Habits and Rewards
Forming good habits is a lasting way to change your life.
Why habits?
Stephen King is one of the most prolific writers of our time. How has he managed to write more than 60 novels, and sell more than 400 million copies? Consistent and sustainable effort. As he recounted in “On Writing,” the vast majority of his books weren’t the result of 16-hour sprints. He follows one rule: to write for 4 hours a day, every day, no exceptions, like a stream carving out a canyon through hard rock.
You likely agree that exercise, healthy eating, a consistent sleep schedule, and reading every day are all things we should be doing, and probably benefit the rest of our activities indirectly.
I hear you. Counterpoint: TV
Waking up an hour early to get a run in? Gross. It’s raining. How about some hot chocolate instead? Now add a fuzzy blanket and some X-Files.
If only we had someone around to say hey man, I know it’s raining outside, and you’re not even sure you want to get into this whole cardio thing. But I’m gonna make it worth your while. Go do that run for me, and you can watch as much X-Files as you want.
Ok, sounds pretty good. But what if I’m a good little optimizer, and I want to form as many habits as possible in as short a time as possible, without burning myself out and falling off the wagon of every last thing in an endless loop? And what if I don’t want to run every day: I just want to run two days a week, and go to the gym the other two, and maybe do hot yoga the other two? It sucks keeping track of all this stuff every day! And another thing! If I’m being rewarded with endless X-Files, how am I going to have time for anything beyond exercise and X-Files?
Basically, use rewards (read on), and get organized (next post).
Use rewards
Now for the juicy part - and I mean that literally in the context of rewarding brain chemicals. For your typical person, running or writing a novel is not intrinsically rewarding, or at least it is less intrinsically rewarding than playing Skyrim.
Until it becomes an automatic habit, you must reward yourself for doing it! This may sound a lot like operant conditioning! This can be thought of very similarly to reinforcement learning. Put it to work for yourself and change your life.
Suppose you don’t do this. Your determination and willpower will take a day (or week) off, and sure - maybe you’ll get back on the bus, sooner or later. But relying on your own grit and available mind space is going to take longer, at best. It will leave you with less daily energy to apply to other things! Your work, hobbies, relationships, other habits - everything will suffer just a little bit. At worst, you’ll find yourself in an endless cycle of trying to start running; things go well for a week, and then you burn yourself out with your enthusiasm, and then start all over again.
Rewarding good behaviors
So, what’s the mechanism we use here?
First, you have to come up with a set of rewards for yourself. What’s your favorite thing to do? This can range from eating sugary treats, playing video games, to reading manga, to watching TV, to reading books, to reading about your favorite hobby, to playing a musical instrument, to cooking, and even to things like running and going to the gym, if that’s a habit you’ve already formed. Whatever it happens to be, set those things aside as rewards.
Now, every time you clear an item off of your daily to-do list, you reward yourself (more details on automating this process in later posts). These rewards start out small (1-5 minutes). As previously mentioned, you don’t want to spend your whole day watching TV as a nice reward for flossing in the morning.
As more items are completed, the rewards grow. As your willpower is depleted throughout the day, you’ll find yourself making excuses not to tackle the next item on your list. Rewards grow throughout the day to counteract this effect, and keep you forming your habits for longer.
Individual caveats
It is important to recognize that every individual has limits, which vary from person to person. Perhaps your work is particularly demanding, or your health has gotten away from you. Taking this into account, you should increase the amount of rewards you get for completing your tasks, and/or decrease the amount you’re trying to accomplish. If you stick to it, habits will become more automatic, requiring less mental energy, and the amount of reward you need to keep it up will decrease over time. Now you have extra energy for the day. If you find yourself at the end of the day with plenty of extra energy, add a new habit, or deepen the goals for an existing one. As I alluded to earlier, perhaps you can instead convert an automatic habit you particularly enjoy (e.g. going for a run) into a reward. One can imagine this can have a compounding effect.
It’s helpful to me to categorize all kinds of habits as how “drug-like” they are. E.g., bingeing TV or video games, alcohol and caffeine intake, etc. These are things that you will necessarily gain (at least) a psychological tolerance to, and withdraw from if you stop. If these are minimized, not only do you have more time for other opportunities, but, anecdotally at least, I find I gain a greater mental acuity. I believe this is due to a greater amount of active dopamine receptors in the brain. Flood the brain with dopamine via various drug-like activities, and to achieve homeostasis, the brain will reduce the amount of receptors to that particular reward. Tolerance to drug-like things is your brain’s way of normalizing rewards.
If you actively minimize drug-like behaviors, this normalization will happen in the opposite direction, and instead of becoming like the typical drug addict for which normal life holds no interest, normal life will be intensely interesting! In this way, you have an innate motivation to seek rewards, and these rewards feel more rewarding! Conversely, we have “negative drugs,” otherwise known as healthy living: exercise, healthy eating, and the like. Forming such habits will give you this same innate motivation.
Minimize all fun? Not so fast
The willful optimizing reader may say: why not completely eliminate anything drug-like, and only live in a completely healthy fashion?
I don’t think the brain is designed to work this way; that is, with no rewards, or constant rewards. The brain’s reward system is greedy. It always seeks to maximize rewards experienced, with as minimal effort as possible - unless there is a system in place to prevent this, e.g. a moral system, a value system, and their physical realizations/extensions. One may argue that these kinds of systems and organizations (personal principles, one’s religion, political beliefs, family, the workplace) are simply different sources of rewards, with social or biological foundations themselves. Aside from a good book waiting for you at the end of the day, your reward may be seeing your values play out in the world, your children succeeding in their endeavors, flourishing relationships, a successful career, etc.
These sorts of things are intrinsic, and typically good and healthy. One may argue that if an individual has found sustainable ways to achieve all of these kinds of long-term rewards, they’re pretty much set for life. Maybe this is how many define success! But, perhaps you’re not quite there yet to a sustainable, satisfying life. If you were satisfied and sustained, you probably wouldn’t be reading this article. Let’s continue with the assumption that you want to make a change.
Balance in all things
Often these day-to-day, external, intrinsic rewards compete with other rewards in your life for your attention. It is not easy to encapsulate these kinds of rewards and use them as a treat for going out for a run. Furthermore, if you are not intentionally giving yourself a controllable kind of nugget in exchange for “going for a run,” or whatever your goal habit may be, and doing so in a repeated, organized manner, your goal habits are all but guaranteed to fall by the wayside, and be consumed by more intrinsically rewarding things (drug-like things and base instinct).
Maybe that’s not so bad, depending on what your goals may be. For the purposes of this article, we’ll assume you have a goal that is not intrinsically rewarding up front, as happens to be the case with many worthwhile things.
Going back to our question: why not completely eliminate anything drug-like, and only live in a completely healthy fashion? Because if the nugget waiting for you on the other side of your task or goal isn’t juicy enough, you’re not going to form that habit. You’re not going to train your brain the way you consciously desire, it will be trained by other, external factors. Too juicy, and risk being consumed by your reward. Not juicy enough, and risk being consumed by external factors and making no habitual progress.
Play this balancing act with care; I recommend linearly ramping down rewards (starting high)/ ramping up your habit demands (starting low) until it’s just a little hard - then maintaining this challenge level for awhile, seeing that you don’t burn out, before making further perturbations.
See the next article, on using CoachRL to put the above into action, here.
See the articles in this series here.