Self-Control

Before taking this course, I would have told you that I greatly lack self-control and don’t have any willpower. If I crave a specific food, it won’t take very long for me to buy and eat it because I have no control getting rid of my craving or the willpower to ignore it. However, as stated in Chapter 10, willpower doesn’t give reason to why someone has self-control. It does not explain with action or reason how or why a person is able to crave a specific food, but not actually consume the food.

Skinner discusses some controlling responses that provide the reasoning behind a person’s self-control. However, these few controlling responses that Skinner discussed all have a lot to do with self-control and without self-control, it is difficult to use these approaches. In order to leave the money at home, you need to want to do so; in order to successfully deprive yourself of something, you need to control yourself to continue with deprivation as long as necessary. Each of these responses seems to me to be apart of the self-reinforcement and self-punishment category, of which requires a certain level of self-control and self-discipline to successfully reinforce or punish oneself, which is where I tend to lose. I will try to use the self-reinforcement process for writing a paper. Write a page, and then check social media. But while writing that page, the only thing I seem to think about is getting my hands on my phone, and eventually cave in before completing the page. I do believe that both the self-reinforcement and self-punishment processes have the ability to be very successful when a person already has self-control, but when they completely lack that control, these processes are likely to fail.