Personal Behavior to Increase

Unit 7 Discussion Board
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In normal life, daily activities are typically conducted in the presence of particular circumstances or cues, which implies that they are within a stimulus control construct. Goal-based actions are vital behaviors whose performance is anchored on the individual’s knowledge concerning the value of the reinforcing outcome. Habits are also instrumental behavioral tendencies that prove increasingly insensitive to the current value of the outcome. Although habits in normal life are normally influenced by stimuli that trigger them, there have been insignificant efforts to establish how stimulus control impacts desirable behaviors. This essay evaluates my inability to maintain regular exercise over time, the role of stimulus control in this dimension, and the approaches to successfully generalize and maintain the desired behavior.
Regular exercise is a significant personal behavior I wish to increase. Over the past years, I have developed New Year’s resolutions focusing on daily exercises despite struggling to maintain the behavior. Heward et al. (2020) posit that generalization is the happening of behavior change in situations or settings which previously were outside the original training. In the case above of regular exercise, generalization of behavior change may have failed in different positions and environments due to inconsistencies in my exercise routine. Considering I had previously exercised in particular gyms at specific times, the behavior generalization may have failed due to changing times and environments. Also, Fisher et al. (2021) comprehensively discuss stimulus control and the impacts of antecedent behavior on stimuli. The maintenance of the conduct in question may have derailed due to the absence of stimulus control. For instance, I failed to develop explicit discriminative stimuli related to exercise, and thus it was challenging to start and sustain behavior (Hero et al., 2020). Moreover, ...