You know what I love? A nice, thick milkshake. Rich and creamy, preferably with strawberry chunks and Oreo crumbles. That’s the good stuff right there, and sometimes there’s nothing better after a hard session at the gym to reward myself for my efforts. They’re a great reinforcer, if you remember the last article – they’re a primary reinforcer so they regain their value over time, they’re quickly delivered with a stop at the nearest drive-through, and they’re distinctly pleasant. Even a mediocre milkshake is worth the trip. Top notch reinforcement.
You know what I hate? Drinking too much milkshake and getting heartburn, and feeling sluggish. That’s the essence of satiation – when you’ve had enough and just don’t want anymore. That point when someone could give me a milkshake for every single rep, and I’d still walk away. I call it “Milkshatiation.”
I actually don’t, but I should, right?
Let’s retread a bit of familiar ground with reinforcement. If I paid someone with a milkshake every time they edited an essay for me, it wouldn’t matter how many I offer if they’re already full. Conversely, I could promise someone trying to cut back on his pot smoking a milkshake every day he didn’t smoke an entire ounce before work – but if he’s already full of milkshakes from the munchies after the last pre-work ounce, that reward isn’t going to work. Satiation, effectively, makes a reinforcer stop working.
There’s also an advanced state of satiation where you reach aversion; that happens when you drink so much milkshake you spend the next day on the toilet, smoke so many cigarettes you throw up, or drink so much you have an all-day hangover. The point where you say “I’m never doing that again,” and in many cases you really don’t for a month or more. Satiation is strong enough that it can overcome the reinforcement value inherent in nearly anything; that makes it something to be wary of when building a habit, but it can also be something to embrace when breaking one. You just have to put it to work sometimes.
So how does one put it to work? You already know you should reward yourself for meeting a goal, whether it’s doing something more, less, or not at all, but what do you do if what you’re trying to reward yourself with just isn’t doing it? It’s easy to find a new reward for adding a behavior, but how do you reward yourself for not doing something? What do you do when the substitute just isn’t as good as the original, and all you really want is another cigarette, a drink, to break your diet, or to just do nothing but play video games all day? Well, behavioral psychology tells you to just go ahead and do it. Get it out of your system.
The thing about stopping a behavior is that something drives you to do it, and there are two key approaches to ending it. For self-reinforcing behaviors, rewarding yourself for is vital, but it may not be enough; dieters run into this often as they start a new trend, start lapsing more and more, and soon enough find themselves back in their old habits. A cheat day, however, mitigates this by taking the power away. A day of indulgence creates satiation and reduces the reinforcement or even renders it ineffective – the more satiated you are, the easier it is to resist that temptation. While it may seem counter-intuitive, behavioral change is a numbers game; even if the plan is to quit smoking entirely, switching from a pack a day to a pack every other day is a tremendous shift. If the goal is to go low carb, six days of abstinence and one day of all the pizza you can eat will still leave you better than where you started. Eventually that “once a week” cheat day can become eight days, nine days, two weeks, three weeks, and one day, you’ll realize you don’t even miss what you left behind.
One last tip – just because you’re already satiated to the point of not wanting to indulge in your bad habit is no reason to stop reinforcing yourself for avoiding it; that might be one of the best points for it. Your bad habit has much less appeal than usual then, giving the replacement behavior and reinforcer much more by comparison. The end goal is to make the new behavior more appealing than the old one, and capitalizing on that moment of milkshatiation is paramount.
Now that you know the basics of behavior, I’m going to show you what they look like in action. Send me a message (here or via my contact page at http://www.lifegotweird.com/contact.html) and I'll send you a copy of my thesis writing behavioral plan; you’ll learn how I wrote an honors thesis in just under a month! Don't forget, if you need a refresher all my past articles are available at http://www.lifegotweird.com/articles.html. Come make a change!
