Hacking My Brain [What am I getting out of this anyway? Rewards.]

In our ongoing discussion about building habits based on the Rubin model from Better than Before, we have figured out how to determine which of the four tendencies you fall into and what that can mean for your habit formation. Case in point, I am an OBLIGER and that means I need to insure there is plenty of outside accountability for me to be able to truly see my habits built successfully. We have also looked at why the concept of 'should' deserves to be shelved for the better part of your habit formation. Today, let's talk about ways you can help make your habits stick. You've chosen a habit, now you want to find a way to make it pleasurable (and thus repeatable) for you to do this habit on a regular basis. I'm here to tell you why it might not be the best idea to tie a reward to your habits.

It's a pretty easy thought to go from: I want to do something on a regular basis to I'll reward myself whenever I do what I'm thinking I'm supposed to do. Rewards are pretty ubiquitous. I do X, I get Y. If I keep doing X, then I keep getting Y. Y presumably being something that we want to get as often as possible. After all, it works with animals and children. You want to teach your dog to sit, you reward them whenever they sit so that they associate doing the thing with something pleasant and are thus more likely to do it again. Only then do you pair the command with the motion in order for them to make the connection between the command, the motion, and the reward. Dog training 101, right? Same with children, you want them to do something, you tell them they will get something out of it. It would seem this is pretty simple. Right?

Well, not completely.

On the surface, it is 1 and 1 makes 2. In practice, it's more like 1 and 1 makes 1. What actually happens is that we lose the motivation to do the action unless we're getting rewarded and the reward begins to lose its hold if we're achieving it too often. This on top of the fact of having to make a decision about rewarding ourselves (One of the things Rubin makes very clear is that the less decision making involved in our habits the better) create a perfect storm for the destruction of a habit instead of the creation of one. I hear you saying wait, that doesn't make sense. Consider this: children who is rewarded for coloring only color if they get rewarded whereas children who do not get rewarded for coloring will color much more frequently. Or perhaps you would rather the example from Daniel Pink's Drive in which creative thought processes for problem solving were actually inhibited by the introduction of a reward, in this case money. So what do you do?

It would be nice to say we're going to do a habit solely for the sake of the habit. That, in its purest form, should be why we're making changes to our habits in the first place because its good for us. However, if that just isn't going to fly and you want to use the reward model, consider a couple things:

1. Make the Reward Fit the Habit. All too often, we set up a reward which works directly against our good habit. Like if I lose ten pounds, I'll reward myself with chocolate cake. I've done something very healthy, so I'm going to give myself something unhealthy as a reward. When you look at it in black and white, that sounds crazy. Better to give yourself something in line with what you're trying to accomplish. I run consistently, I get new sneakers.

2. Know when you get your Reward. Automate the decision making process so that you're not trying to figure out whether or not you've earned your reward. Make it a milestone. For example, I lose ten pounds, I get a new dress. You have taken the decision making process away by connecting it to an external happening. This also cuts down on the desire to give yourself the reward without reaching the milestone which is much easier to do when you're just giving yourself a reward whenever you are performing the habit.

Those two criteria can help you to pick rewards and when to give them ahead of time so that you're not scrambling, but you're still able to reward your good behavior.

If you're interested in the ongoing saga of Hacking My Brain, make sure you subscribe to get your free short stories and to get the monthly newsletter including the posts I've written over the month.

Interested in seeing what I do with the rest of my life? Check out my books under the BOOKS tab. I have three full-length novels available as well as a book of shorts and one short story.

Hacking My Brain [Shoulding All Over Myself]

After reading THIS POST from February on Gretchen's blog, I realized I really do should all over myself. The phrase 'Don't Should All Over Yourself' came up in the comments and I think its apropos. How often do we say we should or shouldn't have done something when it comes to things that we want to do? I forget which chapter of procrastination expert Neil Fiore's book "The Now Habit" deals with the problem of Should (despite having listened to the audio book quite a number of times, I find the narration soothing) but it comes up as something that makes us feel bad. Whenever we tell ourselves we should or shouldn't do something, we're taking a model of perfection and overlying it on our now which is by default not perfect. It's just another way for us to end up not wanting to do anything because we can't reach that perfect person or situation. Case in point, as a writer, I should be able to write everyday. That RARELY happens for me. Not because I don't have the best intentions but because I, as a person, have a tendency to prioritize too many other things over my writing. (This is something I'm working on, slowly.)

Another thing I have a hard time with is managing my social calendar. I have friends, a number of them. They like to do things. I like to help them do things or at least go sit in the audience and be in awe of the things that they do. However, I'm also an introvert who needs a certain amount of me time in order to not be a triple A terrible human. Plus I recently started a job where my go time is between 6 and 730 in the morning, not conducive to late nights. Facebook events make me feel like I'm always missing something, mostly because I am. I'm choosing sleep over interaction on a lot of cases. But the missing of things I want to go to and can go to is the problem. Until recently, I didn't really do well managing my calendar. I had one calendar over here which I barely updated and Facebook events reminding me of something else over here and while I should have been able to manage those things and keep track of everything, I was failing miserably. So finally, in an effort to not be completely lost about what is going on I instituted the habit of updating my calendar on my phone whenever I agreed to do something. That automatically syncs to my IPad at home which is where I keep my writing schedule and workout schedule. Plus I have a handy wall calendar (yeah, analog) so that I can see the entire month and make sure I'm not overscheduling myself without realizing by saying yes to too many things.

If you know that should is not helping, how do you deal? Having expectations for yourself is a reality. They have to be phrased somehow. If 'should' doesn't work, what does? Fiore's book deals with procrastination, contrasting between the language of the producer and the language of the procrastinator. Procrastinators unfortunately set themselves up to feel the need to procrastinate through the use of 'should' messages. On the other hand, producers use different language to feel empowered to make decisions. Things like 'I am', 'I choose', or 'I will' communicate a sense of choice and a possibility of accomplishment. They are not panacea however. You can say these things as much as you like without moving forward to actually doing any of these things. Trust me, been there, tried that. You still have to do the work, not just make the choice to do the work.

One of my other favorite blogs, Nerd Fitness likes to point out that the exercise program of the most worth is the one that you do and stick with. It doesn't matter what your intentions are, it matters what you do. If you can't get yourself to the gym everyday, but can manage three days a week, stick with what works. Don't beat yourself up over the 'shoulds' of life. I recently started going to the gym and told myself I would go to the gym three times a week. So far, so good. I didn't tell myself I should because as far as I'm concerned going to the gym at all is an 'I should'. How many times I get there is dependent on the week. (I schedule three times a week, but if I don't make all of them, I don't hamstring myself.)

What's the current should weighing you down? Are you shoulding all over yourself in an attempt to work toward a goal? Would a change in vocabulary perhaps add the spark needed to move from 'I should' to 'I will'? Oh and if you're into Gretchen's podcast, you might listen to the Little Happier 'Don't Let the Perfect be the enemy of the Good' available now. I listened to it earlier at the gym, it is, as usual, a little ray of hope in my day.

Hacking My Brain [So What's an Obliger?]

Learning about the four tendencies as outlined in "Better Than Before" by Gretchen Rubin has offered me a new framework from which to think about my habit formation and how to get myself to do things on a regular basis. Like blogging for instance. I'm not a very good blogger. I have a tendency to forget about this thing for weeks at a time. Which means I never build up much of an audience. One of the keys to blog audience building is consistency. I occasionally flirt with the idea of just letting this thing fall by the wayside and not worrying about it anymore. However, I have things to say that I want to share, so I keep coming back to it.

What does being an Obliger have to do with any of this?

I'll repost the handy chart I made that gives you the four tendencies and their interactions with expectations.

As you can see from the chart, Obligers are the ones who do well with external expectation and poor with internal expectation. In short, I thrive when someone else expects me to do something and have a higher rate of failure when I, solo, expect me to do something. Case in point, blogging. I have attempted on several occasions to put myself on a self-imposed schedule for blogging in order to keep this blog up to date. Unfortunately, because of how I feel about internal expectation, which is to say I can disappoint me without there being really any consequences, that has not worked. On the flipside, I have no audience expecting me to come to them with pearls of wisdom (or even a possible witty comment) on a regular basis so that doesn't work either. No consequences, no one breathing down my neck to say that I should. Nothing. Now that we have defined the problem an obliger faces, how does one create a system of accountability by which one can do something like blogging without it being cumbersome and useless? I'm still working on this. There is a hashtag called #MondayBlogs on Twitter. In order to work on blog traffic, I want to participate in that as much as possible. Therefore, I need to have content to post. External activity helping to drive internal motivation. I want to blog. I just need some reason outside of myself to blog regularly. If I take part in #MondayBlogs, then I have to post a new blog post by Monday every week. Considering that Monday is currently my day off, that works out rather nicely. I can write the blog post before Monday. Edit it on Monday, and make sure that it gets posted to the interwebs by Monday afternoon in order to take part in the Monday blog traffic.

Let's look at another something I've done recently where I am running into what I call the 'Obliger Wall'. The Obliger Wall is the awareness that I want to do something, but my nature is working against me for some reason. My obliger nature is making it hard for me to create and hold onto the habit.

Recently, I started going to the gym, Planet Fitness. I've been trying to get my weight back under control for a while now and I'm more than a little disappointed in my progress. I actually started this journey last year only to end up 20lbs heavier over the course of a year than losing any real weight. Needless to say, this was a trend I really needed to head off before it got any worse. So gym membership, here I come. Problem: Going to the gym is not inherently something I feel inclined to do. I know why I need to. I feel the mild unhappiness with my body shape that prompts it, but I'm not exactly super motivated in spite of my shortcomings. In most cases, this is where I quit. I cancel the gym membership and I give up. Who cares if I look like a whale in a bathing suit but me, right? I'm falling back on the online option for group interaction in the Nerd Fitness Rebellion and Habitica (formerly HabitRPG). I've written about Nerd Fitness HERE and HabitRPG HERE. These are two of my favorite sites on the internet and they offer me a chance at accountability that I don't have in my regular life. Through my party occasionally asking me how things are going and opening up a daily battle log on Nerd Fitness, I've tried to set myself up for success. This is not to say that I get a lot of interaction from these places and no one is riding my coattails trying to get me to do anything, but the occasional how is this going, which requires me to formulate my thoughts into some kind of update (and feel bad if I haven't done anything toward my goal) has been very helpful. I'm in week four of going to the gym and seeing some positive improvement in my weight. So I guess it's working.

One thing I will point out though: Just because I'm an Obliger doesn't mean that I cannot work off of internal motivation. It simply means I have better success when I have external factors spurring me on. At the end of the day, no one cares if my books get finished, but me so the motivation has to come from within me. I don't have an agent or a publisher or even a favorite reader waiting for these things. It's all on me. If it sounds like I can't get myself to do things on my own without someone standing over me with a stick, that's just not true.

Hacking my Brain [The Four Tendencies]

As a writer, I do a fair bit of reading. Some of it I even find useful for more than just allowing me to procrastinate about doing more important things. One writer I find very interesting (interesting enough that I also subscribe to her podcast) is Gretchen Rubin. Gretchen is a lawyer turned writer who specifically deals with habits and how to create a happier life. I first read her book, The Happiness Project, on a plane returning from New York with my mother. I bought it in the airport when the dramatic YA novel I had been reading ran out. It was a sixteen dollar book at the magazine kiosk, but I didn't regret it. That book, in short, is about a year long experiment Gretchen did on herself in order to create a happier life. It started from a place of stagnation and dissatisfaction and moved toward making real strides to improve her circumstances without necessarily changing much of anything. To me, this was a novel idea. In my own mind, though I had never said it out loud, I considered happiness a product of things that happened to me as opposed to something that I could affect and control. This may be an unintended side product of my interactions with a bunch of therapists over the years who have emphasized how much my condition (Severe depression/Schizophrenia/Social Anxiety/Aspergers) is not my fault and just the reality of faulty brain chemistry. In a way, that set me up as the victim. After reading The Happiness Project, I decided maybe just blaming bad luck and poor genetics wasn't enough.

I liked the book so much I lent it out on multiple occasions and that's my it isn't on my bookshelf right now. I lent it out and never got it back. Oh well, as I always say with books, they are enriching someone's life wherever they are, so no hard feelings.

In my pursuit of improving my life, I started seeing a therapist who fully believes my life is under my control. The worst of the faulty brain chemistry has been corrected through medication and now I'm enjoying a happier and more fulfilled life thanks to someone believing it was possible for me. However, that's not enough. I recently started embarking on changing my life a little further by tackling my habits. Gretchen wrote another wonderful book called Better than Before about the science and strategies of habit formation. Of course, I had to read it and see what I could glean for the use in my own journey of habit formation. The first thing I learned was that just as there are different personalities, there are different tendencies when it comes to habit formation. I put together a handy little chart to be able to tell them apart.

Now as you can see, you can be one of four. I am actually an Obliger. I thought I might be an Upholder, but from looking at how I handle projects and inner expectations like food logging and portion control, I realize I have a real problem dealing with expectations I set for myself. Is it impossible for me to do the right thing if I don't have external expectations or someone hounding me? No, but things go much more smoothly for me when I consider that I have someone else I am influencing, impressing, or just accountable to. The biggest question is what does this mean for my writing? I am generally capable of finishing a writing task without someone breathing down my neck or a real deadline other than the one that I set on the calendar. On the flipside, I do so much better on things like NaNoWriMo because it gives me a lot of external accountability. Others are looking at my progress bar going: Has it turned purple yet? They're asking me about whether or not I'm writing today. All stuff that makes me feel like 'Ah man, I really need to be writing today'. I'm going to think on this some more and see if there are ways to create external accountability to get things done more quickly. It would be awesome if I could find a system to get me writing more with fewer days off. Look for that to be upcoming. I also have a progress report due on where we are in creating the next two books: Wielding His Scythe and Blades of Fate.

If you would like to check out Gretchen Rubin, try her blog/website at gretchenrubin.com. You can also find her podcast, Happier with Gretchen Rubin, through her website. If you want to find out your tendency, take the quiz found here.