What’s the number one obstacle that gets in the way of people successfully changing or creating habits or accomplishing their goals? No contest! Resistance to identifying and using rewards is the clear and consistent winner.
Given our culture’s obsession with happiness, you wouldn’t think incorporating rewards into the change process would be a problem. Well, at least I didn’t anticipate how much of a problem it would be.
I’ve heard a number of explanations for this often deeply entrenched resistance. The two most common explanations are:
- Accomplishing what I intended to do should be reward enough.
- I can’t really identify any rewards.
Are You Reward-Resistant?
You may believe that accomplishment should be its own reward, but your brain doesn’t necessarily see it that way—and it’s the way your brain sees it, not the way you do, that matters. Sure some activities and accomplishments are intrinsically rewarding, but that’s not the case for all activities. Rewards help your brain help you accomplish the things you set out to do and turn desirable behaviors into habits. You can read more about how this works in Food, Sex, Drugs, Rock ‘n’ Roll, and Habits.
Apart from it not being true, believing that everything should be intrinsically rewarding might be making it difficult for you to identify the rewards you’re currently getting. That’s why explanation number one and explanation number two often go hand-in-hand.
Most things you find rewarding (pleasant or enjoyable) can be used as rewards. So once you understand that rewards are rewarding, you can probably make a list of potential rewards. However, you might encounter another common obstacle: But I just do those things whenever I feel like it. That’s precisely the problem, and the result is that you may be rewarding yourself for behaviors you don’t want to perpetuate—thus actively perpetuating them—or for not accomplishing what you set out to do. It doesn’t matter whether or not that’s your intention. Unless they’re backed up by persistent action, your intentions (or lack thereof) and your opinions aren’t remotely interesting to your brain.
What Not to Do
Turning rewarding activities into rewards may seem unnatural at first. Say you decide your reward for completing a task will be to attend a movie, but you don’t complete the task. The way to get your brain to take you seriously is to not go to the movie. But it’s easy to rationalize why you should go to the movie anyway, especially if you made plans to go with other people. So it isn’t a good idea to set up rewards that involve other people, at least while you’re getting the hang of the reward process.
And don’t set something up as a reward if you know you’re going to do it no matter what. A reward needs to be something genuinely pleasurable—something you’ll miss if you don’t get to do it or have it—but not something you’re already committed to.
System 1 (the unconscious) is the impulsive part of the brain. It’s focused on immediate gratification, on what feels good right now. The more frequently you give in to the impulses of System 1, especially when you’re trying to implement a reward system, the longer it will take to be successful. Accomplishing long-term or even short-term goals and changing or creating new habits requires persistence and repetition—as well as restraint, which is a function of System 2.
Some of my clients are more successful than others at identifying and using rewards. Those who are successful are willing to engage in the trial and error process until they discover something that works. When you hit on the right combination, you might discover that rewards aren’t just effective, they can make even tedious projects fun. Here’s a great example, and one you can use as a blueprint for your own goals, projects, or habits.
Will Declutter for Plants
One of my clients has undertaken a major decluttering project in her home. This is a project she’s been attempting to complete for a while, so she’s tried many different approaches and strategies. Some were successful temporarily but not over the long haul. Others didn’t work at all.
But the system she’s using now seems perfect—not only because she has the reward piece figured out, but also because it’s based on acknowledging, rather than minimizing, baby steps.
For each 15-minute period of time she devotes to her decluttering project, she enters a checkmark into her daily planner. That provides her with immediate gratification (a hit of dopamine) and helps her keep track of her progress. For each checkmark in the planner, she puts one dollar into a jar, which gives her another hit of dopamine. The jar is clear glass and it’s in a prominent location so she can see the accumulating cash.
When she has enough money in the jar, she buys plants, which provides a bigger hit of dopamine at the time of the purchase and smaller hits when she sees the plants in her living space afterward. One thing that makes this reward system work is that she doesn’t allow herself to buy a plant unless she’s got enough funds for it in the jar. The system would break down if she spent money on plants that she hadn’t yet “earned.” Another thing that makes it work is the fact that the plants add to the pleasant ambiance her decluttering is intended to create in her home.
I think it’s pretty genius.
What do you think?
She’s hardly unique in her compulsion to chase squirrels. We all do it, and we all rationalize it, too. We have great, sometimes elaborate, explanations and justifications for why chasing some particular squirrel was absolutely, positively essential at the time we went after it. We don’t all chase the same squirrels, but most of the time our explanations for why we’re chasing our particular cute, furry rodents are highly fictionalized. So I give her kudos for paying attention and recognizing the cost.