Many people mistakenly attribute their bad habits to character flaws such as laziness or lack of self-discipline. But, the real reason that bad habits thrive is because they produce immediate reinforcement. Most good habits don't naturally provide immediate reinforcement. However, people can learn to create their own sources of reinforcement.
Using the Immediate Reinforcement Principle to Create Healthy Habits
In the modern world, behaving based on immediate consequences puts us on the road to mental illness, addiction, and metabolic diseases. Yet rather than being constrained by our native habit-forming tendencies, the human mind is uniquely able to create immediate positive consequences for behaviors that ordinarily take time to feel rewarding.
The typical person, for instance, may train for weeks to months to see pronounced exercise benefits. By then, most have given up due to the combination of the lack of visible progress and the immediate rewards offered by alternative behaviors such as social events or entertainment. Without changes to the reinforcement dynamics, this is a difficult cycle to break. To form lasting exercise or other healthy habits, we must introduce our own immediate reinforcers into the behavior. The reinforcement options are many, thankfully, including both external and internal rewards.
For example:
-Choosing a type or format of exercise we find most enjoyable
-Socializing the experience (e.g., workout partners, trainers, exercise groups, dogs)
-Building in competition, cooperation, novelty, or adventure
-Using a physical or online workout log to help visualize progress
-Reward ourselves for achieving daily milestones (e.g. getting to the gym, completing the workout, making a small improvement in performance, etc.)
The above are all examples of external reinforcers we can combine in real time with our desired behaviors to provide sources of immediate positive feedback. As useful as these external systems are, however, immediate internal reinforcers may be even more important for long-term success. Internal reinforcers for behaviors such as exercise, sleep, nutrition, and finances usually come in the form of constructive self-talk and visualization. A single workout may not produce any visible changes in your physique, for example, but this didn’t stop Arnold Schwarzenegger from visualizing changes in his muscles as he was training as a source of internal reinforcement.
High performers in almost every field, similarly, employ positive self-talk during their activities as a real-time strategy to inspire consistency, resilience, and achievement. Importantly, these high performers use many combinations of internal and external reinforcers to create rapid positive feedback; in contrast, most people not only lack these strategies for creating immediate positive feedback for themselves, but they do the opposite. They unintentionally create immediate negative feedback for themselves through self-criticism and other negative self-talk when they are trying to form a new habit. This makes healthy habit formation nearly impossible.
Author:
Thomas Rutledge, Ph.D., is a Professor-in-Residence in the Department of Psychiatry at UC San Diego and a staff psychologist at the VA San Diego Healthcare System.
