How are behaviours(shopping, exercising, biting nails etc) maintained through reinforcement?

How may a behaviour we want to decelerate be decreased?How are behaviours(shopping, exercising, biting nails etc) maintained through reinforcement?
Behaviors that are followed by pleasurable consequences become stronger and more frequent. So you can attempt to reinforce an activity by providing yourself with a positive consequence or reward any time you follow through on the desired behavior. Some behaviors have their own natural rewards built in. For example, if you are exercising you may lose weight, become stronger, and feel better about yourself.





In order to decrease the frequency of an unwanted behavior you could try changing the consequence to something unpleasant or undesirable. This can be tricky because many times there are positive consequences covertly embedded in seemingly unpleasant experiences. One such example is that of a student acting out in class. His teacher may verbally reprimand him in front of peers and send him to the Principal's office. However, his behavior may be reinforced by the positive consequence of getting out of class, or having more attention. It is best to do a behavioral analysis in which you list all the possible pleasant vs unpleasant consequences of an unwanted behavior. Then work on either reducing the rewards of the unpleasant behavior, or finding adaptive replacement behaviors to obtain the same rewards.