How to fight laziness with behavioral psychology

According to Jules Renard, laziness is nothing more than resting before getting tired. Discover the token system, an excellent behavioral psychology method to fight laziness and start studying, working or doing what you’ve been putting off for later.

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Hello friends!

Laziness means inaction, lack of action. The opposite of laziness, then, is acting, doing, accomplishing. The point we have to understand is that a lazy person is lazy only with one type of action, like studying or working, but not lazy with other actions like going out to a club or going to the cinema. This becomes even more evident when we discover that in our culture, it is very difficult for a person to do nothing (nothing at all) for even 15 more minutes.

In an experiment carried out and published recently, when having to stay in a room without any stimulation for 15 minutes, some people even prefer to take electric shocks than to remain doing nothing. If so, how can laziness be considered in our Judeo-Christian and Greek-Roman culture as one of the 7 deadly sins?

As I said, this is because laziness is laziness for certain behaviors. A person may be too lazy to do a sport, such as walking or weight training, but may not be too lazy to study more than 8 hours a day. Another person, may be too lazy to study and go to the gym religiously. A person can be a workaholic, a workaholic and work 14 hours a day, but be too lazy to read a book to the end.

What I mean is that it does not lead to anything to classify a person as lazy. What you need to think about is when, at what moments, in what way and why a person presents what we call laziness.

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What is laziness?

According to the Michaelis dictionary, laziness comes from the Latin pirigitia, a noun meaning slowness; wander; leisure. The two main meanings today are:

1) Little willingness to work; aversion to work; inaction, laziness.

2) Delay or slowness in doing anything; indolence, sluggishness; delay, negligence.

Therefore, laziness means a slow response from the body to perform an action or even non-response. For example, you ask someone for a favor. If the person takes time to do what you asked or does not do it, you can describe his slowness in responding, his indolence, or his non-response as laziness. Thus, we combine the subject with the adjective lazy in our thinking and say: “So-and-so is lazy”.

Anyone who is a parent will see that when we ask a son or daughter to perform an action, how fast or slow the action is will depend on the action itself or on the reward that comes from the action. If we ask the child to get ready for school, he may seem lazy. But if we ask her to dress up to go to an amusement park, she will show no trace of laziness.

The token system

The token system is one of the ways used by behavioral psychology to increase the probability of issuing behaviors. In less technical terms, we can say that the token system is useful to reduce laziness.

In one of the courses I took during college, we were asked to create a self-experiment with the token system. So, instead of applying the method to another person (the card system is usually applied in therapy with children), we used it on ourselves.

At the time, I was starting to study German. That was my goal, folks. Despite this, we know that learning a foreign language is a long and time-consuming process. Since I didn’t have the money to pay for a language course during this period, I had to study on my own, being self-taught. However, the problem was not studying. The problem was to study with a frequency that corresponded to the time we dedicated when we were enrolled in a language school.

Knowing that to speak the basics of a language we need to know between 2,000 and 3,000 words, I saw that if I learned 10 new words a day, in a period of one year, I would have learned 3650 words! However, as I said, my difficulty at the time was creating the discipline of studying every day.

So, I applied the token system. See how it works:

According to Caballo (1996): “a token system, in which a token or a point is given immediately after each occurrence of the response-objective and, when a certain number of tokens or points have accumulated, a broader reinforcer is presented. Since the tokens pair with it, they become conditioned reinforcers.”

A token can be a paper with the writing – “Valor 1 token”. Or it could be a spot on a weekly chart. For example, on Monday the behavior was performed, so a point is assigned on that Monday. For children, we indicate the creation of tokens.

In this way, saying that we have to learn 3000 words of German may seem like such a huge task that we will be “lazy” and not learn. But if we divide this apparently high number into small groups, say 10 words a day, the task becomes much easier.

Having an answer target (10 words per day), let’s create a token system, also called the token economy. For each answer-objective, we will give a chip or a point. Once the subject has collected a number of tokens (for example, 7 tokens = 70 words learned), let’s switch to positive reinforcement such as being able to watch a movie.

So the system is simple:

1) An answer-objective is defined (learn 10 words of German a day, go to the gym, walk 1 hour, read 100 pages of a book, work 4 hours without interruption). For each answer we assign a token.

2) A positive reinforcement is defined that will be exchanged after reaching a specific number of tokens. If it is a 0-objective response per day and if we count 5 working days, we will have a booster every 5 tokens or if we count the week we will have a booster every 7 days. However, it is important that, when the objective response is not issued, the form is not given and the day is not counted.

3) It is important to record the behavior over the period, to know if it is being effective or not. If it is not being effective, this could be changing the target response (for example, decreasing the effort from 10 words to 6) or increasing the reinforcement by accumulating the right number of tokens, such as being able to take a small trip or buy a specific gift. .

The token system will not work properly in just this sense, that is, if the required response is too high with too little reinforcement. If the answer is relatively easy and smooth, it won’t be a problem to do it, there won’t be laziness. If reinforcement is a desired reward, there will be motivation to keep the behavior routine.

As I mentioned above, the token system is widely used in early childhood education. This is because it is easy to see that every child has a lot of energy to burn. So, it would be rather strange for her to be lazy, indolent, slow to act, having so much vitality to use.

What happens is that the child does not want to spend his energy on something he considers uninteresting. A child can spend hours playing video games, just as he can be super attentive to an explanation of how the heart works in a biology class and, even if it is the same environment (the school), he can be inattentive and lazy in a Portuguese class.

That is, we always have to analyze deeply and see that in the end no one is lazy everywhere, at all times. When we find a kind of slow response, or non-response, in ourselves or others, it will be for one of two reasons:

– the action is evaluated as too big and tiring;

– there is no reward for taking action after the effort has been made.

For example, who would go to work 40 hours a week if they didn’t have the reward (the salary)? Similarly, when the task is seen as excessively difficult because it is long or large, the best way is to break it down and do it in parts. This is easy to see when the student has to write a TCC (Course Completion Work). The final work looks huge and the student does not move. If, instead, he starts using the token system and divides what he has to do into parts each day and motivates himself with a reward at the end of the week, the whole journey will be lighter and more pleasurable.

In this way, the token system is a great system – and it works (I proved it by having used it on myself during college) – for increasing specific behaviors and for creating and maintaining habits, whether these are for study, work , to practice physical activities or whatever you find you don’t do, because you’re lazy.

PS: I would like to thank Silvana, who suggested the topic of laziness. Thanks Silvana!

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