Luckily, my goals were met with reinforcement from peers and close friends as well as naturally occurring reinforcers like feeling more energetic due to walking more and no more effects from dehydration.

It’s really hard to deprive yourself of things you like especially when you are in control of the reinforcement. It’s easy to haggle with yourself saying that you were close enough to your goal to get the reinforcement. I delay my reinforcement until Sunday every week after I met the previous weeks goals. So sometimes by Thursday I would try and rationalize with myself that 5/7 days is just as good as 6/7(mastery criteria).

In addition, the reinforcement I choose felt more like a chore when it came time to do it. I didn’t want a responsibility I wanted freedom to do what I wanted. Since our preferences change so rapidly I need to be able to have a lot of choices. Then it came to me; money. Money lets you do what you want! Explain

So I decided to change to a token economy system. I’m assigning goals a money value and I pay myself to engage in the behavior that accomplishes those goals. Then once I’ve reached engaging in the behavior 6 out 7 days a week goal. For example; I get 50 cents for each day I walk 2500 steps. I can bank that money until the end of the week and only if I hit that 6 out of 7 day criteria can I take the money out. If I only get 3 out of 7 days I get to keep the money I got for the 3 days I walked 2500 steps or more, but it stays in the bank until I do hit the 6 out 7 day mark. The money doesn’t have to be used so when I want to do nothing and don’t need money or if I want to save up and buy something I would never get myself I can do that.

This will allow me to get a little bit of reinforcement in the form of getting paid every time I engage in the behavior and then a larger reinforcer when I save up for it. I have the capacity and tolerance to wait for something like that, so this will hopefully be a more effective approach.

Initial Baseline

It’s been a week and a hard one at that. Just tracking is hard, but I should have put a reinforcer in place just to track the data for this first week. Now that I have baseline I’m going to pick 3 goals to put into intervention and start tracking the progress. The baseline data that looked like I’d be most successful with was drinking more water, doing yoga, and walking more. My baseline for walking was 1766 steps per day. A good goal would be 2000 steps/day. It’s just a little above the average for each day and 3 out of the 6 days I’ve reached or exceeded that average so striving for 6 out 7 days a week of 2000 steps is doable. Shooting for 3500 steps everyday would be a tall order compared to my other scores. I was able to do it one day, but I clearly can’t on a regular basis, so I need to set a goal that I can get a more consistent result and then move up from there.

Water was my next potential goal as I know it doesn’t take much effort to drink water and I have a high likelihood of contacting reinforcement if I set my goal around something attainable. Looking at the graph on most days I drank between 10 and 20 ounces, so I’m going to set my goal at 17 ounces 6 days a week.

Finally, I’m going to work on doing more yoga. I did yoga 3 times out of 6 days and would like to get to 6 days a week.

A year in growth with ABA

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.