Behavior Change Changing a Behavior:

Behavior Change

Changing a Behavior: Excessive Television Watching

Target Behavior

The behavior I will be targeting for this project is a tendency to watch too much television, especially in the hour immediately preceding my going to sleep. I have difficulties sleeping, and though I have used television consistently as a way to relax and try to ease myself into sleep, I have become worried that I spend far too much time watching television, and might actually sleep better -- and get to sleep earlier -- if I watched less. From now on, I would like to limit my television to no more than one hour from the time I get home in the evening until I go to bed, to take place no less than an hour and a half before I turn in. I want to change this behavior because I believe it will help me in two ways. First, I think that I might sleep more, and sleep better, if I watched less television, and second, I think that cutting down on my television would help me be generally more productive.

My hopes for the new behavior are that, in addition to cutting down total time spent watching television to an hour in the evening at least an hour and a half before I go to bed, is that my studying will improve, that I will sleep more hours every night and that my sleep will be less interrupted, and that my general productivity and mood during the day will both be lifted. In order to test this, I have calculated the amount of time I send watching television and sleeping on the average work/school day. I generally start watching television between six and seven, and continue until approximately midnight -- a whopping five to six hours a night. It takes me as long as an hour to fall asleep, and I am up at six-thirty. This means that I spend almost the same amount of time sleeping that I spend watching television.

The Intervention Plan

The temptation to watch more television will be great, especially as I do not live alone and can't stop others from watching. Feeling that I can't fall asleep might tempt me to turn on the television, so I have removed the set form my room. The notion that television helps me sleep is probably false (that is what we are testing), and I must give myself time to overcome this cognitive distortion. Behavioral learning is central to this intervention; it is my hope that through behavior modification I will be able to become happier and more productive and thus reinforce the newly learned behaviors. The design of the intervention is essentially a positive-reinforcement behavior modification experiment with no extrinsic rewards, but some concretely defined (by me) intrinsic rewards.

I know that I have a tendency both to be lazy and to become very set in my habits, and this could cause some definite difficulties in forcing myself out of my usual routine, and into a "work mode" of studying when I would normally be watching television in the evenings. These personality traits can be accounted for by developing a well-organized and well-structured plan. As lazy as I can be, I also like to keep things regimented and compartmentalized, so if I consciously set out times allotted to specific activities, I should be able to stick to this schedule. Half-an-hour to an hour after coming home, I will watch an hour of television with dinner (for efficiency's sake -- eating doesn't take a lot of concentration). I will then study and do any homework I have for the next three hours. This should take me to approximately eleven o'clock (or earlier when I have less school work). Even if it still takes me an hour to fall asleep, I will have gained one full hour of sleep over my television watching days, and the payoff should be immediately observable.

The Implementation

Though I broke with my plan on the weekends (Friday and Saturday nights only; twice I fell asleep watching television on the couch and I watched more than my allotted hour the other two nights), I managed to restrict myself to single hour of television at a specific time every evening. Keeping track of exactly when I fell asleep was difficult (completely impossible, actually), but I was generally in bed and trying to sleep an hour to two hours sooner than I had been while watching television. I also appeared to be falling asleep sooner, as my last-remembered glances at the clock grew closer and closer to the time I had shut the lights off. Again, however, it is impossible to state this with any certainty, as I did not have a research assistant present to time the exact instant when I truly fell asleep.

I can say with a fair degree of certainty that I awoke less during the night then I usually do, starting on the third night. For the duration of the experiment, I kept a simple tally sheet next to my bed to mark the number of times I awoke (that is, the number of times I was conscious enough to make a tally mark). This number dropped off from a height of five on the nights before the intervention, to only two on the third day and only one every few days in the second week. I still felt exhausted waking up at six-thirty in the morning (and I'll intervene with my boss about that next), but I perked up much faster and felt generally more rested and energetic throughout the day, also starting after the third night of the intervention. The increased sleep and/or the more restful sleep were definitely having an effect.

There was not as obvious an effect on my mood, though this was not especially bad to begin with. I was certainly pleased that I didn't feel as tired, especially in the mornings, but moods are subjective and influenced by a great number of variables, so collecting data on this point seemed not only moot but also nearly impossible. The results of the data that was collected show that less time spent watching television directly led to more time a sleep, and a more uninterrupted and thus more restful sleep, as well.