The behavior I have chosen to modify is my sleeping behavior. As a college student sleep is something that I don’t get enough of. I chose to modify this behavior because sleep is an important part of life. I want to be tired when I go to bed and awake when I get up in the morning. I wanted to modify this behavior because I think having good sleeping patterns is a good trait to have in life. So much more can be done when we are awake and refreshed after a full nights sleep.

I observed my bedtimes for a week. They vary from night to night. One night I went to bed at midnight and the next night it was 10:45. For the entire week the times varied. The earliest I went to bed was 10:30 and the latest was 12:45. I do get up at the same time every morning because I have class at 8am every day. The fact that I go to bed at different times each night causes my body to respond differently to sleepiness during the day. Usually I would take a nap the day after going to bed late at night. Or I would sleep through my alarm and miss my 8 o’ clock class. Sleeping through class is definitely a bad result of not enough sleep. Taking naps once in a while is OK but I took a nap 4 out of 5 days this week while recording baseline data. I can get other things done during that time if I wasn’t so tired.

The main stimulus condition that is present is my roommate. We usually stay up late at night talking or goofing around. She usually does her homework at night and that keeps me awake as well. Another condition is my homework. I usually nap during the day so I don’t have time to do my homework until nighttime. I usually start my homework at 9 and it keeps me busy till the later hours of the night. Another condition is my friend. He usually gets off of work at 10:30 and comes to visit us. He stays for about an hour. The hour he is here I can’t get any homework done. Actually I never get anything done while he is here. Sometimes he stays later than an hour. So these conditions aren’t too hard to get rid of.

My original goal was to be in bed at 10:30 every school night. I wanted to be able to have everything done by that time so I could get 9 hours of sleep every night. Well after about a week I realized that this goal was very unrealistic. I could never be in bed on time. My punishment was that I couldn’t take a nap the following day if I didn’t got to bed on time. This punishment didn’t seem to affect me because I never had time to take a nap anyway so it wasn’t really a punishment. So when I didn’t go to bed on time I wasn’t being punished by anything. I had to motivation to be in bed on time. So after a few days of this goal not working I switched my goal to being in bed by 11:30 every night. This seemed to be more realistic and I actually got some results.

Well since my main stimulus condition is my roommate all I had to do was tell her that. I told her about this project and told her I needed her help in it. She was very understanding and very helpful in reminding me it was past my bedtime. This project helped her as well. She usually wakes up with me in the morning. So she would tend to go to bed with me at night. This worked out well because usually it was because she was staying awake that I was kept awake. As for my homework, as I started going to bed on a regular schedule I wasn’t as tired during the day. It wasn’t necessary for me to take naps as frequently. I started getting my homework done earlier in the day while my roommate was away. Then later in the night I had time to just relax. As for my friend, he also knew about the project. When he came to visit it was earlier in the day. He would always leave by 11:30 so we could go to bed. If I had anything I needed to do I simply told him he couldn’t visit right then. As soon as these three things were modified it was a lot easier for me to get to bed at the time I had scheduled.

At first when my goal was at 10:30 my punishment was that I couldn’t take a nap the next day. Like I said before I had no time for a nap anyway so that wasn’t a good enough punisher. When I changed my goal I also got a little stricter on the punishment. For every half-hour I stayed up after 11:30 I had to set my alarm to wake up a half-hour earlier. Now I really love my sleep and I hate getting up early. At first I was concerned that I would simply hit the snooze button until later so that wouldn’t be punishment either. Then I got my roommate involved with that as well. She was to make me get out of bed when it was for punishing reasons. I gave her the liberty to do whatever she found necessary in order to make it unpleasant for me. I didn’t have any reinforcers for going to bed on time other than that I am more awake during the day. The reinforcers were more intrinsic. I was doing this to benefit myself and all I really wanted to get out of it was being more awake during the day. I didn’t want to feel the need to take as many naps. So having a regular schedule for sleeping was reinforcement enough.

I am punishing on a continuous schedule. There is only one time each night that it is possible to be punished. Everytime I stay awake past 11:30 I have to set my alarm a half-hour earlier. So I have to physically do that the second I stay awake longer than I should be. If for some reason this doesn’t work I will switch to a more severe punishment. Luckily this was severe enough to motivate me to be in bed on time that I didn’t need to get any more sever. I was being motivated by two different things. One was the fact I would have to get up early. The second was that I truly wanted to have regular sleeping patterns. So the program was simple for me.

The Results:

I am happy to say that at the end of two weeks I have gone to bed by or at 11:30 every night. It didn’t take a small punisher to increase to a more severe punisher to get me to do it. I simply started out with the worst possible punishment and I didn’t even want to have to deal with that. Once the project started, my roommate and I always worked together to make sure we were in bed by 11:30. If she needed to stay up she wouldn’t bother me. She would make sure she wasn’t keeping me awake.

Though I don’t understand it. She had the liberty to do whatever she wanted to do to me if I didn’t go to bed. I wonder why she didn’t keep me up on purpose just to harass me in the morning. Actually it’s because she is a very kind roommate. If it weren’t for her help I probably wouldn’t have been as successful. Knowing that she could do whatever she wanted to get me out of bed in the morning motivated me to go to bed on time. It especially motivated me after hearing some of her ideas.

I am going to keep this up now. There won’t be the threat of punishment involved anymore. I believe it will still work because I was more intrinsically motivated to begin with. My erratic bedtimes have ceased and its 11:30 every night. It is only 8 hours that I get to sleep. I would like to have had 9 but that was too hard to do. No one goes to bed at 10:30 around here. I am happy with how it has worked though. I haven’t taken as many naps in the two weeks while I was doing this. I am more awake throughout the day and I am more productive overall. It wonderful what a set sleeping pattern can do for you.