As long as I have been in school, doing homework, I have always been procrastinating. Especially when it comes to doing assigned readings. I would find myself leaving it all until the very last minute, and torturing myself the night before or morning of the exam. It’s not that I didn’t want to do the work, it was that I didn’t want to do it at that time. I would always seem to find something more interesting to do, such as browse various websites on my phone. I spend way too much time on my phone, and not enough of that free time doing work. I tend to procrastinate mainly because I am lazy, distracted, and stressed out. My stress comes from doing work, so I tend to procrastinate to decrease my stress levels. These are the antecedents to my bad behavior of procrastinating, which leads to more stress. During the course of the study, I was able to record my laziness in the form of distractions, such as phone use during various times of the day. I counted a distraction as anytime I was on the phone longer than roughly ten minutes. In order to prevent myself from continuing to procrastinate, I designed a behavior modification plan. My plan used a positive reinforcement technique as well as a negative punishment technique. If I found myself studying consistently for one hour with no distractions, I would reward myself …show more content…
I determined that overall, my plan was decently effective at eliminating my procrastination habit during the plan’s period. My phone usage decreased by more than 50%, especially during the hours I was studying the most. The extinction of this behavior came on the final day, as expected. In cases using reinforcement, the reinforcer is removed, with the hopes that the behavior caused by the reinforcement stays in place. In my case, I was lazy, and not doing work, which lead to procrastination, which lead to stress. Thanks to my behavior modification plan, I was able to change the antecedent of laziness, and the behavior of procrastinating into a positive behavior of focused studying, leading to less stress in the end. Once the reinforcement of rewarding myself with a break and an episode of Parks and Rec was removed, the behavior of focused studying stayed intact. I did notice, however, that my phone usage went up slightly since the plan, which meant my focus decreased as well. While the behavior modification plan and behaviorism seemed to have a slight effect on my procrastination habit, I believe such an issue is something that one needs to motivate themselves to fix, rather than external methods such as reinforcement and punishment. They are unfortunately only a temporary fix for these sorts of