Behavior Change Research Paper

Behavioral Change Reflection

I am a 22-year-old, Trinidadian and Chinese female, from New York who loves coffee. Living in the suburbs provided me with a lot of opportunity to take part multiple activities at once and having two older brothers to be rough and active with helped me find my way into sports. I continuously ran track and played soccer up until high school when I focused on track and continued to do that throughout college. I was always seen as fit and part of that was due to track and my genes. However, I was introduced to coffee at a young age. It wasn’t until high school when I started driving did I have it more often. I would usually drink an iced coffee before school every morning and that was considered breakfast. In college,

I was averaging 3-4 cups a day, but was still considered healthy for a woman of my age and weight. Due to my large intake of coffee, my behavior change was to stop drinking coffee for a month, substitute it with water, and implement mindfulness to help with the anxiety or gitters I may have from not having it. The intervention I chose is called Mindfulness-Based Stress reduction (MBSR). Some of the formal practices are mindful movement which is a gentle yoga that emphasizes on awareness of the body, the body scan which us designed to scan your body without the tensing and relaxing of muscle groups that is associated with progressive relaxation and sitting meditation which is the awareness of the breath and systematic widening the field of awareness to include all four foundations of mindfulness: awareness of the body, feeling tone, mental states and mental contents (Cullen, 2011). The best way I

Self-efficacy affects behavior directly and through its impact on outcome expectations, which is the expectations an individual has about the outcomes of a behavior (Hausenblas & Rhodes, 2017). This theory describes my behavior change because I incorporated outcome expectations into my plan. My outcomes were physical, (improved mindfulness), social, (my coworkers/friends will be pleased to know I did not cave in), and self-evaluative, (I will be proud of myself for completing the behavior change). The amount of self-efficacy I had also affected sociostructurally factors like barriers (too much social support or headaches), personal goals, (to drink more water and be more mindful), and effect my behavior (how long the behavior change will be, the type and frequency of it). Self-efficacy is defined as the belief that one is capable of organizing and executing the courses of action required to produce and outcome (Bandura, 1997). I believe I demonstrated a self-efficacious behavior that allowed me to successful complete this behavior change. Once the 4 weeks was up, I still practiced being mindful without even thinking about it. I thought I would be in a rush to drink coffee again as well but I was not. A few days later, I had a cup and that was it for the week. I had become less dependent on it so I would be drinking water constantly. As I