There was more than one bad habit to choose from when I got this assignment, but in the end I’ve decided to eliminate the bad habit of picking my nose. As far as I can recall, I’ve had this bad habit since I was a little kid and there were times when my friends made fun of me or I made a social situation uncomfortable by picking my nose (it’s not as bad as it sounds now). However, I’ve gradually learned to control it but I was never able to eliminate it completely. As I’ve noticed, since I got this assignment, I pick my nose whenever I’m irritated and, or if I’m in an uncomfortable situation. I’ve also noticed that picking my nose makes me feel good, probably because I’ve been doing it for a while, which is another main concern that I have.
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Knowing myself, I will forget about changing the behavior if I reward myself, because of the great sense of accomplishment after one day, so I’ve decided to go with punishment. In my case, the target behavior is picking my nose, and the goal is to eliminate it. According to operant conditioning, in order to eliminate this unwanted behavior of mine, which is picking my nose, I will have to use negative punishment (removal of a desired thing). Therefore, in order to implement this, I’ve decided to take away music as an act of punishment if I pick my nose. I choose music because I wanted to eliminate the behavior rather than decrease it, and since music sustains my life in a way, I thought it would be the most effective punishment. I decided to not listen to anymore music for the rest of the day if I picked my nose. I did this in a way where I allot myself a limited number of times I could pick my nose with every successive day having fewer times where I could do it and gradually zero, for example, I set the limit three as the limit for the first day, and two on the second and gradually zero on the last day. I would say that I was more than successful in changing my behavior during the four days. Since I decided to eliminate the behavior in a constantly decreasing manner, it helped me transition better and helped me maintain my self-control and since I was keeping data it helped me to be more aware of myself and my social
Knowing myself, I will forget about changing the behavior if I reward myself, because of the great sense of accomplishment after one day, so I’ve decided to go with punishment. In my case, the target behavior is picking my nose, and the goal is to eliminate it. According to operant conditioning, in order to eliminate this unwanted behavior of mine, which is picking my nose, I will have to use negative punishment (removal of a desired thing). Therefore, in order to implement this, I’ve decided to take away music as an act of punishment if I pick my nose. I choose music because I wanted to eliminate the behavior rather than decrease it, and since music sustains my life in a way, I thought it would be the most effective punishment. I decided to not listen to anymore music for the rest of the day if I picked my nose. I did this in a way where I allot myself a limited number of times I could pick my nose with every successive day having fewer times where I could do it and gradually zero, for example, I set the limit three as the limit for the first day, and two on the second and gradually zero on the last day. I would say that I was more than successful in changing my behavior during the four days. Since I decided to eliminate the behavior in a constantly decreasing manner, it helped me transition better and helped me maintain my self-control and since I was keeping data it helped me to be more aware of myself and my social