Why Rewarding Yourself May Be a Bad Idea
Gretchen Rubin
6x NYT Bestselling Author | Host of the "Happier with Gretchen Rubin" Podcast | Order "Life in Five Senses," out now in paperback
I’m doing a video series in which I discuss the various strategies that we can use for habit-formation.
Habits are the invisible architecture of everyday life, and a significant element of happiness. If we have habits that work for us, we’re much more likely to be happy, healthy, productive, and creative.
My forthcoming book, Better Than Before, describes the multiple strategies we can exploit to change our habits. To pre-order, click here. (Pre-orders give a real boost to a book, so if you’re inclined to buy the book, I’d really appreciate it if you pre-order it.)
Here, I talk about the Strategy of Rewards. I have to say, this is one of trickiest aspects of habits. There’s definitely a place for reward, but we have to think about it very carefully.
Rewarding good behavior sounds like a sensible idea—on the surface. But rewards have very complex consequences.
Rewards can actually undermine habits, so if I want to make a habit, I must use rewards in a very careful, limited way. It’s ironic: studying the Strategy of Reward means studying why we should mostly avoid using reward.
Have you ever had an experience where you rewarded yourself for cultivating a good habit, and then it backfired? Or have you successfully used a reward to take yourself deeper into a habit?
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Gretchen Rubin is the author of the blockbuster New York Times bestsellers, The Happiness Project and Happier at Home. She writes about happiness and habit-formation (the subject of her next book, Better Than Before) at gretchenrubin.com. Follow her here by clicking the yellow FOLLOW button, on Twitter, @gretchenrubin, on Facebook, facebook.com/GretchenRubin.
Photo: englishme community, Flickr
Market Researcher at Pharmaceutical Solutions Industry
9 年Aha...rewarding yourself is like self-praise. So, without being selfish, why not think of others, let your ego diminish, and appreciate others and reward them.
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9 年Merci de votre mail Meilleures salutations
Small Business Owner / Entrepreneur
9 年The right way is to reward the process not just at the finish line and only when there is a predetermined, measurable, incremental improvement that exceeds the previous level of performance (i.e., running 1 mile in 8 minutes gets a reward but doing the same again gets nothing). Also, for humans, "physical cookies" & yoga mats are not the ideal rewards--emotional "cookies" e.g., feelings of success, enlightenment, peace, freedom, safety (either by self imagination or outside praise) would be better (maybe those marker coloring kids desire for physical "cookies" plateaued after a few belly aches fulls but with a systematic reward system based on their individual emotional "wants," eventually they could be producing even replicas of "masterpieces"). This explains why you do a lot of things already (putting on seatbelts automatically gives you the positive feeling of perhaps safety) But if you want to do something bigger, deeper, (masterpieces) plan to use a system of incremental rewards. And if you want them to be addicted to a new habit, you might want to investigate using a randomized reward schedule.