Rewarding yourself can backfire. If you tell yourself, “I’ll only listen to my favorite podcast while I’m at the gym,” it takes just one moment of weakness to realize you can cheat and listen to it any time you want. Instead, try this: Reward yourself with something that has no enjoyment value whatsoever. Like a checkmark on your calendar.
I first heard this tip from writer Tim Clare’s podcast. If you want to stay motivated, he says, the reward has to be so crappy that you’re not actually working for the reward. He said that he puts a checkmark on his calendar every day he writes, and at the end of the week enough checkmarks earn a gold star. The same approach has worked for me and for others. I have to admit: Buying myself a pack of stickers is embarrassingly motivating.
Why stickers work better than “real” rewards
Tim Clare likes the theory that this works because of cognitive dissonance: We have to change something major (our behavior) to earn something that’s not valuable (a sticker), so we try to resolve that dissonance by deciding we value the behavior change. The crappy extrinsic reward strengthens our sense that the new habit is intrinsically valuable.
And as my colleague Meredith Dietz has written, experts believe that the secret to lasting motivation lies in our intrinsic goals. Engaging in healthy behaviors like exercise only works if we’re doing those behaviors for their own sake, not because we’re enduring our gym time as a means to an end. Extrinsic rewards like streaks and badges can gamify this process so addictively that we lose sight of why we’re actually doing it in the first place. Note that I’m not saying you should chase streaks; I’m thinking more like literal stickers on a piece of paper, or a note in your phone where you write down how many miles you ran this week.
Another type of ineffective reward is the real-life splurge: promising you’ll treat yourself to something (a dessert, a clothing purchase) once you hit a certain goal. Here’s the problem: If you hate exercising so much that you need a bribe to do it at all, you’re quickly going to find a way to have the reward without the work. There’s nothing actually stopping you from listening to that “gym only” podcast at home, or ordering yourself the new outfit you had earmarked as a reward for when you make it through the couch to 5K program.
What do you think so far?
Using a crappy reward works because it just reflects your existing motivation back on itself. You check off today’s work, not because the checkmark is valuable in itself, but because the checkmark reminds you that you kept a promise to yourself. There’s a thrill to closing that loop, and those little wins really build your self-efficacy. In self-efficacy theory, small wins boost your motivation to keep working toward bigger goals.
The best part of using stickers or checkmarks is that it’s pointless to cheat. What are you going to do—lie to yourself when you didn’t actually go to the gym? But building up that row of numbers or stickers becomes its own reward. You’re really just rewarding yourself with the satisfaction of having stuck to your habit.