I hate getting up in the morning. I am no good at it. I hit the snooze button multiple times and then when I finally stumble out of bed I rush around like a half-asleep idiot because I am then running late. This has been ongoing for some time now. This morning, it occurred to me to look at this from the point of view of if it was a behaviour I wanted to teach my dogs. Suddenly a multitude of fascinating possibilties came to light.
So, to start with – sleep is obviously a self-reinforcing behaviour. (It is in itself highly enjoyable for me anyway). Then you add the associated factors – the warmth and comfort of the bed. It is heading towards winter now, the mornings are getting colder and darker. Therefore staying in the bed is considerably more reinforcing than getting out into the cold and going to work. Even though I enjoy my work once I’m there, it isn’t so enjoyable I can’t wait to leap out of bed in the morning! Then on weekends when I don’t have to go to work, I have the option of choosing to get up at a reasonable hour or insetad sleep in even later (guess which option I choose?)
Now, to dissect this from the dog training view point. How can I shape my own behaviour to make getting up early something I really want to do? Is it possible? I propose an experiment!
It’s Your Choice game – the getting up in the morning version (didn’t I say there were endless applications??)
If I were shaping a dog, I would do the following:
1) Make the correct choice easier for the dog, and gradually increase the difficulty by manipulating their environment and limiting access to other potential reinforcements.
2) Use very high value rewards.
3) Make sure the dog was in a heightened arousal state before we began working on anything.
Applying my knowledge of dog shaping then, I propose the following for HUMAN shaping:
I can’t really limit my access to the bed if I am already in it. I can make adjustments however, like turning off the snooze option on my alarm, thereby removing the choice to hit snooze and go back to sleep (more on this below). I can move the alarm away from next to the bed so I have to actually get out of the bed to turn it off (though I suppose this could be conisdered to be use of an aversive – I get up because I want to remove the unpleasant stimulus of the loud alarm going off).
I can make the option of getting up more appealing by being more organised the night before – i.e. I can make sure my clothes are ironed, everything I need for the following day is set out, I can wash my hair. All things that take up time in the morning and might lead to stress and therefore make the getting up option more unappealing, like racing around looking for where I dropped my work shoes (yesterday AND today), discovering the only clean work shirt I have is unironed AND has a stain, spending extra time in the shower to wash my hair and making myself late (stress!) Without these added stressors I can adjust my morning routine to become more relaxed and enjoyable, perhaps the option to sit down and have a leisurely cup of tea or coffee. If it becomes a more pleasant experience I am more likely to choose that option. I can also make sure I don’t go to bed at, say, 3AM which would decrease the likelihood of getting up just 4.5 hours later.
I can give myself a higher chance of success by adding criteria gradually (and being specific – success is more likely to result if you know exactly what you are shaping at each stage). I therefore propose that my initial criteria is to get up 5 minutes earlier each day (say the baseline is 7.30AM, I will therefore initially aim to get up at 7.25AM. At this stage I will set an end goal of 7.00AM). If I went straight to setting the alarm an hour earlier, what do you think my likelihood of success is? (Very low).
In this case criteria can be set as the amount of minutes earlier I get up – rather than trying to shape the finished behaviour, I will shape it in steps. 5 mins earlier is an achieavable goal (even just sitting here now I think ‘Heck, 5 minutes earlier, I can do that!’) As I achieve success with that it will be easier to add another 5 minutes and so on. I will feel good because I have will have succeeded several times in a row before adding new criteria, and will therefore be more likely to succeed with the new criteria also . (I will also be specific in that a SUCCESS in the terms of ‘getting up earlier’ means me up and out of bed and getting ready, and not returning to bed, and not just lying in bed awake.)
As I have more success, I may choose to make the correct choice more difficult to challenge myself – I can move the alarm back closer to the bed for example. The coming of winter will add to this too, as it continues to get colder and darker in the morning (though I could help control this by setting the heater to come on at certain time on the morning). Sometimes there will be environmental factors I cannot control, such as my partner being home on the weekend and able to sleep in (he usually leaves before me in the morning). This will make the option of staying in the bed and spending extra time with him even more appealing. However, being a good trainer I know that these environmental reinforcers will pop up now and again and all I can do is make sure I control everything available to me. I can still control many other factors and therefore maintain a good chance for success.
(I will add here that because I am choosing to shape myself using POSITIVE methods I will not be using aversives such as having my partner rip the blankets off in the morning and throwing a bucket of cold water over me. I will also not be using lures, such as having my partner make me a cup of coffee and encouraging me to get up to have it.)
OK, so I have adjusted my environment, set my criteria and mapped out a course of steps that should be easy to let me succeed at each stage to reach the finished behaviour. Now to find a high value reward.
Firstly, just having a more relaxing start to the day will be reinforcing. I could try something like laying out a chocolate before I go to bed and rewarding myself with that when I get up – however, I have to admit the value of the chocolate will be low compared to the value of staying in the bed!!! I suppose it could also be classified as a lure. This will really require some thought... since sleeping in is SUCH a high value reinforcement for me, topping it will be difficult (suggestions anyone???) I propose for the time being that getting up earlier will be self-reinforcing as I have more time to do things I enjoy, perhaps training the dogs or having a chance to sit down and relax before heading off to work. Plus the feeling of having achieved a success in my path to my goal.
Hmmm, heightened arousal state – I suppose in some ways that should be easy to achieve, since I am starting off asleep. One thing I can think of for myself is setting some favourite music to come on in the morning as my alarm – I love to sing and dance around the house (and I know you all do it too so wipe that smirk off your face) so waking up to something a bit energetic could be helpful. Like when your favourite song comes on the radio and you start belting it out at the top of your lungs and inadvertently tapping your feet or fingers – that is a heightened arousal state.
Now, back to the issue of the alarm clock – this is actually the first thing that came into my mind and led to me going on to examine all the other issues in detail. In fact, my initial title for this post was going to be ‘What are you REALLY reinforcing?’ Let me outline it for you below.
For quite some time, I have set my alarm earlier than I plan to get up, so I can hit the snooze button once (or twice, or three times or so on!) and sleep a bit longer. It’s a bit like when you wake up in the middle of the night, say 3AM, and it feels so good to look at the clock and know you still have another 3-4 hours of sleep before you have to get up. It felt so good to be able to grab those few extra minutes of sleep each time in the morning.
Looking at this from a dog training perspective though, I came to a startling conclusion – what if I had inadvertently shaped myself to respond to the alarm as a cue to go back to sleep? Let’s break it down – what I think my alarm is cueing is ‘time to get up’. In reality, what behaviour have I learnt to associate with the alarm? Hitting snooze and going back to sleep. So really, my alarm has become a cue for ‘go back to sleep’. Same as if you cue your dog to ‘give’ when he is tugging and he doesn’t let go. What behaviour has the dog REALLY learned for your ‘give’ cue? He’s learnt ‘keep tugging until mum prys it out of my mouth’. And by setting it so I had the chance to hit the snooze button several times before getting up, I was giving myself multiple chances for self-reinforcement. So the going back to sleep behaviour has therefore been reinforced over and over again – is it any wonder then that I don’t want to get up in the morning when my alarm goes off??
Then I thought about it some more and tried to decide whether in fact the alarm had now become a conditioned reinforcer – the alarm was in effect marking my ‘correct’ behaviour of going back to sleep. So subconsciously when the alarm went off my brain interpreted it as ‘good job, keep doing that’. Same as using a clicker for a dog. I offer the behaviour of sleep, the alarm goes off and marks me as correct and I am then reinforced by getting to go back to sleep. It is the circle of reinforcemnent in action!
I was truly astonished when I thought about this. It is said that only the dog ever knows what you are clicking/marking. I didn’t even realise what behaviour I was reinforcing on MYSELF!!
So now I know this, I could say that the alarm is a poisoned cue. It doesn’t mean what I want it to. I need to change it. Now, I could try to go back and alter what the cue means (could be time consuming and difficult, even impossible). Or I could just add a new one altogether.
Now that I know what I know, hopefully I can avoid the same thing happening again! Luckily my alarm (which is my phone) had several options for different alarm noises. How can I make the new alarm my cue to get up? Normally one would add a cue once the behaviour has been shaped to where you want it. (i.e. you wouldn’t add a ‘sit’ cue for a dog that was doing very slow, cautious sits). How can I shape a cue for ‘get up’? Can I set the new alarm to go off when I am doing things during the day, things I do when I get up? What if I decided to set the alarm every time I planned to have a coffee, so the alarm became a cue to ‘go and make a coffee’? It isn’t exactly a cue for getting up, but since I will have to get up to make the coffee in the morning, it still achieves the same result. Plus getting to drink the coffee is reinforcing!!
My goodness but my brain hurts now. When it comes to shaping my dogs I feel like I am beginning to get a handle on it – when it comes to shaping ME it requires much more in depth concentration!
Check back for updates on how my experiment is proceeding. For now, I need to go and make myself a coffee (as reinforcement for thinking all this out
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