Six Ways to Miss an Alarm, Each Diagnosed with the COM-B Model

“All, apart from reflective motivation, are necessary for a given behaviour.” That sentence sits in the middle of a 2011 paper about public health policy, and it contains a claim most advice about mornings quietly contradicts. Much wake-up advice is an attempt to supply reflective motivation: find your why, picture the life you want. The sentence implies, though the authors do not spell it out for any behaviour, that a person can act without it, for instance by habit.

The paper is Michie, van Stralen and West, “The behaviour change wheel: A new method for characterising and designing behaviour change interventions,” Implementation Science, 2011, volume 6, article 42. It introduced the COM-B model, in which behaviour (B) is generated by three interacting conditions: capability, opportunity and motivation. To change a habit with COM-B, identify which of those conditions is failing for the behaviour in question, then choose the intervention type the framework links to that condition. This post runs that procedure on one behaviour, getting out of bed when the alarm goes off.

What does COM-B actually claim?

The authors define the three conditions in plain terms. Capability is “the individual’s psychological and physical capacity to engage in the activity concerned,” including knowledge and skills. Opportunity is “all the factors that lie outside the individual that make the behaviour possible or prompt it.” Motivation is “all those brain processes that energize and direct behaviour, not just goals and conscious decision-making,” including habitual processes and emotional responding as well as analytical decision-making.

Each splits in two, giving six components. Capability divides into physical and psychological. Opportunity divides into physical (afforded by the environment) and social (afforded by “the cultural milieu that dictates the way that we think about things”). Motivation divides into reflective (evaluations and plans) and automatic (emotions and impulses arising from associative learning or innate dispositions).

Two features of the model are easy to miss. First, the components interact. The paper says opportunity can influence motivation, capability can influence motivation, and enacting a behaviour can alter all three. Second, the model is deliberately neutral about where the problem lives: the authors write that it “places no priority on an individual, group, or environmental perspective.” A bad habit is not assumed to be a character flaw, and it is not assumed to be an environmental defect either.

The COM-B model, introduced by Susan Michie, Maartje van Stralen and Robert West in Implementation Science in 2011, holds that any behaviour requires capability, opportunity and motivation, each with two sub-types, and that an intervention should be chosen according to which of the six is deficient.

What is the Behaviour Change Wheel around the hub?

COM-B is the hub of a three-ring diagram. The inner ring is the six components, which the paper’s tables label “sources” of behaviour. The middle ring holds nine intervention functions: education, persuasion, incentivisation, coercion, training, restriction, environmental restructuring, modelling and enablement. The outer ring holds seven policy categories, the levers that institutions use to make those interventions happen.

The part that makes the wheel usable is a link table in the paper (Table 2) that says which intervention functions fit which source. It is the reason a diagnosis can lead somewhere. Reproduced from the paper’s table:

• Physical capability: training, enablement
• Psychological capability: education, training, enablement
• Reflective motivation: education, persuasion, incentivisation, coercion
• Automatic motivation: persuasion, incentivisation, coercion, environmental restructuring, modelling, enablement
• Physical opportunity: restriction, environmental restructuring, enablement
• Social opportunity: restriction, environmental restructuring, enablement

The definitions matter for what follows. In the paper, coercion means “creating expectation of punishment or cost,” incentivisation is “creating expectation of reward,” restriction is “using rules to reduce the opportunity to engage in the target behaviour (or to increase the target behaviour by reducing the opportunity to engage in competing behaviours),” and environmental restructuring is “changing the physical or social context.” Enablement is “increasing means/reducing barriers to increase capability or opportunity,” with medication and surgery among its examples.

A COM-B model example: six reasons a person fails to get out of bed

The paper is about tobacco control and obesity policy. It says nothing about alarms. What follows is this blog’s own application of the framework to waking, using the paper’s link table for the fixes, and nobody has tested it as a method. The “what it looks like” column is inference from the definitions and contains no data.

Failing component	What it looks like at the alarm	Question that identifies it	Intervention functions the paper links	Fix that fits
Physical capability	The body cannot comply: a sleep disorder, illness, or sleep too short to function	Does the person wake and feel unable to get up even on days they care about?	Training, enablement	Medical assessment and treatment (enablement); a changed sleep schedule
Psychological capability	The person lacks knowledge or skill: misjudged how much sleep is needed, no idea the phone is on silent, never learned to get up without negotiating	Would the person have acted differently if they had known something?	Education, training, enablement	Learn how the alarm and sleep timing work; practise a fixed first action
Physical opportunity	The room permits the failure: phone within reach, dark room, alarm easy to dismiss	Does the alarm get silenced without the person fully registering it?	Restriction, environmental restructuring, enablement	Alarm across the room, light, a second device
Social opportunity	Nobody expects the person anywhere, and nobody will ever know	Does anyone notice, today, whether the person is up?	Restriction, environmental restructuring, enablement	A person or group that sees the result; a household norm; an appointment with someone
Reflective motivation	The person judges, awake or half-awake, that more sleep is worth more than the morning	Does the person, in the evening, want the early start?	Education, persuasion, incentivisation, coercion	A cost or reward attached to the outcome; a clearer reason
Automatic motivation	The warm bed pulls harder than the plan; snoozing has become the habitual response	Does the person know the plan, want it, and still reach for snooze by reflex?	Persuasion, incentivisation, coercion, environmental restructuring, modelling, enablement	Change what happens right after the alarm; repeat until the new response is habitual

Why the order of the questions matters

The table reads top to bottom for a reason. Capability problems come first because motivational fixes applied to them do damage. Someone with an untreated sleep disorder who is handed a penalty for oversleeping has been given coercion for a physical capability problem, and the table shows that coercion is not on the list of functions for that row. The mismatch does not merely fail. It supplies a reason to feel ashamed about something that was never a choice. Anyone who wakes unrefreshed after what should have been enough hours has reason to ask whether something like sleep apnea or a delayed sleep phase belongs in the picture before doing anything else on this list.

Opportunity comes next, because it is the cheapest to change and the least dependent on willpower. The cheapest case is the alarm that is silenced in a daze. The authors’ definition of opportunity includes factors that “make the behaviour possible or prompt it,” so an alarm is itself an opportunity factor, and so is where it sits. A separate alarm clock on the far side of the room is a standard physical-opportunity fix: restriction, in the paper’s vocabulary, because it removes the competing option of dismissing the alarm from the pillow.

Motivation comes last. This is the reverse of how most self-improvement content is ordered, where motivation is the first and often only target. In the table, the two motivation rows are the only ones where persuasion, incentivisation and coercion appear. Those are also the interventions that need the person to keep cooperating, because an expectation of reward or cost works only while the person believes it. Vroom’s older expectancy theory splits that belief into three rated terms, and scoring each one for a single morning shows which of them is actually weak.

Where the two motivation rows differ

Reflective and automatic motivation look alike from outside, since both end with the person still in bed. The question that separates them is what the person says the night before. Reflective failure shows up as a change of mind: the plan sounded fine at 10 p.m. and seems foolish at 6 a.m. Automatic failure shows up as no change of mind at all: the plan is still endorsed, and the hand goes to the snooze anyway.

The paper’s table gives automatic motivation six functions against reflective motivation’s four, and adds environmental restructuring and modelling, which appear nowhere in the reflective row. That asymmetry suggests the fix for automatic failure is less likely to be an argument. It is more likely to be a change in what surrounds the moment. An accountability witness is an example of changing the surroundings of the moment, which is the next section’s topic.

Which COM-B components does DontSnooze address?

DontSnooze is an iOS app in which a person posts a recorded clip when they have done the thing, friends can react to it, and a miss results in a photo picked at random from the person’s own gallery being shown to those friends for 48 hours. Posting proof requires the paid Pro tier, which the free version does not include. Read against Table 2, it works mainly on social opportunity, since an audience is a change to the social context, which the paper calls environmental restructuring. It also works on reflective motivation, since the photo creates an “expectation of punishment or cost,” the paper’s definition of coercion, and friends’ reactions to a completed wake-up are a mild form of incentivisation. Table 2 links coercion to both motivation rows, so the penalty could act on either; because it is a cost weighed the evening before, it fits the reflective row, and any effect on the snooze reflex itself would have to come from repetition.

The app leaves physical capability untouched, so a sleep disorder or chronic short sleep is a case for a clinician, and a penalty aimed at someone who cannot comply is coercion applied to the wrong row. It also does nothing about psychological capability or physical opportunity: the room, the phone and the ease of dismissing the alarm stay as they were.

How can a person run this diagnosis on themselves?

The procedure is short. Pick the target behaviour and state it precisely, for example “feet on the floor within two minutes of the first alarm, five weekdays out of five.” Over a week, note for each miss which of the six questions in the table gets a yes. Most people will find one or two components recurring rather than six. The paper itself anticipates this when it observes that for one target the only barrier might be capability, for another it may be enough to provide or restrict opportunities, and for yet another all three may need to change.

A week is a short sample, so a component that shows up once should be treated as a hint rather than a finding, and the log should run longer before anything is bought. Then pick from the linked functions only. If the diagnosis is physical opportunity, motivational quotes, which are persuasion, are off the list. If the diagnosis is automatic motivation, an argument for why mornings matter is also weak, because the person already agrees.

The authors write that their classification “will no doubt be superseded.” The framework’s value, for now, is that it forces the question of what is failing before anything is bought or promised. A different policy-side checklist, the nine-letter MINDSPACE acronym, lists influences instead of diagnosing deficits.