Rewarding yourself can backfire. If you tell yourself, “I'll only listen to my favorite podcast while I'm at the gym,” it only takes one moment of weakness to realize that you can cheat and listen to it any time you want. Instead, try this: Reward yourself with something that has no pleasure value. Like a tick on a calendar.
I first heard this advice from Podcast by writer Tim Clare. If you want to stay motivated, he says, the reward should be so lousy that you don't actually work for the reward. He said he checks his calendar every day he writes, and at the end of the week, if he ticks enough boxes, he gets a gold star. The same approach has worked for me and for others. I have to admit: buying a pack of stickers is very motivating.
Why Stickers Work Better Than “Real” Rewards
Tim Clare likes the theory that it works because cognitive dissonance: We need to change something important (our behavior) to earn something useless (a sticker), so we try to resolve this dissonance by deciding that we value behavior change. A crappy extrinsic reward reinforces our sense of the intrinsic value of a new habit.
And like my colleague Meredith Dietz wroteExperts believe that the secret to sustainable motivation lies in our internal goals. Healthy behaviors like exercise only work if we do them for their own sake, not because we tolerate time in the gym as a means to an end. External rewards like stripes and badges can gamify the process so much that we lose sight of why we're actually doing it. Note that I'm not saying you should chase streaks; I'm talking more about literal stickers on a piece of paper or a note in your phone where you write down how many miles you've run this week.
Another type of ineffective reward is spending money in real life: promising to treat yourself to something (dessert, buying clothes) once you reach a certain goal. Here's the problem: if you hate working out so much that you need a bribe to do it at all, you'll quickly find a way to get the reward without putting in the effort. There's really nothing stopping you from listening to that “gym-only” podcast at home or ordering that new outfit you've earmarked as a reward for when you make it to the 5K while sitting on the couch.
What are your thoughts so far?
Using a crappy reward works because it simply reflects your existing motivation back to yourself. You check off today's work not because the checkmark is valuable in itself, but because it reminds you that you kept your promise to yourself. Closing the loop feels good, and these small victories really boost your self-efficacy. IN self-efficacy theorySmall victories increase your motivation to keep working towards big goals.
The best part about using stickers or checkmarks is that there is no point in cheating. What are you going to do, lie to yourself when you didn't actually go to the gym? But creating that row of numbers or stickers becomes a reward in itself. In reality, you are simply rewarding yourself with the satisfaction of sticking with your habit.
