Coaching practices for Extinction Attention Maintained Behavior

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Extinction Attention Maintained Behavior, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• I keep doing this thing I hate and punishing myself for it never works
• Every time I manage to stop the bad habit I’m left with this empty restless gap and just slide right back into it
• When I try to lock onto one thing, my attention slides off it within seconds and I have to keep dragging it back
• I keep trying to white-knuckle my way through with willpower at the exact moment of temptation and losing
• I sit down to focus and within minutes I’ve drifted to my phone, an open tab, the snack on the desk

Practices that may help

1. Extinguish unwanted behaviors by removing their reinforcement
   Stop a behavior by consistently withholding the reinforcer that maintains it — not by punishing it.
   Operant Conditioning and Schedules of Reinforcement
2. Use differential reinforcement to increase desired behavior while reducing unwanted behavior
   Reinforce the behavior you want while withholding reinforcement from the one you don’t — at the same time.
   Operant Conditioning and Schedules of Reinforcement
3. Selective attention to individual sounds
   Deliberately focus on one distinct sound source among several and hold attention there.
   Attention Training Technique (ATT), Made Practical
4. Modify antecedents to trigger behavior before it depends on motivation
   Change the cues that precede a behavior to make it more or less likely to occur.
   Operant Conditioning and Schedules of Reinforcement
5. Reduce cues for competing behaviors during focused periods
   Your focus is partly controlled by what stimuli are in your environment — reducing competing cues protects target behaviors.
   Stimulus Control, Made Practical
6. Replace the old behavior with a healthier substitute
   Substituting a competing response for a problem behavior is more durable than suppression alone.
   The Transtheoretical Model of Change, Made Practical
7. Use variable-ratio reinforcement to make habits persistent
   Once a behavior is established, shift to an unpredictable reward schedule to make it resistant to extinction.
   Operant Conditioning and Schedules of Reinforcement
8. Attentional deployment
   Direct attention away from the emotionally provocative element of a situation before the emotion fires.
   Cognitive Reappraisal vs. Suppression, Made Practical
9. Train flexible attention
   Practise deliberately moving attention between external cues and internal experience — and back.
   Detached Mindfulness, Made Practical
10. Remove or modify the cue rather than resist the response
    Eliminating or changing the environmental stimulus is more effective than relying on willpower to resist it.
    Stimulus Control, Made Practical

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