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Brain-Based Transformational Solutions

Reward Stickers
and the End of Civilization

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If you listen to the dire warnings of the anti-reward-stickers faction, you’ll discover that giving kids reward stickers—or any kind of reward for that matter—is likely to turn them into anti-social schmucks who send their parents off to assisted living as soon as they can get away with it. Someone really said that. That’s because the kids will inevitably become “reward addicts,” which means they’ll need more and more of the reward to be satisfied. And eventually, they won’t be able to function without it.

No one is arguing that rewards don’t work. In fact, experts in the field frequently comment that they work “too well.” But the fact that they work isn’t good enough. One individual with a Ph.D. actually wrote this: “If I went to the doctor with a sore knee, one solution that would end the pain would be to amputate my leg. There is no doubt the solution would work. But it is still the wrong answer.” (Well, there is some doubt the solution would work, given that phantom limb pain is real and a real possibility.)

I’ve written and talked about rewards a lot, so I’m not going to go into the why of them again, except to say that the brain runs on rewards and we can’t change that. Rewards activate memory and learning circuits in the brain. You can figure out the implications. What I want to do is address some of the misguided thinking about rewards (including reward stickers) and behavior change.

Desired Outcome

What both the fellow with the hypothetical sore knee and the rest of the anti-reward folks seem to be missing is a clear definition of their desired outcome. In addition to being painful, a sore knee usually has some negative impact on mobility, so the desired outcome for treatment would include a return to normal function, thus eliminating amputation as a possible solution—and this particular example as a viable refutation of rewards.

So determine what your desired outcome is, and then decide whether or not rewards will help you get it.

Maybe you’re a busy person who wants to pursue your interest in Italian Renaissance art. You might decide that taking a class or spending a certain amount of time each week exploring the subject will help you achieve that outcome. In that case, you could set up a system to reward yourself each time you complete an assignment or spend your weekly allotment of time on your pursuit. Rewards can help you follow through and keep you on track. They can’t help you improve your talent or taste in art or sustain your interest in the subject.

Or maybe you’re a parent who wants to get your kid to develop a bedtime routine that doesn’t involve screaming, crying, or begging. You could set up a system to reward him or her for completing specific tasks. Rewards can definitely help with that, especially if you start small (with one task) and add new tasks one at a time and your kid is into the reward. But rewards can’t get him or her to love getting ready for bed, and it’s unrealistic to expect them to.

Intrinsic Motivation

All of the experts opining on the subject seem to believe that (1) kids should be intrinsically motivated to do the right thing—meaning whatever it is the adults want them to do—and (2) being intrinsically motivated will affect their behavior (i.e., will cause them to, in fact, do the right thing).

There should be a collective hysterical burst of laughter right about now. I’m an adult. You’re an adult. We can’t even get ourselves to do things we’ve decided we want to do when we’re crystal clear about the benefits of doing them and the consequences of not doing them. Why would we expect kids to behave better than we do?

Intrinsic motivation is a tricky concept, anyway, because it’s tied up with should. I should want to do this because it’s the right (healthy/ appropriate/ considerate/ responsible, etc.) thing to do. And you should want to do it, too. Some people are more bound by what they should do than others. They follow the rules. Whether they’re adults or kids, they generally cause less trouble. From the outside, they appear to be intrinsically motivated, but they’re not. The point is that I can’t tell what your motivation is for doing something and you can’t tell what my motivation is.

And being intrinsically motivated is no guarantee that anyone, adult or child, will follow through. Motivation and action are not one and the same, much to the disappointment of people who’ve paid hundreds or thousands of dollars to get motivated. Adding extrinsic motivation to the mix doesn’t conflict with the intrinsic motivation. It provides an extra boost and can help you deal with System 1’s siren calls of distraction and immediate gratification.

A couple of weeks ago, I described my current reward sticker routine for completing the same four tasks once in the morning and a second time before going to bed. They’re all things I want to do (am intrinsically motivated to do) and that I was doing more often than not. But since I wasn’t doing every single thing twice every single day, I decided to try the gold stars. That was my desired outcome, by the way: to do the four things twice a day. Period. And I would know I did them by the number of stars on my calendar. The extrinsic reward stickers have been just the boost I needed to get to—and so far to stay at—100% completion.

Maybe you’re intrinsically motivated to do a particular thing.  If you are doing it, congratulations! But if you aren’t following through to your satisfaction, add an extrinsic reward to the process.

Maybe your kid wants to learn to play an instrument (is intrinsically motivated), but doesn’t always feel like practicing. Add an extrinsic reward for following through on the practice schedule and see if that increases his or her practice time.

For both adults and kids, reward stickers are easy. You get a visual record of a series of successes that encourages you to keep the chain intact. But you can use anything that works.

Behavior change is not easy, for kids or adults. But it’s important to recognize that the concepts we have about how we should go about changing behavior need to be balanced against how our brain actually operates. Our brain wants a treat. So we can decide what kind of treat to give it or we can let it choose its own treats. See Eating the Entire Bag of Potato Chips.

Habits: Eating the Entire Bag of Potato Chips

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potato chips

A couple of years ago, I noticed that instead of following the same route (taking the same streets) to and from a particular grocery store, my habitual route was somewhat circular. After paying attention a few times, I realized that the route I’d ended up with involved more right turns than left turns, which meant it was ever so slightly faster. (If you know me, you know even the illusion of faster matters.)

A habit is a recurring, often unconscious pattern of behavior that is acquired through frequent repetition. Habits are acquired or learned over time. You can suddenly discover, as I did, that you have a habit you weren’t even aware of.

I may have consciously thought about making that initial right turn a few times at first, but I never think about it now. I’m satisfied with this habit, so I have no need to think about it unless I encounter an obstacle along the path. Goals, which I wrote about the value of last week, require ongoing System 2 intention from beginning to end. You’d be hard-pressed to complete a goal while your mind is otherwise occupied.

But habits only require System 2 attention until System 1 takes them over. That means that once a behavior or routine becomes a habit, it is initiated by your unconscious (System 1), usually as a result of something in the environment—a cue or a trigger. Your response is automatic rather than intentional or volitional.

Some other examples of habits are:

  • playing an instrument, if you’re trained
  • raiding the refrigerator in the evening
  • brushing your teeth before going to bed
  • biting your nails
  • eating the entire bag of potato chips every time
  • checking your email first thing in the morning

The word “habit” often elicits another word: “bad.” If you think of habits as bad—or as just something inconsequential that you do—you’ll have a harder time creating the habits you want to have.

Habits Are Immune to Your Opinion

Good habits, bad habits, they’re all the same to your brain. It doesn’t care what you think of your habits. All it cares about it is being efficient. Do anything often enough and it will become a habit. And habits, by their nature, are hard to change. Trying to exert willpower, using positive thinking, engaging in deep soul searching, or looking for the underlying cause of a habit are all fruitless endeavors. Unfortunately, you can’t have a heart-to-heart with your basal ganglia.

Your brain creates behavioral habits, with or without your conscious participation, in order to operate more efficiently. It chunks repetitive behaviors and turns the chunks over to the basal ganglia so you don’t have to waste your precious and limited System 2 attention on them. Habits are an energy-saving device.

The unconscious part of your brain (System 1) has one imperative, which is survival. However, it is only concerned with the short term: get out of the way of that bus right now! The fact that eating an entire bag of potato chips every time may have long-term negative consequences for your survival is of no concern to System 1. Up till now, eating the entire bag of potato chips has worked out fine. You’re still here. The status quo is status quo.

Maybe your cholesterol is becoming a growing concern. Well that’s conceptual; there’s no immediate crisis. Acknowledging and evaluating information about your cholesterol and deciding whether or not to change your diet requires System 2 attention. And then actually changing your diet requires more System 2 attention. In the meantime, System 1 continues running it’s program—in this case your habit of eating the entire bag of potato chips each time.

You think, What’s wrong with me? I know better. Or worse, and even less productive: I must be trying to sabotage myself. But the fact that you have information or that you know better has no direct or immediate bearing on your habit, which runs automatically whenever it is cued or triggered.

We experience this confounding situation over and over again because we tend to assume that behaviors are preceded by conscious intentions. You decide what you’re going to do and then do it. But only some behaviors are preceded by conscious intentions, far fewer than we’d like to believe. Estimates are that from 50% to 80% of what we do every day we do on autopilot, which means without conscious intention or volition.

You may be operating a 4,000 pound vehicle on a busy highway at a speed of 65 miles an hour or more while your mind is somewhere far, far away. This is especially likely to happen if you’re familiar with the route. You don’t need to pay conscious attention to your driving if nothing out of the ordinary occurs. You can zone out and your unconscious will generally get you to your destination just fine.

Your unconscious is doing exactly the same thing once you open the bag of potato chips. It’s getting you to your destination of eating everything in the bag. You don’t need to tell it to do that. But if you want it to not do that, you’re going to have to tell it over and over again until it rewrites the chip-eating program. You’re going to have to practice.

Repetition and Perseverance:
Practice, Practice, Practice

You would expect that the more a musician practices her instrument or the more dishes a chef prepares, the better they will become at doing those things. A musician is unlikely to attain excellence if she only practices when she’s in the mood for it. Skillful musicians develop the habit of practicing regularly whether they’re in the mood for it or not. And they don’t have to be in the mood for it precisely because they’ve developed the habit. They don’t have to waste conscious attention or drain self-control resources by thinking about or deciding each time whether or not to practice.

When a musician shows up onstage to perform a violin solo, her habit of practicing ensures that her fingers know what to do with the violin. Without her habit of practicing, she might still be thinking about becoming a violinist or wishing it were so.

Changing or starting a new habit is no different. A musician or a chef wouldn’t expect to execute with complete skill the very first time. And the best musicians and chefs continue to hone their skills by practicing. So if you want to master not eating the entire bag of potato chips every time instead of just wishing it were so, all you have to do is keep practicing until it becomes automatic.

Should You Try
Living Without Goals?

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winning

No. Just no.

Yes, there are some folks out there who are quite insistent that instead of setting goals, you should put all your attention on your habits. It’s like advising a writer that instead of using nouns, she should put all her attention on verbs. We need both nouns and verbs. And we need both goals and good habits.

I’ve also come across more than a couple of people in the behavior-change field who seem to confuse goals with habits.

A goal is the state of affairs that a plan is intended to achieve and that (when achieved) terminates behavior intended to achieve it.

A goal requires ongoing conscious (System 2) attention. You decide what your desired outcome is (the new state of affairs), and then you create a plan to achieve it. Once you’ve achieved your goal, you don’t keep working toward it. You’re done. A goal has an end point.

A habit, on the other hand, is a recurring, often unconscious pattern of behavior that is acquired through frequent repetition.

Habits are created with or without your participation. If you want to start a new habit or change an existing one, you need to use conscious (System 2) attention initially. But once something becomes a habit, the unconscious (System 1) takes care of it. Habits are ongoing.

I don’t know why or how this either/or, black/white approach to goals and habits came about, but I first heard of doing away with goals in the 1990s when someone gave me a copy of Living Without a Goal by James Ogilvy. I recall reading a bit of it, attempting to give it a fair shake, but even back then I rejected the premise. Subsequently I’ve come across numerous spokespersons for the Zen-like attractiveness of the goalless life, which is especially prominent in the blogosphere.

What’s Wrong with Goals?

One of knocks against goals is that (horrors!) they limit you. Of course they do, but living without goals also limits you. You face limits no matter what you do because when you’re doing one thing, you can’t be doing four other things at the same time. If you board a plane for London, that’s where you’re likely to land even if you change your mind mid-flight and decide you’d rather land in Adelaide, Australia. Trying to keep all your options open doesn’t enhance your life, it keeps you from living it.

In addition to limiting you, another knock against goals is that they eliminate the element of surprise from your life. The idea that if you set and pursue goals life is going to stop surprising you is absurd.

In fact, you’re much more likely to be surprised (both happily and unhappily) once you set your plan into motion because you’ll be actively engaged in accomplishing something challenging. You may be uncomfortable, you’ll get feedback, you’ll learn new things, you’ll have successes and failures, you’ll have to make course adjustments, and you may even decide to change direction. So you may end up exactly where you hoped you would or you may end up someplace quite different. In either case, you’ll have had a chance to appreciate some new scenery and you’ll know much more about yourself than you would if you’d arrived there randomly.

Furthermore, you’re less likely to be surprised by life if you don’t challenge yourself because the unconscious part of your brain doesn’t like surprises. It wants you to be safe and secure, so it will attempt to keep you in your comfort zone, blissfully unaware of what you’re missing.

What’s Wrong with Giving Up Goals?

After considering their case, I’ve concluded the anti-goals folks get it wrong in four ways.

(1) They are unwilling to make a commitment.

When you commit yourself to one thing—especially to following through on a long-term goal—you agree to forego other things and to sometimes do things you don’t particularly feel like doing in the moment. If you want to change your status quo, you can’t just snap your fingers. You need to take action, you need to be persistent, and you need to figure out how to overcome obstacles. You don’t know ahead of time what your experience will be or how things are going to turn out. Doing something you don’t feel like doing now in order to have something you want in the future may not make you happy, but it’s more likely to enhance the satisfaction and meaning in your life.

Something else that comes across from many in the anti-goal camp is an almost pathological fear of measuring results. I’m sure that measuring results can be carried to an extreme, and when coupled with poorly thought-out goals (or goals determined by someone else), not particularly rewarding or even healthy. But measuring results is how you know when you’re getting closer to or farther away from what really matters to you. Why wouldn’t you want to keep track of that?

(2) They have a poor understanding of what goals really are.

What are the things in life that really matter to you? Your goals should not be ends in themselves, but rather the means of having more of what you really want. If you know what you want, you can either hope that doing whatever you feel like doing in the moment will get you there. Or you can identify goals that can get you more of what you want and then take steps to achieve them.

Many of the arguments for giving up goals seem to imply that once you create one, you’re somehow imprisoned by it. It’s true that a goal without a plan is just wishful thinking, but plans are only rigid if you treat them that way. The best way to approach a goal is by paying attention to feedback and adjusting course as needed. There’s nothing in the definition of a goal that prevents you from being flexible or responding to new information or insights.

Yet another misunderstanding about how to make setting goals more effective is the focus on the outcome rather than on the process. You need to identify your desired outcome so you’ll know what you’re aiming for and will be able to tell when you’ve arrived. But then you need to focus your attention on the steps it will take to get there: on the process. Focusing on the outcome will actually decrease the likelihood of achieving your goal.

(3) They have an inability to identify juicy, enlivening, and expansive goals.

Maybe the real problem is a lack imagination. If the idea of setting goals seems dry and boring to the anti-goal folks, they’re probably not setting the right goals.  Maybe they haven’t yet determined what they really want and are still searching. They don’t understand that by undertaking challenges they can stretch their limits and expand their possibilities. They can learn just as much—if not more—than they can learn by meandering moment to moment.

If you do know what you want and have an idea about how to create more of that in your life, you’re likely to find working toward your goals exciting rather than tedious. Of course you won’t be excited about every single step and you won’t be excited every minute of every day. No one is. That’s where having a plan comes in handy. But if you’re not passionate about your desired outcome, let it go and find something else to work toward. Don’t throw out the entire concept of goals.

(4) They lack awareness about how the brain actually works.

Your brain is primed to create habits, but it is not primed to achieve goals. If you do the same thing, under the same circumstances, over and over again, it will become a habit. You will no longer need to focus conscious attention on it because your basal ganglia will have taken it over. Your brain loves repetition and routine. And the unconscious part of your brain actively resists change.

So if you want to change your status quo, which is what a goal is intended to do, you need to focus your conscious attention on completing the steps you’ve outlined until you’ve achieved it. Maintaining focus is not easy. It helps to have a plan that includes a means of measuring your results and rewarding yourself for your accomplishments. If you don’t get your brain to go along with your plan, your brain will get you to go along with its agenda. The unconscious part of your brain is much more interested in immediate gratification than it is in long-term satisfaction—which is why doing whatever you feel like doing in the moment is so appealing. Your brain is generally at the ready to divert your attention to any nearby bright, shiny objects. That means going with the flow is less a philosophical choice and more the path of least resistance of the unconscious part of your brain.

Don’t buy into the anti-goals rhetoric, even if you’ve had negative experiences with goals. Making effective use of goal-setting starts with knowing what you really want and making a commitment to go after it.

Benefits, Celebrations, and Rewards

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goldstar

Your brain is wired for survival—survival, that is, in the rough and tumble world of the savanna your ancestors roamed 2.5 million years ago. Part of the wiring for survival includes the reward pathway, the purpose of which is to help you remember and repeat activities that are good for you and remember and avoid activities that are bad—possibly even deadly.

Every cell in our brains—every moment of our mental lives—is intimately connected to entire history of life on this planet. —Ferris Jabr, Scientific American

As a case in point, the reward pathway is even older than we are; it evolved in worms and flies about a billion years ago.

Your brain’s reward system operates with or without your participation, which is why you can develop habits you don’t want to have that may be extremely difficult to change or stop. The most effective way to alter those habits, or any behavior you would like to change, is to make use of the reward system.

But maybe you think you don’t—or shouldn’t—need to reward yourself for doing what you want to do or what’s in your own best interest. Maybe you believe knowing what you want to do, why you want to do it, and how to do it is sufficient. You’re an adult, right? You have self-discipline and self-control. Or you can develop it. Rewards might be OK for young children. Or pets. But you don’t need them.

If that’s where you’re coming from, well, science does not support your position. It turns out all of us are hardwired to be “insatiable wanting machines.” If we don’t learn how to use the brain’s reward system, it will continue using us.

Gold Stars

I hand out a page of stickers to the clients in my Goals, Habits & Intentions course, and the reactions are always interesting. Some people love them and immediately figure out how to use them as rewards. Others hold onto them for weeks, wondering what to do with them. (“Why do I have these?”) Some have no problem connecting awarding themselves a sticker with getting a reward. Others go through the motions without making that connection.

Stars and stickers are obviously only one type of reward, but they’re easy to get and use and can provide a strong visual reinforcement, as I recently rediscovered.

There are four things I do early in the day and again near the end of the day. I can’t turn them into a routine for various reasons, so that’s not an option. They’re all things I want to do. No one told me I have to or should do them. But in the moment, at any given time, the unconscious part of the brain, which is focused on immediate gratification, can almost always find something more interesting or enjoyable for me to do.

I noticed that a lot of my self-talk was taken up with prevaricating about doing one or more of the four things. Should I do it now or later? OK, I’ll do it after [fill in the blank]. And as the day progressed, it would get easier and easier to not do something and then rationalize as to why that was acceptable. I was using a lot of conscious attention and getting mediocre results. Although I was doing these four things twice a day most of the time, I don’t want to do them most of the time. I want to do them all of the time.

Knowing what I know about how the brain works, I mentally slapped myself upside the head and got out a sheet of small but sparkly gold stars. I decided I would reward myself with one gold star after completing the four things in the morning and a second gold star when I completed them again at the end of the day. I apply the stickers to the small wall calendar in my bathroom where I also keep track of how much walking I do each day.

Instituting the gold star system has had two significant results:

  1. I have had zero incompletions, meaning I’ve been able to award myself all the gold stars I’ve been eligible to receive.
  2. My self-talk now serves to remind me what I have yet to do before I can get the next gold star. So instead of dithering about whether or not to do it, my self-talk serves to keep me on track.

My brain anticipates the dopamine hit I’m going to get from slapping that sticker on the calendar. And instead of having to make excuses for myself for why I haven’t done something, I get to acknowledge and enjoy the fact that I’m actually doing what I want to do.

Benefits Are Not Rewards

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.

But a benefit is not a reward. I get a different benefit from each of the four things I do as well as a general well-being type of benefit from doing all of them. One of the four things is a series of stretches that takes five minutes or so. The short-term benefit is I feel good during and after doing them. The long-term benefit is I’m more flexible and have less back and shoulder tension. I have to do the stretches consistently in order to get the long-term benefit. Giving myself a reward each time I do them helps me be consistent.

I already knew what the benefits were before I began using the gold stars, but that kind of knowledge has no impact on the brain’s reward system. Knowing the benefit of doing something takes place in the conscious part of the brain; the reward system operates at the unconscious level of the brain (remember the worms and flies?). The reward system isn’t logical; it’s functional.

Celebrations Aren’t Rewards, Either

In behavior-change terms, a celebration is an impromptu acknowledgement 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 something you really want (enjoy) and it needs to be identified ahead of time. What exactly will you get when you complete or accomplish the thing you set out to do?

I know my reward for doing that series of four things will be another gold star, so my brain pushes me to do what I need to do to get it because it craves it. (Sometimes my brain is a really cheap date.) And the more gold stars I accumulate, the stronger the craving becomes. If I were to spontaneously decide to treat myself to a movie or a glass of wine for earning the maximum number of gold stars in a week, it would be a celebration. If I planned to do it ahead of time, it would be a reward.

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. 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

Benefits, celebrations, and rewards are all rewarding to experience, but they serve different purposes in terms of motivation and incentive when it comes to effecting 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 be unwittingly reinforcing behaviors you don’t want.

When an Explanation Is the Booby Prize

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Trying to understand why we do the things we do—or fail to do the things we want or intend to do—is a deeply engrained habit of thought. It seems obvious. It feels useful. When our ancestors roamed the savanna, they had a practical reason for trying to determine cause-and-effect explanations for what was going on around them: survival. And there are plenty of domains and situations in modern life where it’s also important to determine cause and effect. On a personal scale, for example:

  • If I don’t shop for groceries, I won’t have any food to eat.
  • If I don’t leave enough space between my car and the one in front of me, and it stops suddenly, I’m likely to run into it.
  • When I eat too much citrus fruit, I get a rash.

Trying to come up with cause-and-effect explanations for our behavior is far less straightforward, but that doesn’t stop us. We think we can figure out why we do—or don’t do—the things we do. But we’ll never have access to all the necessary information since much of our behavior is initiated by the unconscious part of our brain.

We’re also under the illusion that having an explanation will make a difference. In fact having an explanation is so important to us that anything that seems to fit with our pre-existing beliefs will do, whether or not it’s accurate. Most of the time, we won’t be able to come up with a definitive explanation, and even if we did, so what? By itself, understanding something has no direct impact on our behavior.

Searching for an explanation for our behavior is often just a diversion from doing something about it. Sometimes we think we can’t take action until we after we figure out the why of what we’re doing or not doing.  As I said, this habit of thinking feels useful. It has that in common with rumination. Both habits of thought seem like problem-solving but are really mental distractions that keep us stuck.

In truth, when we set out to explain our actions, they are all post hoc explanations using post hoc observations with no access to unconscious processing. Not only that, our left brain fudges things a bit to fit into a makes-sense story. Explanations are all based on what makes it into our consciousness, but actions and the feelings happen before we are consciously aware of them—and most of them are the results of nonconscious processes, which will never make it into the explanations. The reality is that listening to people’s explanations of their actions is interesting—and in the case of politicians, entertaining—but often a waste of time. —Michael Gazzaniga, Professor of Psychology, UC Santa Barbara

Essentially an explanation is a story about how or why something happened or is the way it is. It may be more—or less—accurate, but it’s still a story. And it’s often a story about dysfunction. If we want to effect behavior change, we have to let go of the old story, anyway, and craft a new one. The only way we can make that happen is by focusing on what we’re doing instead of on what we think about what we’re doing.

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