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The Reward System Is Functional

February 27, 2024 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Yes, the reward system is functional, which means that it isn’t conceptual or fanciful—or optional. It’s integral to our survival, and it’s even older than we are: it evolved in worms and flies about a billion years ago. It doesn’t care what your or my opinion about rewards is. Having an opinion about the reward system is like having an opinion about whether or not your car should need gas. No matter how deeply committed to your opinion you are, unless you have a battery operated car, it needs gas. If you fail to put gas in the car, it won’t operate. If you fail to utilize your brain’s reward system, on the other hand, it will operate you. It fulfills a non-optional function that’s essential to survival.

One thing that gets in the way of using rewards intentionally and effectively is the mistaken belief that things like rewarding experiences, benefits, or celebrations are the same thing as rewards. They are not.

Rewarding Experiences Are Not Rewards

You undoubtedly have experiences and engage in activities that feel rewarding to you. All that means is that you enjoy them, which is really neither good nor bad. Some of the experiences or activities people enjoy or find rewarding are the very ones they want to eliminate or change. And the reason these behaviors are difficult to eliminate or change is because they are rewarding (smartphone scrolling, eating unhealthy food, binge watching, buying things, snorting cocaine…).

So it’s extremely important to recognize that rewards and rewarding experiences, while related, are not the same thing. They both elicit “liking” neurochemicals in the brain at the time they are experienced. And some rewarding experiences also involve dopamine, the “wanting” neurochemical. In fact it’s the dopamine, rather than the liking neurochemicals that makes altering some existing behaviors so difficult. This is an example of the reward system operating you.

Rewards utilize dopamine intentionally. Dopamine can help develop creative tension, which increases the motivation to take a specific action or series of actions that you want to take in order to get the anticipated reward. It’s a carrot…if carrots motivate you, that is. I can take or leave carrots, but the opportunity to add new music to my digital playlist always motivates me. Dopamine also puts your brain on notice that this particular action or series of actions is important and it should pay attention.

Experiencing an unmediated rewarding activity is passive. Identifying and using a reward to reinforce behavior change is active.

Rewarding: providing satisfaction or gratification; enjoyment
Reward: an act performed to strengthen approved behavior; reinforcement

You can use rewarding experiences as rewards, but they are not rewards in and of themselves.

Neither Are Benefits

A benefit is something that is advantageous or good. Benefits can be short-term or long-term. They result from actions you take. (Of course, you can also benefit from actions other people take or from fortunate changes in circumstances, but you have no direct control over those things.)

If there were no benefit to you for embarking on a particular course of action (completing a project or goal action plan, changing or starting a habit, or following through on an intention), there would be no point in doing it. Benefits answer the question of why you want to do something. So it’s useful to clearly identify all the benefits that would—or could—accrue if you accomplish what you set out to do.

It seems logical, doesn’t it, that understanding the benefit or beneficial nature of a particular action somehow ought to magically translate into the taking of that action? And yet this isn’t how the brain works. The brain’s reward system is functional, not logical. Benefits are not interpreted by your brain as rewards just because they are good for you. And understanding what benefits may accrue doesn’t have any direct impact on your behavior. Knowing that ordering from the salad side of the lunch menu instead of from the burger side is better for your cholesterol level and maybe your overall health will not make ordering a salad happen. Nor will it turn a salad into a reward or even a rewarding experience.

But you could use a reward to motivate you to order that salad if good health or some aspect of it is a long-term desired outcome.

Celebrations Aren’t Rewards, Either

In behavior-change terms, a celebration is an impromptu acknowledgement, after the fact, of something you’ve accomplished. The difference between a reward and a celebration is in how you use it, not what it is. In order for something to be effective as a reward, you need to crave it. That’s because dopamine is triggered by the expectation of a reward. So in order for you—and your brain—to crave a reward, the reward needs to be (1) something you really enjoy and (2) identified ahead of time.

Celebrations are great! Go ahead and celebrate your successes and accomplishments. But don’t try to substitute celebrations for rewards because they will not help you train your brain to do what you want it to do, which is the point of a reward. If you have trouble identifying suitable rewards, pay attention to how you celebrate and the treats you give yourself. You may be able to use some of those things as rewards.

The Bottom Line

Rewarding experiences and celebrations are enjoyable, and benefits are…beneficial (good for you). But, unlike rewards, they do not serve the function of motivating you to create behavior change. Because the reward system operates at the unconscious level, you can’t simply dismiss it or try to circumvent it. The best course of action is to take advantage of it and work with it. Otherwise, you may unwittingly develop and reinforce behaviors you don’t want. No one sets out to develop undesirable behaviors or habits on purpose. And yet each of us has trained our brain, often unwittingly but via the same process, to engage in every one of the behaviors and habits we now have, both the ones we like and want to keep and the ones we don’t like and want to change or eliminate.

I’m beginning a six-month experiment called Contrivance of the Month. This experiment includes using my newsletter, lucidwaking, to feature an article on the relevant contrivance in one issue and links to worksheets, instructions, and additional information in another issue. The March contrivance, as you may already know or have guessed, is rewards. If you want to play along, you can check out the 2/20/24 issue on the Newsletter page on my website, where you can also subscribe to lucidwaking to keep up with the contrivance content. The next issue with all the links and other good stuff will be published tomorrow, 2/28/24.

Light Up Your Brain with Gratitude

November 27, 2015 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Thanksgiving is the one day a year we set aside to reflect on the people and the things we’re grateful for. At least that’s the idea. The reality of feast, family, friends, fun, and football isn’t entirely off the mark. All those warm, festive feelings are good for us and good for each other. At least they have the potential for keeping us out of trouble. But the giving thanks part of Thanksgiving can easily fall by the wayside, especially in light of another characteristic of the holiday: frenzy.

Yes, it’s nice to have a day that’s focused on people getting along, eating good food together, and thinking about what we’re grateful for. But it’s hard to stuff a year’s worth of gratitude into a single day. Gratitude is more powerful and more effective when undertaken as a regular practice than when treated as an annual event.

Multiple studies confirm that gratitude can improve your health, happiness, and wellbeing. Among other things, a regular gratitude practice can help you:

Sleep better and longer
Exercise more
Be more optimistic
Decrease aches and pains
Lower anxiety and depression
Increase resilience

How? Well, researchers at the National Institute of Health (NIH) observed that people who felt gratitude had higher activity in the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus is an area of the brain responsible for controlling such bodily functions as eating, drinking, and sleeping, as well as influencing stress levels and metabolism.

Gratitude also activates the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is involved in the brain’s reward system. The release of dopamine fills us with a feeling of pleasure. It’s the reward we get for the behavior we just engaged in. The purpose of the brain’s reward system is to help ensure that we learn—and remember—behaviors that enhance our chances of remaining alive. That’s why so many of the things we naturally find rewarding are related to food and reproduction. In addition to food and sex, lots of things trigger the release of dopamine, including social interactions, generosity, and—as it turns out—gratitude.

Dopamine plays a role in:

Movement
Memory
Behavior and cognition
Attention and alertness
Motivation
Sleep
Mood
Learning

It’s part of a brain circuit called the mesolimbic pathway, which connects behaviors to feelings of pleasure, resulting in the formation of habits. When dopamine is released, emotional and learning circuits are activated to increase the likelihood we will remember what we did so we can repeat the behavior. The hit of dopamine we get from feeling grateful engages our brain in what neuroscience researcher Alex Korb calls “a virtuous cycle.” Once we begin practicing gratitude, our brain actively looks for things to be grateful for. How cool is that?

Find a Gratitude Practice that Works for You

There are several different ways to practice gratitude. You can choose one, mix and match, or modify one or more to suit yourself. The keyword is “practice,” which means doing it on a regular basis.

Gratitude Journal: Keep a gratitude journal in which to record things you experience that you’re grateful for. You can do it by hand, on a computer, or with an app.

Gratitude List: Think of—or record—one or more things you’re grateful for, either every day or once a week. Interestingly, there’s evidence that doing this weekly is more effective than doing it daily.

Expressing Gratitude: Create a daily practice of conveying your gratitude to other people—friends, family, co-workers, service people, even strangers—verbally or in writing.

Gratitude Meditation: Begin your meditation by acknowledging what you are grateful for in the present moment.

At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us. —Albert Schweitzer

Gratitude is an appreciation for what is meaningful and valuable to us. Simply experiencing feelings of gratitude can enhance our wellbeing by changing our brain. But since we’re social animals, it makes sense that sharing those feelings by expressing our gratitude whenever possible is even more rewarding.

How Quickly Can You Turn Success into Failure?

September 18, 2015 by Joycelyn Campbell 4 Comments

We don’t have to make a point of looking for what isn’t working or the places where we haven’t lived up to our expectations. Our brain automatically notices those things and points them out to us. It’s wired to pay more attention to negative events than to positive ones. That’s because while positive events may be extremely pleasurable and possibly even good for us, negative events could kill us or put us in grave danger. At least that’s how the unconscious part of the brain (System 1) perceives them. This automatic tendency is so universal it has a name: the negativity bias.

In and of itself, having a brain that points out what isn’t working or measures how far we missed the mark isn’t a bad thing. That kind of information is potentially very useful. It’s the way we over-value and respond to negative information that gets us into trouble. Because we have a brain that is primed to notice the negative, it’s easy for us to overlook the positive altogether, even when there’s plenty of positive for the eye to behold.

When Good Isn’t Good Enough to Qualify

Several of my clients are addressing health-related issues in my Goals, Habits & Intentions course. They have either set long-term goals to achieve specific results in terms of such things as diet and exercise or they are working on changing or creating habits that support the level of health and well-being they want to achieve.

One person who has diabetes is working on lowering her blood glucose level (which is measured by a test called the A1c). She decided to aim for lowering her A1c to a specific number and created a goal action plan to help her do that. She was following her plan just fine until she purchased a kit from a drugstore to do a home test and got a result that was better than the one she was aiming for.

At that point, she pretty much stopped following her plan. But when she got her official A1c test results back from the lab a few weeks later, they were disappointing. The number was not as low as the one she’d gotten from her home test. Her view of the situation was that she had failed—not just in continuing to follow that specific goal action plan, but in doing the Goals, Habits & Intentions coursework.

So I was surprised to learn that her A1c result was lower than it had been the last time she was tested. And the number last time she was tested was lower than it had been at the beginning of the year. From the first test to the third test, she had lowered her A1c by 1.6 points! By any objective measure, that’s a significant success. Instead of celebrating it, however, she discounted it. Her successful results were a failure in her own eyes because they weren’t quite as amazing as she’d thought they would be.

I suggested she make a visual chart that tracked her A1c numbers over the course of this year and put it up in a prominent location so the irrefutable evidence of her success would be harder to ignore.

The Default Response

This is a pernicious problem we all face: jumping to conclusions about the information provided to us by our brain and by external sources. It can happen at either end of the scale (“good” news or “bad” news), but the interesting thing is that the result of both good news and bad news is often the same: we stop whatever it is we were doing. And the culprit in both cases is System 1 thinking, which is focused entirely on the short term.

If the news is “good,” we stop because we think we achieved our goal so we don’t need to continue working toward it. That makes a certain amount of sense because that’s what you do when you actually achieve a goal. But in a lot of cases we need to set up a goal in order to change or start a habit so we can maintain our success. This is especially important in the area of health and wellness. If we want to maintain long-term changes, we can’t stop doing the things that are making us healthier. Instead, we need to turn them into habits. (As an aside, I read a blog post a couple of years ago by someone who set out to develop a 30-day habit of strength training. After the 30 days he decided he had been successful and didn’t need to do it any longer.)

If the news is “bad,” we use it as evidence of our poor character (lack of self-control, powerlessness, etc.) and of the pointlessness of our attempts. Why bother? Nothing works, anyway. The automatic tendency isn’t to evaluate what might have gone wrong, but to chuck the whole thing, thus guaranteeing failure and maybe even overlooking evidence of success.

Celebrate Success!

I used to be able to count on getting in several workouts at the gym each week. And I loved it. But at the beginning of this year, my daily schedule went bonkers and has stayed that way. After months of attempting to fit the gym into my new schedule, I traded the gym for walking every day because I can break walking into smaller segments of time and fit them into the breaks between classes and appointments. As September approached, I decided it was time to exchange a couple of days of walking each week for using the treadmill at the gym.

I went to the gym at the beginning of the first week, loved it, and thought I could probably get in not just one more visit but two that week. Nevertheless, I managed only the one visit. The same thing happened the next week and then the week after that. I noticed I had failed to follow through on my original intention. I noticed the impulse to interpret my once-a-week gym visits as a failure. But I also acknowledged I really hadn’t had an opportunity to get in more time at the gym, and I’d kept up my walking and even increased it. I reminded myself that baby steps and perseverance are an almost unbeatable combination. At the end of three weeks, I looked at the notations on my calendar and realized I’d gotten in three more workouts on the treadmill than I would have if I hadn’t set an intention.

In order to celebrate success, we have to notice it, which means not having a knee-jerk reaction to every realization we haven’t met or exceeded our expectations. The game is only over when we stop playing—and that is largely up to us.

When have you turned a success into a failure? What do you think you could do to change your perspective in those kinds of situations?