What do you value?

Our life narratives influence what we value in life.

During a time in my life when I was in a deep depression I started keeping a record of what made me feel a little like going on. I found there were a couple of things I still enjoyed. At that time it seems the little bits of joy were enough to make carrying on bearable.

If you are feeling down through the period of isolation start keeping a journal or record of your experience. To find hints at what motivates you, record your activities and rate them. Any rating system will work but a simple one is to rate them 1 through 10.

During covid-19 I am starting to do this again and will be experimenting with a couple different rating systems. I plan on using a +5 to -5 system, with 0 as neutral. During the stay at home order I started this experiment with my three categories of three, but it’s not as easy to use. The idea is to record activities that are highly rewarding, moderately rewarding, somewhat rewarding, and neutral, as well as those that are slightly to very aversive.

Values are an essential part of our reinforcement hierarchies.

What do you value? Let’s hope it’s more than a garage filled with a five year stockpile of toilet paper. When I was still working the items people were most aggressively panic buying were toilet paper and water. I would see people come into the store four or five times to get baskets full of toilet paper.

Recording your activities and emotional responses will give you a way to build your own custom list of motivating activities. These categories are part of your reinforcement hierarchy. I also have a more complex reinforcement hierarchy consisting of 200 points I use for dog training. But it seems the 10 + 0 categories are sufficient for our daily lives.

Values are one of those catch terms that include the whole range of reinforcement types. An important class of values we need to pay attention to are the ones charged with emotion. Both personal and cultural values are energized through emotions. Emotionalized values are reinforcement with a chemical kick.

This is true for both positive and negative events. Or we could say positive and negative reinforcement. It seems that negative events are often the ones with the highest emotional impact.

By rating my activities I’m finding what moves a task up or down the reinforcement hierarchy are the underlying emotions. Often these emotions are rooted (motivated) in primary needs, fear, and desire.

Our monotonous day in and day out activities are motivated by bigger concerns and more important needs. There are a lot of little low ranking events with an occasional big emotional payoff.

An example of a higher level need obtained from monotonous activities is discovering some intellectual insight. This insight could be discovering some deeper meaning from a narrative, such as a story about new research or it could be something interesting about dog behavior. Discovering insight about a narrative in the Bible, other traditional text, or the act of being human can also be rewarding.

The emotional value of higher level reinforcement is tiny compared to more basic needs

When looking at basic needs we find those little day in and day out monotonous activities have more practical payoffs, such as not being homeless or keeping a family together.

In the first example, emotions associated with discovery maintain the monotonous behaviors needed for developing insight. For those of us who enjoy this kind of reinforcement, many of those little acts are also rewarding in themselves. During Covid isolation I find most of my daily behaviors fall on the +1 of this scale. There are usually a couple of +2 events about every other day. There are also quite a few -1 events with an occasional -2 event. Those -2 or -3 events usually involve going out into the public, such as needing to go to the store.

Day in and day out rituals become reinforcing in themselves. One behavior mod technique is to use a daily ritual as a reward for another behavior. Our personal rituals are an important and often overlooked part of our lives. They are the micro building blocks of our life narrative.

One of the big problems with stay at home isolation is that it has disrupted our daily rituals. Daily rituals are reinforcing, so eliminating them is aversive. This is a problem with adjusting to any change. An effective strategy for adjusting to change is to replace one set of rituals with another.

We all adjust to the stay at home orders by developing new rituals. How our new rituals emerge is of some interest. Do they develop from random events that become ritualized or are they planned out?

I have noticed my behavior has drifted back to a schedule I’ve lived on most of my life being self-employed. Having your time controlled by others is much different than doing your own time management.

While I am not formally working, I still put in 12 to 16 hour days. My days are mostly filled with writing, reading professional articles and business books, learning new software, learning about streaming video, and building websites. Before I started recording my value scores for daily activities I felt like I was getting very little done. I now see I am accomplishing goals, they just seem meaningless because of the socioeconomic climate.

Recording the value of daily activities helps define and refine one’s daily schedule.

Organizing what we’re going to measure can help us find direction in itself. Once we start measuring something it also becomes more important. By counting events we attend to their nuances and their contributing parameters. Measuring brings awareness to what we are doing and how we are doing it. Counting can actually prompt the behavior it is measuring.

Documenting activity helps develop new daily rituals that support getting more tasks done throughout the day.

Occasionally, about once every week or two, I have a day where my behavior is quite depressed and on those days I get little done. I call these my days off. I find on my days off I only accomplish three to seven hours of work during the day. I have begun to notice a pattern as to when I take a day off. My days off are usually accompanied by a break in my daily routine. Often I get to sleep much later than normal, wake up two hours late, and am overly tired. I am going to start monitoring this more closely to verify if it really is a break in my daily rhythm that’s causing a lack of sleep and being overly tired, or perhaps something else. These posts take several days, sometimes weeks to write and I am always updating my insight. I am finding that these disrupted sleep patterns and days off are more closely linked to fear and depression.

If you have developed unwanted habits during the Covid-19 lockdown, think about what behavior pattern you want to replace it with. Once you have a new target behavior selected, there are several ways to start using the new behavior while interrupting the undesirable behavior.

The first step is to develop an awareness of what behaviors are unhelpful. Then uncover what your motivation directives are and what your desired behavior will look like. With this information you will know what to change and why you are doing it, as well as why you want to do something else and what that something else is.

The takeaway for this article is to start scoring your values. Going forward you will have two important ways to evaluate events and situations, the trust score from the last article and your values score.

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What is Your Value proposition?

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