Behavior Change: Positive and Negative Reinforcement

 

We coaches are constantly talking about healthy habits but what we fail to mention is the importance of behaviour. It is in fact behaviour change that any coach is helping you achieve. Whether your goals are fitness-related, body composition, financial… whatever,  you have to change the way you act in order to change your outcomes.

Now traditionally we use what we call negative or positive reinforcement to form desired behaviours.

Positive or negative reinforcement.

Whether you’re training a child to eat their veggies, training yourself to read your university textbooks, or potty training a dog, positive reinforcement is when we reward someone for good behaviour.  It’s giving a kid a sticker, every time they do their chore or buying yourself a new outfit after consistently going to the gym for a month.

Negative reinforcement, on the other hand, is using a negative stimulus to encourage a different behaviour.  It’s spanking a child to discourage bad behaviour, or calling yourself a fat slob and making yourself run 6 miles because you had an episode of binge eating.

Pavlok’s bracelet is a gimmick that was created based on this very idea.  You program it to shock you any time you do something you don’t want to do.  So for example, every time you reach into the cookie jar you get shocked.  Negative reinforcement is reinforcing good behaviour with the threat of something bad happening if you do not.

Do these types of behaviour reinforcement actually work?

Some of us older folk were brought up in an era where spanking as a punishment was the norm.  We know now as we knew as kids then, that this doesn’t always work.  We knew that if we got caught being bad we’d get spanked. We still did the bad thing.  While we don’t spank our children anymore, we do still use negative reinforcement to punish poor behaviour. It’s taking away the internet passwords when the teen doesn’t do their chores.

There are a couple of reasons why negative reinforcement doesn’t work and they’re really logical when we think about them.

1. Humans are complex beings.  We are not simple.  Negative reinforcement might be beneficial when working with simple-minded animals and simple behaviours: for example, you may be able to teach a dog not to bark by placing them in a bark collar.  Or a cow won’t go near an electric fence after it touched it the first time and learned it hurts.  Humans, on the other hand, act or behave in response to a number of different competing factors.  We don’t just decide we’re going to act in a certain way and then do it.  Instead, how we act is influenced by our psychological state, our environment, our internal values, our sense of identity, our social influences, what we’re prioritizing at the moment, how much ambivalence we’re feeling towards that change and many other things I’m sure…  To make this clear, I am a mother and an athlete, and I am also a coach. Those are three separate identities that sometimes might contradict each other.  As a mother, my child is my 1^st priority, as an athlete my fitness, and as a coach, my clients are my 1^st priority.  If something happened to my son, my mother identity takes priority.  My very first response is going to be to behave in a way that helps my son. It doesn’t matter if I’ve got somebody in the gym that I’m coaching when I learn about the incident with my son. It doesn’t matter if I’m working out myself. That identity, the identity of the mother is going to take precedence over all other identities.  I’m going to act in a way that is in line with the values and priorities of that identities while forgetting about all the other identities.  I won’t act like a coach at that moment.  This is an example of an internal factor that influences the way we act. There are external ones too.  Cues that force us to act without thinking, habits patterns, etc. The point is, simple stimulus reinforcement works best on simple behaviours. We are not simple.
2. Humans also don’t do well when we’re learning what not to do. We do better when we learn what to do. Anybody who’s ever tried to diet and been told you are not allowed to eat this, or you’re not allowed to eat that, knows that such diets will never lead to permanent change. Change simply doesn’t come easily when we’re focusing on what not to do.
3. There’s also the fact that when the negative stimulus is removed, you’ll go back to your old behaviour anyway.  A negative stimulus does not create more habitual good behaviours, in fact, once the negative stimulus is taken away, you can actually rebel against them. So as soon as you stop wearing that bracelet, not just one but two hands are in the cookie jar.
4. We tend to game our own systems. For example, a gym holds a one-month clean eating challenge.  Gym members who committed to the challenge agreed to do 5 burpees every time they ate ‘bad’ food. What athletes started doing is bargaining with themselves. Is this muffin worth five burpees? Is this cookie worth five burpees? And they’d decided more often than not that, yes, it is. A lot of the athletes just ended up eating the junk and owing burpees, instead of actually changing anything at all.  Nothing was learned.

Negative reinforcement is not going to help you change and as such it will not help you reach your goals.

What about positive reinforcement?

Positive reinforcement is rewarding good behaviour. And it will work to an extent. The problem with this is that when the reward stops, the behaviour tends to stop too.

There are companies that have tried, for example, rewarding their employees with cash bonuses for maintaining a fitness membership and going to the gym a certain number of times each week. For months and months, this might work. But as soon as the employees stopped getting the bonus or the reward, they no longer go to the gym. There’s no more motivation.

With positive reinforcement, we learn to depend on the extrinsic or the external motivation instead of the intrinsic. And that means that we consciously allow what’s happening outside us to influence our behaviour. The trick then is to somehow cultivate an intrinsic or internal motivation, that’s something inside you that makes you want to behave in a certain way.

So what works?

• Self-compassion. Punishing yourself doesn’t help. Forgiving yourself when you feel like you’ve messed up allows you to get back on track and act in more healthy ways sooner than later.
• Intermittent positive reinforcement. Sometimes we get a reward, but often times we don’t. It’s that occasional unknown reward that keeps us coming back.  Some of my clients will have heard me say these are “now that” rewards instead of “if-then.” It’s not if you do this then you get that, it’s, now that you’ve done this I’m giving you this… kind of reward. This is motivational, in the sense that it’s extrinsic, but it creates an intrinsic desire – you want to reach that reward but you never know what is going to give it to you. And in fact, this is the method that all social media works off of. We all get little dopamine bursts when people like our stuff or leave us comments. But we never know when it’s actually going to happen, which ones of our comments are going to give us the likes. So we keep trying, we keep putting more and more content out there. We’re giving more and more of ourselves, and of our time and effort just hoping for that little like. Whether you realize that this is what you’re doing or not, it is very much there and why social media is so addictive.  It’s very much a methodical, systemic process that social media creators have deliberately formulated to make you come back. If you can somehow instill this intermittent reward in yourself, make it internal… awesome!
• Finally, I can’t close this without mentioning the importance of celebrating your wins – even the small ones. Especially the small ones.  Every time we celebrate our wins, whether it’s something silly, like shouting “woohoo!” every time we do something that moves us towards our goals (like eating the carrot or walking to the mailbox), you get a little bit of a hormonal rush. That’s a little bit of dopamine, and whether you can sense it or not it’s a huge win. Dopamine is a reward hormone that creates a strong hormonal response, telling us to do whatever it was we did to get it, again. Celebrate your wins to help make wins your habits. Do it by sharing your successes with others. Smile wide, shout ‘woohoo’ or say the word “victory” and clap your hands… do whatever you can to take that moment and celebrate it because it will on a very physiological level it causes intrinsic motivation that’s going to help you change.

So that’s it. That’s all I really had to say for today about that and I hope you found this useful.

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I help professional women who struggle with nutrition and fitness, build healthy lives, so they can take control of their health and love the way they feel in their own skin.

I provide you with the guidance and tools you need to break down big goals into small, actionable steps that you can do every day, easily, to build sustainable fitness and nutrition habits without feeling miserable about it!

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