Lynne S. Gots, Ph.D.
Licensed Psychologist
Using a Competing Response to Break a Habit
By Lynne Gots, posted on March 18th, 2014.
Entertaining can be stressful for me—not because I worry about cooking an excellent meal or making the house look spotless but because our Australian Shepherd Freddie is a handful when strangers are on his turf. And to him, everyone except the very immediate family is a stranger with dubious intentions.
Recently our neighbors were over for dinner. As usual, Freddie barked. A lot. I gave him a bone to chew and sent him to his crate to quiet him. After awhile, he’d settled enough for me to let him out to lie by my feet at the table.
Dogs are very put off by direct eye contact. They find it threatening, especially if they’re fearful, like Freddie. So I always instruct visitors not to look at him.
But telling someone not to do something often has a paradoxical effect. Just think about the last time you told yourself not to eat dessert, or not to check your email, or not to send a text to someone you desperately want to hear from.
So of course as soon as I told my neighbor, “Don’t look at him!” he immediately turned and locked eyes with Freddie.
After the frenzied barking had subsided and Freddie had gone back to his bone, I was able to think clearly enough to realize my approach had been all wrong. Instead of saying, “Don’t look at Freddie” I should have said, “Look out the window” or even, “Close your eyes!”
The idea of replacing one action with another is a behaviorial strategy used to break habits. Substituting an undesired behavior (such as nail-biting, smoking, hair-pulling, or skin-picking) with a benign one is using a competing response to short-circuit the habit.
An effective competing response should be: 1) readily available, 2) inconspicuous, and 3) incompatible with the undesired behavior. For example, someone with trichotillomania (hair-pulling) might keep a fidget toy on the desk to use while working at the computer at home but might prefer to clench her fists to ride out the urge to pull at work. Or a smoker trying to quit might chew gum instead.
Trainers use competing behaviors all the time to stop dogs from barking and jumping up. When Freddie and I are out for a walk and see another dog across the street, I tell him to “Heel” and “Watch me” to divert his attention and keep him from going into overdrive. When he and Baxter greet me on my return from a day at the office, I throw toys for them to fetch so they won’t get muddy paw prints on my work clothes.
Come to think of it, I should try the “Watch me” command the next time we have company for dinner. Unaware I’m talking to the dog, the guests will look at me instead of making eye contact with Freddie. Problem solved.
Tags: competing response training, dog training, habit reversal training, trichotillomania
Posted in Dogs, Techniques |
How to Stop Being Your Own Worst Enemy and Start Getting Things Done
By Lynne Gots, posted on January 15th, 2014.
Even though I don’t think New Year’s resolutions work, I’m still a sucker for the kinds of self-improvement lists popping up everywhere this time of year. “Five foods you should never eat!” “The only three exercises you’ll ever need!” “The ten best breakfasts for fat burn!” Even my own recommendations for modifying a morning routine turned up in the latest issue of Working Mother Magazine condensed by the journalist who interviewed me into three ways to “Change a Habit, Change Your Day.”
I’m clearly not the only one irresistably drawn to quick fixes. So here’s another list.
My Five Favorite Tips for Becoming More Productive
1) Don’t wait for motivation to strike.
You don’t have to feel motivated to start. Momentum builds from action, so do something. Anything. Once you take the first step, it gets easier.
2) Stop fooling yourself.
Think you’ll do it later? Think again. Get started now because it will never happen later.
3) Make a daily To Do list.
And then cut it by two-thirds. There’s nothing more daunting than a long list of tasks you’ll never finish. Pick a few items you know you can complete in one day. You can always add more if you have time.
4) Do the hard stuff first.
It’s tempting to get started on the easy, mindless tasks but by the time you get around to the more difficult ones, you’ll have run out of steam (see #2). Motivation researchers have shown we have limited stores of willpower. So jump in and tackle the big challenges first, before your willpower dwindles.
5) Reward yourself.
You may think your day is already front-loaded with too many pleasurable activities (watching cute kitty videos on YouTube, playing Candy Crush Saga, searching home design sites for the perfect ottoman, reading political blogs, making Fantasy Football trades, sneaking in an episode of your favorite TV series). But you’re probably using those as distractions, not rewards. Do the time-wasters after you’ve finished a task and they’ll become motivators instead of sources of guilt. You’ll either enjoy them more or discover the limitations of their appeal, thereby freeing up time to explore new (and possibly more meaningful) leisure pursuits.
So test out my suggestions. If they work, you may never need to make another New Year’s resolution again.
Tags: motivation, New Year's resolutions, productivity, time management, willpower
Posted in Behavior Change, Motivation, procrastination, Self-help, Techniques |
Why New Year’s Resolutions Don’t Work
By Lynne Gots, posted on January 6th, 2014.
Not even a week into 2014 and already I’ve broken my resolutions. I should have known better.
Most of the promises made on the eve of January 1st are doomed to fail. Yet we continue to make them year after year, doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Isn’t that the definition of insanity?
My first resolution didn’t even last through New Year’s Day. Feeling pleased with the meditation practice I’d cultivated over the last year by setting myself the modest goal of sitting and focusing on my breath for at least five minutes daily, I’d decided to raise the bar. I would meditate for thirty minutes every day!
As it turned out, on the first of January I got involved in preparing a complicated meal, puttering around the house, and sharing the fruits of my labor with my family. When I finally remembered I hadn’t yet meditated, it was 11:00 pm, and I was sleepy. Normally I’d put in my five minutes and call it a night. But instead, I set my timer for 20 minutes and struggled to stay awake while I concentrated on my inhalations and exhalations until the bell chimed.
You’d think, having just quadrupled the length of a typical late-night meditation session while managing not to fall asleep during it, I’d congratulate myself. But no. I felt disappointed.
I kept my second resolution until January 3. I’d decided I would accrue 10,000 steps a day on my activity-monitoring wristband. Despite my sedentary job, I often do get in at least 10,000 steps by taking the stairs instead of the elevator to my seventh floor office, walking the dogs for nearly an hour, and catching up with my favorite TV shows on the elliptical trainer instead of the couch.
Usually, in spite of my aversion to the cold, I manage with a Teutonic-like resolve to drag the dogs (both wimps when it comes to weather extremes) and myself out the door every day for a walk. But with the wind chills hovering in the single digits on January 3 and the sidewalks iced over, none of us could endure more than fifteen minutes around the block, giving me a paltry 5700 steps for the day.
Maybe you’re sticking to your resolutions a little longer than I did. But unless you’re endowed with an ironclad will—and, if so, probably not in need of making vows to improve yourself—you’ll abandon them sooner or later.
Why don’t New Year’s resolutions work? In my experience, both personal and professional, most people fail to stick to their resolutions because they set their sights on inflexible goals. Both my resolutions were too rigid and unrealistic, failing to take into account variability in daily responsibilities and interference from outside forces (like the weather).
Before making my resolutions for 2014, I’d already been meditating regularly and getting more active by aiming for consistency over quantity. This tactic motivated me because even one minute of meditation “counted.” And when I increased the length of a practice, I did it out of choice rather than obligation. But as soon as I changed the rules, demanding of myself 100% adherence to an arbitrary numerical standard, I set myself up to fail.
Fortunately, I recognized my distorted thinking right away and have gone back to striving for consistency. I’ll still try to practice longer when I can carve out the time but I accept that it’s not always possible.
Many people get frustrated and give up altogether when they fall short of their goals. If you’re an “all-or-nothing” thinker, you may believe you blew it if you slipped up even just a little. Then, bye bye, resolutions.
One reason making New Year’s resolutions is so appealing, according to social scientists, is “the fresh start effect.” Researchers found an increased interest in dieting, inferred from the frequency of Google searches for the term “diet,” around the beginnings of new weeks, months, years, semesters, birthdays, and holidays.
Viewing change from the perspective of a fresh start mentality can backfire, as anyone who’s fallen off the diet wagon on a Wednesday knows all too well. Your waistline won’t shrink if you tell yourself, “Oh, well. I guess I can eat whatever I want and start the diet again on Monday.”
But if you must give yourself a mental clean slate to recommit to change, there’s a better way. You can take a page from Zen Buddhism and the concept of Shoshin, or “Beginner’s Mind,” where every moment can be a fresh start. Even the same action repeated over and over is different every time.
So forget about the New Year’s resolutions and just begin again—not tomorrow or next week, but right now.
Tags: beginner's mind, meditation, mindfulness, New Year's resolutions
Posted in Acceptance and Mindfulness, Behavior Change, Motivation, Techniques |
