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R Is for Rewards

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Your brain enjoys rewards so much that it actually has a whole system devoted to them. The neurotransmitter dopamine—sometimes referred to as the pleasure chemical—is part of the reward system. It’s released both when you experience a reward and when you expect to experience one. As the release of dopamine fills you with feelings of pleasure, your brain associates those feelings with whatever you just did or ingested. It’s called associative conditioning.

That association is the basis of the brain’s reward system, the purpose of which is to ensure your survival by helping you learn and remember the behaviors and substances that are good for you. Many different substances, activities, and behaviors trigger the release of dopamine. Some of them, in addition to food and sex, are:

  • social interactions
  • music
  • generosity
  • scary movies, scary situations, or scary thoughts
  • psychoactive drugs (alcohol, cocaine, heroin, nicotine, etc.)
  • gambling
  • sugar
Your Brain Runs on Rewards

For the most part, your brain’s reward system functions automatically without your conscious intervention. You probably don’t pay a lot of attention to it other than being aware that some things are a lot more pleasurable than others, and of course you want to engage in the behaviors or ingest the substances that are pleasurable.

While you may have no problem thinking of some experiences as rewarding, you might be ambivalent—or worse—about using rewards intentionally to help you modify your own behavior. As a being with a prefrontal cortex, you may think you aren’t susceptible to rewards the way your puppy is. Or you might be under the impression you shouldn’t need to use rewards. You should just be able to make up your mind to do something and then do it.

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. 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 you don’t learn how to use the brain’s reward system, it will continue having its way with you.

Let’s say you want to begin a new habit. If there are no rewards, or weak rewards, habits are much less likely to take hold. That’s because the basal ganglia, which is the part of the brain that turns repetitive behaviors into habits, depends on having enough dopamine to operate efficiently.

I hand out pages of stickers to the clients in my Goals, Habits & Intentions course. 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.

A reward is positive reinforcement. It motivates you to repeat the behavior. In the case of long-term goals, small hits of dopamine encourage you to keep moving forward, so it pays to know where you are headed. And it works better to acknowledge and celebrate each small accomplishment along the way (often a sticker will do) than to wait for one big jolt of dopamine at the end (an entire spa day).

Benefits Are Not Rewards

If there were no benefit to you for embarking on a particular course of action, 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 you identify benefits via the conscious part of your brain, and rewards are processed by the unconscious.

Celebrations Are Not Rewards

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:

  1. The reward needs to be something you really want (enjoy).
  2. The reward needs to be identified ahead of time: what exactly will you get when you complete or accomplish the thing you set out to do?
  3. You also need to follow through and actually give yourself the reward. (You might not think this needs to be stated, but it does.)
Using Rewards = Using Your Brain

You may believe that accomplishment should be its own reward, but your brain doesn’t 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.

Because your brain’s reward system operates with or without your participation, you can develop habits you don’t want to have that may be extremely difficult to change or stop. And while the conscious part of the brain is certainly better at many things than the unconscious part of the brain is, the reverse is also true. When it comes to modifying behavior, the smartest thing the conscious part of the brain can do is recognize the value of the reward system—and learn how to use it effectively.

Part of the series A-Z: An Alphabet of Change.

Reward Stickers
and the End of Civilization

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A+ grownup

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.

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.

Patience: Learn to Play the Waiting Game

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Patience (New York Public Library)
Patience (New York Public Library)

Whatever it is we want, we want it right now! We are primed for immediate results and instant gratification to a greater extent than we have ever been before. Remember when we had to travel to a theater to see a movie—and we could only see it at certain scheduled times? Wasn’t it great when we could rent or buy VHS tapes or DVDs and watch them in the convenience and comfort of our own homes? Netflix made that even easier by sending DVDs to us in the mail. We only had to travel as far as the mailbox to pick them up. Now streaming a movie is just one of many things we can do instantly. Only a quarter of Netflix customers opt for receiving their movies in the mail. Imagine: by comparison to live streaming, overnight mail delivery of DVDs requires delaying gratification.

The expectation of immediate results comes with a decrease in impulse control and a low tolerance for delays. We don’t want to wait in line—any line. In fact, some of us will pay quite a bit of money to avoid waiting in line. We don’t want to wait to get an appointment. We don’t want to wait for a page on the internet to load. We don’t want to wait for a store or business to open. We don’t want to wait till after dinner to have dessert. We don’t want to wait till we have enough money before we buy something. We don’t want to wait more than two days to have a purchase delivered.

And we are famously unwilling to turn down a smaller reward today in exchange for receiving a bigger reward later.

Getting something we want activates the release of dopamine in the brain. What we really want are those hits of dopamine. After repeated instances of instant gratification, impatience becomes a habitual response. In essence, our brain rewards us for being impatient. But while instant gratification obviously feels good in the moment, it isn’t conducive to the carrying out of long-range plans or the completion of long-term projects. It isn’t conducive to turning down the smaller reward today in order to wait for the bigger one tomorrow—or a year from now.

Impatience does have a place. There are lots of things in life that are not worth waiting for, worth putting up with, or worth spending time and attention on. But the part of our brain that rewards us for instant gratification—the unconscious—doesn’t make distinctions. It’s a stimulus-response machine. Making distinctions requires conscious attention.

Knowing when to delay gratification and being able to control the impulse to go for the immediate reward are crucial to the success of any type of venture—from starting up a business to maintaining an exercise program to cleaning out the garage to completing a course of study. But the strategic application of patience can improve the quality of life for anyone, no matter what their situation.

Giving in to the desire for instant gratification can lead to a short-attention-span theater approach to life, where we’re merely skimming the surface of things, of experiences, and even of other people.

Just because you have looked at something doesn’t mean that you have seen it. Just because something is available to vision does not mean that it is available instantly to consciousness. –Jennifer L. Roberts, Harvard Magazine

Being patient means being willing and able to wait for something instead of hopscotching from one thing to another. Being patient means giving something our full attention, which allows for a deeper and fuller immersion in whatever it is we’re involved in. Patience helps us stay focused on the goal, the prize, the long-term result we’re aiming for. Patience and clarity go hand-in-hand because a busy mind that’s hooked on hits of dopamine is not a peaceful, calm, or clear mind.

So if you find yourself having to wait for something—traffic, a line in a supermarket, equipment at the gym, the food you ordered in a restaurant—use these small opportunities to develop the patience you’ll need in order to accomplish the bigger, more meaningful things in your life.

[NOTE: This post is the fourth in a series. See also When the Going Gets Grueling, Fortitude: Don’t Leave Home Without It, and Focus: Keep Your Eyes on the Prize.]Enhanced by Zemanta

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