Target Behavior
The aim is to observe and modify my sleeping behavior, and the conditioning will be waking up and eating breakfast early. For the sake of this unstructured experiment, the definition of the concept of sleeping behavior is a situation where a person is on a bed with lights off to initiate the sleeping process ( Hombali et al., 2019). The problem is that I find it difficult to sleep for appropriate hours. I tend to stay awake for most of the hours at night, and I find myself sleeping for less than five or sometimes six hours. The consequences are that I tend to wake up late or feel dizzy and drowsy during the day. The desire is to change this habit and to increase my sleeping hours to eight hours per night. The behavior change programs, in this case, therefore, focus on helping me improve my sleeping hours from less than six hours to eight hours per night. I intend to measure my behavior change by noting down the number of hours I will be sleeping per night. The operant conditioning will be eating breakfast early.
Behavior Modification Plan
The experiment towards achieving the desired change, in this case, is an unstructured procedure. The primary process is the procedural observation of sleeping patterns by regularly recording time of sleep in a natural setting, and also the time I will be taking my breakfast. The recording procedure will be taking place at night for seven days, after which the data from the record will be transferred or plotted on a graph to depict the change. Measurements will be recorded on paper each night, noting the time just before turning off the light. One of the vital reinforces, therefore, will light off because once the light is switch off and I will be on the bed, the time will begin ticking. The key to the entire experiment will be that if I wake up early by 8 am, I will take my favorite eggs as breakfast, but if I fail, I will take my usual breakfast with no eggs.
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Switching off my cellphone’s Wi-Fi will be one of the reinforcements that will be critical during the experiment. Most of the time that I sleep late, I am always using my phone. I am always either chatting on Facebook and WhatsApp with my friends or just browsing. Therefore I will turn off my Wi-Fi to ensure that I do not use the internet or any other application during this experiment. Another reinforcement will be switching off my television. When I do not spend time on my phone during night hours, I sometimes watch my favorite television programs. Sometimes, I could wait until late in the night before going to bed. Therefore, switching off my television will ensure that I get enough time to sleep during the experiment.
The last reinforcement during the sleeping period will be the use of an alarm to aid in waking me up. The plan is to initiate my sleeping at 11 pm and wake up at 7 am. However, since I am poor at going to bed early and waking up early, I will have to time myself so that I will be going to bed early and also waking up early. Therefore, I will set two alarms. The first will be the alarm that will be reminding me of time to go to bed at 11 pm, and the second one will be the one waking me up at 8 am. With the two alarms ion the place, I hope that I will be time conscious during the entire observation experiment.
Stimulus Conditions
The experiment will be taking place in the bedroom, and therefore, there will be different sleep triggers or stimulants that will also be considered necessary for the entire procedure. The firs stimulant will be a fact that if I wake up early, I will take my favorite break. It will be stimulant because I understand that without sleeping soon and waking up early, I will miss my favorite eggs as breakfast. Another stimulant will be switching off my light. According to this definition of sleep as for this assignment, sleeping will begin after switching off the light. Turning off my bedroom light will means that I start the sleeping process, and it will stimulate the process of sleeping automatically. The two stimulants will be critical during my experiment because they will be helping with timing my sleeping duration. Therefore, they will be controlling the period when I start sleeping and when I wake up.
Results
The results reveal that I had a tough time achieving the set goal for the experiment. The target time was a house between 11 pm and 8 am morning hours. With the target sleeping time and waking up time in mind and with all reinforcement on place, bedtimes recorded ranged from 12:30 am to 4 am during the baseline phase. For the entire process or experiment duration, there were no instances of achieving the target of going to bed by 11 pm or sleeping 8 hours, demonstrating an obvious behavioral (and sleep) deficit. Different reasons could explain the results or the behaviors of not archiving what results or the target. The most common reasons for not attaining the sleep goals during this phase were due to time spent working and health irregularities. While health is less controllable, work habits must be modified to reach sleep targets during the modification phase. Despite such variability and sleep deficit, it was evident that there was an improvement because I could sleep more hours than the way I used to do before the experiment. The graph below depicts the results as recorded during the investigation.
Evaluation of Plan
The plan did not work as I was expecting it, but there was an excellent improvement to the behavior change. The maximum hours I managed, as shown in the graph was six and a half hours a night. Notable, the target was to sleep for a minimum of eight hours. However, the results were a significant improvement, considering that before the experiment, I was asleep for less than five hours a night. The graph shows the pattern with the fourth day being one of the toughest nights I got during the experiment.
The limitation was on the fourth day, where I got a visitor, and I had to spend extra hours before sleeping. Also, my daily schedule was hectic, and this was interfering with the program I had during the night. Also, timing myself was a problem because I could easily under sleep because it was a behavior I had to develop. So in some cases, I woke before the alarm and had to force myself to go back to the bed. One of the weakness that I had while designing behavior modification was having a fixed schedule. I had fixed sleeping time and fixed waking-up time, and this did not work well because other issues could push men to go beyond this fixed schedule. Therefore, I would have a flexible time when I schedule another behavior modification plan to allow for any emergency issues that could interfere with the process of the program.
Conclusion
From the experiment, I learned that the operant condition is useful when used as a way of modifying behaviors. For instance, the results depict that despite failing to achieve my goal, my score was improving because by sleeping early, I was to take my favorite breakfast. Therefore, such conditioning or positive reward was creating a situation where I was eager to sleep early and wake up early to make my favorite breakfast.
Reference
Hombali, A., Seow, E., Yuan, Q., Chang, S. H. S., Satghare, P., Kumar, S., &Subramaniam, M. (2019). Prevalence and correlates of sleep disorder symptoms in psychiatric disorders. Psychiatry Research , 279 , 116-122.
