Doing negative things because you enjoy it is a normal action that humans do. However, what is the most effective way to change someone’s behavior? Many adults may think instilling fear in children/teenagers work the best but studies show that it isn’t successful a lot of the time. Instead, there are 3 main points that contribute in changing someone’s behavior. We will be using procrastination on homework as an example.
The first element to this is social incentives. By seeing what other people are doing, you would want to do the same thing they’re doing, if not better. Many students procrastinate a lot normally, and having social incentives might mean having friends that tell you that they started on their homework or finished.
The second principle is getting immediate rewards. If you change your behavior, you will eventually get a long term reward, in this case, having better grades or understanding subjects more. Despite that, studies show that people would rather have an immediate reward instead of a bigger one in the future, as that one is still uncertain. To solve this, you could do homework efficiently for 1 or 2 hours and have a 10-minute break of doing the things you would do when you procrastinate.
The final detail is to have progress monitoring. Your brain is better at processing positive information than negative. So, by focusing on the good things that have happened, it’ll help you more in changing your behavior. If you begin to stop procrastinating, you can see how you have more extra time which you can use to sleep more, do more things you enjoy, etc.
By having social incentives, immediate rewards, and progress monitoring, changing your behavior will be less challenging. This could mean eating healthier, quit smoking, exercise normally, and a lot of others. You’ll be able to have healthier behaviors that will benefit you greatly in the future.