Want to get bad things out of your life? Eliminate your boring, routine tasks with automated workflows from Zapier. What about you? Think of all the ways you can remove things from your day-to-day to improve it and reward yourself. Turning off Slack notifications at the end of the day to alleviate anxiety. Putting on my noise-canceling headphones while I'm working (without turning music on) to enjoy some silence. Stopping watching a show or movie that I'm not really enjoying. Shaving off my beard in the summer so my face doesn't get itchy. Taking my car to get an oil change so I can stop worrying about it. Whether freshly-cleaned rooms or well-fed kittens sleeping silently in sunbeams, negative reinforcements can be a great motivating factor and are important to your health. They’re a bit harder to notice, but it’s worth the effort to look for them and nurture your appreciation of them. The reason this all occurred to me over in that Slack thread is because it can be really motivating to remember that negative reinforcements exist and are just as important as positive reinforcements. Alan Carr, the author of Easy Way to Stop Smoking, says "Smoking is like banging your head against a brick wall because it feels a bit better when you stop." The smoker feels compelled to smoke another cigarette to remove those symptoms and restart the cycle with another positive reinforcement. Withdrawal symptoms kick in creating a negative punishment. When the nicotine leaves the body, a drop in dopamine causes distress. Dopamine makes the person feel good and creates a positive reinforcement. For example, when a person smokes a cigarette, the nicotine causes their brain to produce a chemical called dopamine. It’s important to remember that reinforcements and punishments can be tied to unhealthy habits too. The feeling I get from having a tidy bed is a negative reinforcement. Instead, I make my bed because a messy environment is noxious and makes me feel bad. I don’t make it because I enjoy making it. Human Examples of Negative ReinforcementĪ more human example might be me making my bed. When your cat darts out of the room because you stepped on their tail, that’s a negative punishment because they’ve taken a pleasant stimulus (themself) out of your environment. To extend the metaphor, when your cat purrs because you're scratching their ears, that’s a positive reinforcement because they’ve introduced a pleasant stimulus (their adorable rumbles) into your environment. By the same token, your cat provides you a negative reinforcement when they stop screaming and chomp down on their food because they have subtracted that same noxious stimulus. When your cat screams at you to feed them, that’s a positive punishment because they are influencing your behavior by adding a noxious stimulus (their caterwauling) into your environment. If that’s too heavy, here’s an example with a cat. It’s a bit confusing because, here, "positive" means "additive" and "negative" means "subtractive." What Are Negative Reinforcements and Negative Punishments? If you’re thinking, "How can a ‘reinforcement’ be negative and how can a ‘punishment’ be positive?" fear not! We were all thinking the same thing. The other half is negative reinforcement and negative punishments. However, positive reinforcements and positive punishments are only half the equation. In operant conditioning "+1 good thing" is called a positive reinforcement and "+1 bad thing" is called a positive punishment. We generally think of those terms as meaning "+1 good thing" or "+1 bad thing," respectively. In operant conditioning, the concepts of reinforcement and punishment are a bit more complex than we usually think. You might remember operant conditioning from Psychology 101. It reminded me of a concept from operant conditioning. Recently, many of us at Zapier were talking about motivating yourself through reinforcements and how finding the right reinforcements is really hard. Doing that is just as valid as bringing good things into your life. TL DR: It’s important to reward yourself by getting bad things out of your life.
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