Introduction
Sticking to habits has several components to it, however, people often neglect this one. Habit rewards are one of the best ways to stick and create new habits using positive reinforcement. If you struggle with habit triggers and cues, rewards is much easier to do than them
This is mainly because rewards are supposed to be enjoyable. For triggers and cues, the friction is much larger and prevents us from doing the habits. However, habit rewards are literally meant to be enjoyable, an activity you want to do
So, without further ado, let’s get into it
The Psychology Behind Habit Rewards: What Drives Us
The first step of using habit rewards is understanding how they work. Let’s use the example of watching Netflix for this. When you watch Netflix, the pleasure center of your brain is triggered. This pleasure center is telling you that what you’re doing is enjoyable, giving you a motivation to do it again, and again.
The chemical that this pleasure center releases is one we’ve all heard of, dopamine. Dopamine is released upon finishing a certain task. For instance, going back to the Netflix example, our pleasure center releases dopamine after we watch Netflix, giving us great pleasure. The release of dopamine is what motivates you to keep doing the same activity because you’ll want to go back to the dopamine highs.
Dopamine overall is an important concept to explain and could have a whole article dedicated to it. For now, the sufficient definition is that dopamine is what motivates you to do a task over and over again. This can be a powerful tool when paired up with habits because you’ll want to do the habits in order to get your dopamine fix .
Habit Reward Systems for Productivity: Finding What Works for You
Picking rewards for your habits is important because you don’t want to pick something you could do before the habit. However, you don’t want to pick something that you don’t care about. This isn’t as big a problem when you’re first starting out a habit, however, most people pick habit rewards that are unhealthy over a long term, which should be overall avoided. When you start habits out though, it’s better to do this unhealthy thing with a healthy habit at least.
There are two types of rewards you can use. There’s intrinsic rewards (personal satisfaction) and external rewards (outside satisfaction).The main intrinsic reward is finding interest in the work you do, you will never gain intrinsic rewards if you’re doing stuff you hate. My recommendation for this is to make your deep work focused on stuff you like doing in order to boost your productivity and motivation. You will naturally be drawn to your work if you find growth in doing it.
The other type of habit rewards, external rewards, is effective in the short term. However, as you progress in the habit farther, external rewards become useless if you don’t enjoy the habit. External rewards are also very effective if you need to get a goal done quickly. For example, if you have a goal of running 30 seconds faster in 3 days, using external rewards to motivate yourself is more effective than intrinsic. Some examples of external rewards include associating a habit with watching Netflix, having a small snack, or playing a game. It doesn’t matter what you associate the habit with, just as long as you enjoy the reward.
Setting Up an Effective Habit Rewards System
This section will focus primarily on intrinsic rewards. This is mainly because long term systems work much better with intrinsic rewards. However, it is possible to have a long term external reward system, albeit its much rarer.
The best intrinsic reward to set up long term are milestones/personal goals that you can hit often. For example, let’s say I want to get more followers, I could make the goal to be gaining 10 followers by the end of the week. This keeps you motivated and on track with your work, and allows you to become more productive in your work. Another example could be to study for your math final at least 40 minutes every week. It’s a simple goal and is not that hard to achieve, yet it goes a long way in your main primary goal of passing your math final
Another key part of an effective habit rewards system is consistency in your habit. Consistency is what makes or breaks a habit, if you can’t do it consistently, then you won’t be able to do it at all. Setting up milestones/personal goals helps make you more consistent when you set your goal to be more consistent. For example, If I only meditate once a week, my goal for next week should be to meditate twice. Then after that 3 times, and 4 times the week after, etc.
Evaluating and Tweaking Your Habit Rewards Over Time
Habit rewards can always change, and keeping your rewards constant could hold you down. For example, if your reward is longer than the actual habit, over time, once you get more consistent, you should cut the time down. This is primarily because you can’t have your reward be too fun, since you’ll just skip doing the habit to cut to the reward. So, if you find yourself sometimes just skipping the habit to do the reward, it’s time to switch it.
Along with assessing whether it’s too fun, you need to assess whether it’s not fun enough. For example, if right after meditating my reward is to read a book, even though reading is fun, most people just aren’t motivated by that. A bad reward leads to no consistency since you have no reason to do the habit, and often you’ll start becoming inconsistent in the habit and we know what happens after. So, if you find that a reward is not fun enough, then you should change it as soon as you can. The longer you keep a boring reward, the worse and more inconsistent you get with the habit.
Switching up your Habit Rewards to Keep it Fun
My final suggestion for tweaking up your habits is to change them every once in a while. Over time, what starts out fun can become boring for us. For example, if my reward is to watch a show, after a while it might just end up boring for me since I’ve been watching it everyday. Therefore, to keep yourself consistent on the habit and to keep enjoying the reward, you should switch up the reward. Back to the show example, I might decide to switch it with playing a game as the reward. Now, I keep the show fun for when I want to watch it, and I take a fun game and associate it with a habit I want to become consistent in.
Conclusion
Habit rewards are an integral part of building new habits, and becoming consistent in them. The best habit rewards come from intrinsic rewards where you enjoy the habit itself, and use that as the motivation. However, external rewards (like watching a show) can be useful when you first start doing a habit. In the end, whichever method you pick, you should make sure it’s at perfect fun levels, and you should switch it up when it gets boring.
Most importantly, you need to remember that
Nothing changes if nothing changes
