'Behavior Modification Project Essay\r'

'Identify Tar cash in ones chips behavior: Get a Healthier Amount of eternal stop/Stop Napping Daily I chose to shift my quiescency behavior for my behavior modification conf social occasion. stay is something that I put one across al fashions had a fuss with. In high school I would deal an total out of intimately 5 mos of tranquillity a night, and outright as a junior in college I get about 5-6 instants a night. I precious to modify this behavior because I feel that non getting enough catch some Zs is negatively alter my mood, health, and oer whole out learn on my both twenty-four hours experience. It would be beneficial to me to be more(prenominal) than alert and happy through and throughout my dour quantify quite than be tired and pushing myself to stay awake. My briny re identification number with my respiteing behavior is the join of beat I spend per twenty-four hour period napping. If my nightly catch some Zsing patterns were summationd, I c ould eliminate the have for naps during the day.\r\nBaseline Data: 4.5-5.5 Hours of residue per Night At the beginning of the term I ascertained my residualing patterns for a calendar week. Since I exhaust a different schedule on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays than I do on Tuesdays and thoriums I instal that I do get slightly more sleep on some nights than I do on others. I did non include weekend sleep times in my data. On Sunday, Tuesday, and atomic number 90 nights I would go to lie with between 11:30 and midnight. I would then wake up at 5:30 am the avocation mornings. indeed 3 nights of the week I was getting most 5.5/6 hours of sleep.\r\nOn Monday and Wednesday nights I would go to hit the hay somewhere in that same time variant of 11:30 to midnight. However on the following mornings I need to be awake an hour to begin with, so I would wake up at 4:30 am. On these nights I was getting about 4.5/5 hours of sleep. I noted that on Tuesdays and Thursdays I was more homogeneously to get groundwork from work and fall slumbery round 4 pm for about 3 hours each of those days. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, I would nap for about an hour and a half just about 3 pm. I observed that during the times that I would come home and nap, I could contain been doing something more valuable with my time if my tree trunk had the energy to keep breathing out rather than take away a few hours to rest itself.\r\nStimulus Conditions: School, Homework, and Distractions I live at home and commute to school, so the chief(prenominal)(prenominal) stimulus figure was the distractions that are visible(prenominal) to me such as TV and internet. I wealthy person slept with my TV on for as long as I have had it. Usually I provide bending on a show or a movie and fall drowsy(predicate) half way through pursueing it. This is the main problem for me because once I start I have an extremely troublesome time stopping myself. My headland is still con centrating on the website I was on or what I was watching as I am trying to fall asleep.\r\nAnother condition is school. Since I do commute, I have to be up a plenteousness earlier than I would if I were living on campus. I work a lot of days later on I get out of class so I have to have my hair and makeup make and hindquarters’t go to class looking the way I did when I woke up. I realize that I could not change my wakeup time for this abide because that is the join of time that I need to get found and driving force to school. Another condition is my homework. I usually study and work on homework after dinner which is more or less 7 pm so homework doesn’t usually affect my sleep that more than unless I have a lot of work or studying to do.\r\nSet Goals: all(prenominal) workweek stop 30 Minutes to a greater extent per Night At original my final stage was to increase the amount of sleep I got by 10 transactions every day. I attempted that the starting t ime week and found it to be extremely difficult because the times were so close together that it was or so impossible to make myself fall asleep at that exact time. I to a fault was thinking about it too much and thinking about it do it even more difficult to fall asleep. I decided to switch my remainder by handout to bed a half hour earlier than I did the week before. That way with a first point of 5.5 hours, by week 5 I would be getting 8 hours of sleep.\r\nThe national sleep foundation states on their website that 7-9 hours is the recommended amount of sleep for the average person over the age of 17. Therefore I took the median of that to use as my final goal. Since the main problem that I had was the distractions such as TV and Internet, I do it a radiation diagram that I needed to close my laptop and turn dispatch my TV at the specific sleep time goal for that week. I found that with my TV off I was able to fall asleep almost immediately after laying tear down. I sa ve the amount of sleep that I got every night, though it is not exact I did fall asleep almost immediately after the start times so it is only off by a few transactions at most. Sleep while\r\nGoals\r\n calendar week 1 †11:30\r\n week 2 †11:00\r\nhebdomad 3 †10:30\r\nWeek 4 †10:00\r\nWeek 5 †9:30\r\n*Since Week 1 was unsuccessful in passing to sleep around that specific goal time I changed my confinement by pushing my sleep goals back 30 proceeding for the remaining 4 weeks. *Altered Sleep duration Goals\r\nWeek 1 †11:30 (Already Passed)\r\nWeek 2 †11:30\r\nWeek 3 †11:00\r\nWeek 4 †10:30\r\nWeek 5 †10:00\r\n genuine Sleep condemnations\r\nWeek 1\r\nMonday: 11:55 pm-5:30 am †5 hours 35 proceeding (5.58 hours) Tuesday: 11:45 pm-4:30 am †4 hours and 45 legal proceeding (4.75 hours) Wednesday: 12:00 pm-5:30 am †5 hours and 30 minutes (5.5 hours) Thursday: 11:50 pm-4:30 am †4 hours and 40 minutes (4.66 hours) Fr iday: 11:45 pm-5:30 am †5 hours and 45 minutes (5.75 hours)\r\nWeek 2\r\nMonday: 11:20-5:30 †6 hours and 10 minutes (6.17 hours)\r\nTuesday: 11:15-4:30 am †5 hours and 15 minutes (5.25 hours) Wednesday: 11:25-5:30 am †6 hours and 5 minutes (6.08 hours) Thursday: 11:20-4:30 am †5 hours and 10 minutes (5.17 hours) Friday: 11:15-5:30 am †6 hours 15 minutes (6.25 hours)\r\n calendar week 3\r\nMonday: 10:50 pm-5:30 am †6 hours and 40 minutes (6.66 hours) Tuesday: 10:55 pm-4:30 am †5 hours and 35 minutes (5.58 hours) Wednesday: 10:45 pm-5:30 am †6 hours and 45 minutes (6.75 hours) Thursday: 10:50 pm-4:30 am †5 hours and 40 minutes (5.66 hours) Friday: 10:50 pm-5:30 am †6 hours and 40 minutes (6.66 hours) WEEK 4\r\nMonday: 10:25 pm-5:30 am †7 hours and 5 minutes (7.08 hours) Tuesday: 10:30 pm-4:30 am †6 hours (6.0 hours) Wednesday: 10:35 pm-5:30 am †6 hours and 55 minutes (5.92 hours) Thursday: 10:20 pm-4:30 am †6 h ours and 10 minutes (6.17 hours) Friday: 10:20 pm-5:30 am †7 hours and 10 minutes (7.17 hours) WEEK 5\r\nMonday: 10:00 pm-5:30 am †7 hours and 30 minutes (7.5 hours) Tuesday: 10:05 pm-4:30 am †6 hours and 25 minutes (6.42 hours) Wednesday: 10:00 pm-5:30 am †7 hours and 30 minutes (7.5 hours) Thursday: 9:55 pm-4:30 am †6 hours and 35 minutes (6.58 hours) Friday: 10:00 pm-5:30 am †7 hours and 30 minutes (7.5 hours)\r\non a lower floor I have included the graphs that I do weekly with the data I collected over the course of that week. The actual amount of sleep I got, my goal amount of sleep for that week, and the National Sleep Foundation recommended amount of sleep are all included.\r\nI found that these graphs are excellent for displaying how much closer I got to my sleep goal every week. I was very pleased with the results as I did not expect the ensure to go so smoothly. Since I live with them, I had asked my suffer and my child to look for any cha nges in my behavior during this time. both(prenominal) of them agreed that around week 3 I was more fun to talk to because I wasn’t being so negative in our conversations.\r\nMy mother enthralled the fact that I was more volitioning to go out and run errands with her when I got home rather than go in my room and pass out. By week 5 both of them had said that they discover I seemed to be getting through my days without as much complaining. Overall I also didn’t notice any changes myself until about week 3. Weeks 3-5 make a big difference because I no longer mat that I â€Å"needed” to take a nap and since I felt that I had more time to do things that I indirect requested I had a much more positive outlook on my day as a whole.\r\nEncourage/Remove Stimulus Conditions: Time Management and Eliminate Distractions Since my main stimulus condition was the distractions that I had, the most important thing for me to do was to set a rule for myself to constantly tu rn off my TV and laptop before the goal sleep time of that night. I have always thought that I needed the background racquet of my TV to sleep, and I was very surprised to found that I did not have a case-by-case problem with the TV being off. The only fall out I had with this alteration was the fact that I didn’t create this rule until after week 1. For the first week of my project I continued to go to bed with the TV on, and even though I was technically in bed at my goal sleep time I was not travel asleep until approximately a half hour after laying down.\r\nOnce I made this change and altered my sleep time goals the project went a lot more smoothly. Since I could not change the time that I woke up in the morning, I knew I needed to work on time management with my homework so that I could have at least a exact free time before I made myself shut off my electronics. I stopped victorious so more breaks during the time that I was working on homework and I just employ a solid block of time to finale everything I had to do. It was a lot easier for me to get done faster when I wasn’t losing focus on other things all of the time. I was happy with the conclusion I made to turn off my TV and laptop at the time I think to go to bed every night.\r\nI conceptualize that that factor made all the difference in the direction that my project went. I feel that thither would have been more obstacles and challenges if I had not created that rule for myself. Modifying these two conditions helped me be able to fall asleep faster and also enjoy falling asleep much more than I had before. Punishers & Reinforcers: Activities During the Time that was used for Naps I at first contemplated the punishments that I could use for not going to sleep at my goal time.\r\nThe first week of my project I was still not going to sleep around my goal time and I was continuing to sleep at the times I had been sleeping before. I realized that since I used this time to watch movies, I could instead turn it into a recognize by watching movies during the time in which I usually napped. Therefore when I returned home around 4 pm, rather than napping for 3 hours I could use that time for â€Å"free time” watching movies and going on the internet so that I could get my redeem during that time instead of getting my fix right before I went to bed. If I went to bed earlier, I would not need the naps.\r\nIt was almost like a cycle that just needed to be adjusted. I stopped needing naps around week 3 when I was getting roughly 6 and a half hours of sleep. It was a nice feeling to look forward to coming home and having free time rather than coming home and wasting a few hours of my day to feel refreshed. The fact that I had something to look forward to was a earnest reinforcement. I didn’t feel that I needed many more rewards because being on a regulation schedule and not losing as many hours of my day was a reward enough for me. I enjoy h aving more free time as impertinent to having nap time. In a way I was using positive and negative reinforcement because I was taking away my time on the internet and watching movies late at night, but honour myself by using my time during the day for those activities which I got from going to sleep earlier. Design Schedules of consequence and assign Schedules:\r\nI am going to modify my sleep patterns in order to get an increasingly healthy amount of sleep per night. This will aid in the elimination of daily naps. I am going to sleep 30 minutes earlier every week until I am getting 8 hours of sleep a night. My reward will be having more free time to relax and do what I want after a long day rather than wasting those few hours by sleeping. The free time will be my incentive since I already wish I had more time during the day to do things that I want to do. The Results:\r\nCreating this program was somewhat of a challenge because the main problem was my bad sleeping habits. I e rudite a lot about myself as a result of doing this project, and the most that I lettered was darling the end when I was organizing all of my data. Though week 1 did not go as planned, I was very proud of myself for actually following through with my goal sleep times for the remainder of the project and I can clearly see the benefits I have gained from the changes that I made. Even though my main goal was to work on the amount of naps that I would take, I noticed many more benefits on the way. I found it easier for me to pay attention in class, and my note taking skills have also improved. My need for coffee in the morning has gone down and I actually drink more water system in place which is a much healthier alternative.\r\nI also find it much easier to drive to school. I also am in a much better mood in the mornings that I was before. I found the most difficulty in this project during week 1. I believe this is because I had not yet made the adjustment to turn my electronics of f. After making that change in my project everything seemed to work out much better and I never really went off track again. I feel that I am more tillable and I now also have more time during the day to relax and enjoy myself. I felt that I made a good choice in choosing this specific behavior to modify because it has really improved more than one force field of my daily life. I really have learned what a difference a healthy amount of sleep can do for you and I will continue to try and stay with the amount I have worked to getting right now.\r\n'