Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives (19 page)

Paradoxically, I find that a brief period of distraction can sometimes help me avoid being distracted. When I'm trying to focus for a long time, it's helpful to take brief, refreshing breaks (emphasis on the
brief
). When a friend gets stuck, she juggles. “It's the perfect break,” she explained. “It's fun, it's active, it takes a lot of concentration, yet it's mindless. And I can't do it for very long, so my break can't be very long.”

I realized I have a habit like that myself, which I'd been treating as a bad habit, but it's not a
bad
habit, it's a
good
habit—my habit of wandering through the library stacks to look at whatever titles catch my eye. I love doing this, and I've found a surprising number of good books this way. I'd always considered it an inefficient use of time, but actually it was a perfect distraction.

The fact is, I can't write for three hours straight, or for even forty-five minutes. I need a lot of breaks. It's a Secret of Adulthood: To keep going, I sometimes need to allow myself to stop.

The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson,
“New England Reformers”

I
'd been practicing meditation for several months without a single day off, and I no longer felt slightly ridiculous as I lowered myself onto my cushion every morning. For the most part, though, I didn't see any change in myself, and that five minutes of meditation was becoming more frustrating and boring. One morning, after I'd settled myself into position and set the alarm on my phone, I had a powerful urge to stand right back up.

I didn't, but my attempts at an empty mind that morning were foiled by my reflections about why I hadn't jumped up. I sat in the early-morning light, not meditating, thinking about my habit. I was sticking with it for two reasons. First, I knew I shouldn't break a good habit on a whim.
Decide, then don't decide.
Second, because I'd made a habit of meditating, skipping the meditation would make me feel as though I'd started the day on the wrong foot. This is the power of habit—the iron that helps bind me to my good habits, and to my bad habits, as well.

Maybe meditating was changing me imperceptibly. Maybe my struggle to meditate showed just how much I needed meditation. Maybe if I stuck to it, I'd experience a breakthrough.
Or maybe not.

As an Upholder, an argument like “You've been so diligent, take a day off!” didn't really tempt me. But I did briefly think, “Maybe I should give myself a reward for sticking with meditation.” That line of thought seemed dangerous for some reason, but I didn't know why. Wasn't a reward a good way to keep myself motivated?

And so on, and so on until, with relief, I heard the “crickets” alarm go off, and I could stand up.

This train of thoughts, plus a brief conversation with a friend, made me focus on the issue of reward—and its risks. My friend announced, “I've been dieting, but the minute I hit my goal weight, I'm going to reward myself with a luscious slice of chocolate cake.” Even beyond the obvious fact that her plan seemed to undermine the whole purpose of the diet, this struck me as a bad idea. But why?

The Strategy of Reward is a very familiar and popular method to encourage good behavior. It's so familiar and popular, in fact, that it's easy to assume it's effective. Go for a run, have a beer.

But do habits work like that? Rewarding good behavior sounds like a sensible idea—
on the surface
. But
the more I thought about rewards
—about the research I'd read, and more importantly, what I'd observed in people's behavior—the more skeptical I became. As explored by writers such as Alfie Kohn in
Punished by Rewards
and Daniel Pink in
Drive
, rewards have very complex consequences.

In fact, I eventually concluded, rewards can actually be
dangerous
for habit formation. If I want to make a habit, I must use rewards in a very careful, limited way. I noted the irony: studying the Strategy of Reward meant studying why we should mostly
avoid
using reward.

A reward obstructs habit formation, for three reasons.

First, a reward teaches me that I wouldn't do a particular activity for its own sake, but only to earn that reward; therefore, I learn to associate the activity with an imposition, a deprivation, or suffering. This well-documented—but too often ignored—consequence of rewards relates to the difference between outer and inner motivation.

We're
extrinsically motivated
when we do an activity to get an external reward (a carrot) or to avoid an external punishment (a stick); we're
intrinsically motivated
when we pursue an activity for its own sake. Drawing on intrinsic motivation makes us far more likely to stick to a behavior, and to find it satisfying.

Organizational theorists Thomas Malone and Mark Lepper
identified several sources of intrinsic motivation:

Challenge:
we find personal meaning in pursuing a goal that's difficult but not impossible.

Curiosity:
we're intrigued and find pleasure in learning more.

Control:
we like the feeling of mastery.

Fantasy:
we play a game; we use our imagination to make an activity more stimulating.

Cooperation:
we enjoy the satisfaction of working with others.

Competition:
we feel gratified when we can compare ourselves favorably to others.

Recognition:
we're pleased when others recognize our accomplishments and contributions.

The Four Tendencies can help us figure out which intrinsic motivators might resonate most for us. For an Upholder, a habit that's a source of control might have special appeal; for a Questioner, curiosity; for an Obliger, cooperation; for a Rebel, challenge.

Despite the greater power of intrinsic motivation, people frequently rely on extrinsic motivation—the easy carrot or stick—to try to prod themselves or others into action. But it turns out that extrinsic motivation undermines intrinsic motivation, so rewards can turn enthusiastic participants into reluctant paid workers, and transform fun into drudge work.

One study showed that
children who got a reward for coloring
with magic markers—an activity that children love—didn't spend as much time with markers, later, as children who didn't expect a reward. The children began to think, “Why would I color if I don't get a reward?” Furthermore, rewarded children produced drawings of significantly lower quality than children who expected no reward. I visited a major corporation that, to encourage employees to attend health lectures, bestows points that can be redeemed for prizes; so why would employees go if they don't get points? As my sister the sage once told me, “You want volunteers, not recruits.”

Many assume that offering a reward will help people to jump-start a healthy habit, which will then persist after the reward fades away. Not so. Often,
as soon as the reward stops
(and sometimes before it stops), the behavior stops. When people get paid to exercise, take medication, or quit smoking, they do so, but once the reward has been gained, the behavior may stop, too. If an employer gives people $120 for taking a health-risk assessment, why would they take it again for free? If I tell Eliza that she can watch an hour of TV if she reads for an hour, I don't build her habit of reading; I teach her that watching TV is more fun than reading. With some behaviors, of course, it's safe to assume that they'll continue even if the reward stops. I gave Eleanor an M&M every time she successfully used the potty, but I was pretty confident she'd continue to use the potty even after I cut off her M&M supply.

Rewards pose these dangers, and to make matters worse, we often choose a reward that directly undermines the habit—as with my friend's reward of chocolate cake. When I told her that I thought rewarding herself with cake was a bad idea, she protested, “But what will be my reward for losing ten pounds?”

I laughed. “Losing ten pounds!”

Perverse rewards undermine our efforts and teach us to despise the very behavior we want to embrace. I love the TV show
Friends
, and one episode captures this tension. Chandler has started smoking again, and Phoebe points out, “But you've been so good for three years.”

Chandler, cigarette in hand, explains, “
And this is my reward
.”

The second reason rewards pose a danger for habits is that they require a
decision
. A habit, by my definition, is something we do without decision making; making a decision such as “Do I get my reward today?” “Do I deserve this?” “Have I done enough to earn the cash bonus?” or “Does this time count?” exhausts precious mental energy, moves attention away from the habit to the reward, and in the end, interferes with habit formation.

With my own habits, I've decided not to decide. I do an action without debate, without evaluation, and without reward. Just as I don't reward myself for brushing my teeth or buckling my seat belt, I don't consider Power Hour, exercise, or posting to my blog to be exceptional accomplishments that merit a reward. These actions are habits that run on automatic.

The third danger posed by rewards? This one took me much longer to recognize: the risk of the “finish line.” Setting a finish line does indeed help people reach a specific, one-time goal, but although it's widely assumed to help habit formation, the reward of hitting a finish line actually can
undermine
habits.

I constantly work to understand what's happening right in front of me, and when I first noticed that finish lines tend to disrupt habits, I was perplexed. I noticed this phenomenon after several people told me the same thing, practicallyin the same words, that I'd heard from a college friend. He'd told me, “When I was training for the marathon, I was great about running. I loved it. I took it so seriously that I drove the people around me crazy. I thought of myself as a runner and thought I'd be running forever. Then I finished the marathon, I took the two weeks of rest you're supposed to take … and somehow three years have gone by.”

This pattern puzzled me. Shouldn't working toward a specific goal create a habitual practice and supply an emotional satisfaction that would strengthen the habit? Shouldn't the reward of crossing a finish line give people more psychic energy to persevere? I was surprised—almost to the point of disbelief—to observe that finish lines didn't have that effect.

Finally, it became perfectly obvious. A finish line marks a
stopping point.
Once we stop, we must start over, and
starting over is
harder than continuing
. I'd seen this in my study of the Strategy of First Steps. The more dramatic the goal, the more decisive the end—and the more effort required to start over. By providing a specific goal and a temporary motivation, and requiring a new “start” once reached, hitting a milestone may interfere with habit formation.

It's absolutely true that a reward may help people reach a
specific goal
—but in the area of habit formation, the aim is to adopt a habit
forever
, to change the way we live for the better. Not to finish this grant proposal, but to write every day forever; not to run a marathon, but to exercise forever. In a study of people trying to quit smoking, people offered a prize for turning in weekly progress reports had worse long-term quitting rates than people who had no intervention, and programs that rewarded people for wearing their seat belts resulted in lower long-term seat-belt wearing than programs without rewards.

Aside from the energy required to start over once we've crossed the finish line, the very fact that we've achieved a finish line creates its own problem. Once we decide that we've achieved success, we tend to stop moving forward. As a perfect illustration, a guy told me, “I set a goal for myself, ‘6 by 30,' ” he said. “I wanted to get a six-pack before my thirtieth birthday, which was right around the time I was getting married.”

“Wait,” I interrupted, “let me guess how this turns out. You reached the goal but haven't maintained it.”

“Pretty much,” he admitted. And he's a behavioral economist!

Though it's easy to assume that if we consistently repeat an action, it becomes a habit, often it doesn't work that way. I know someone who joined National Novel Writing Month, where participants write 1,667 words a day to complete a 50,000-word novel in a month. He effortlessly kept pace with the program and thought he was building a writing habit, but once the month ended, he stopped writing. He'd been striving toward a finish line, not building a habit. A blog reader observed, “Hitting the finish line usually means dropping the Lenten habit I've adopted. Pray the rosary every day? I planned to keep it up, but I stopped after Easter.”

A finish line divides behavior that we want to follow indefinitely—to run, to write, to practice—into “start” and “stop,” and all too often, the “stop” turns out to be permanent. I was amazed to read that
within six months of delivery
, 60 to 70 percent of women who stop smoking during pregnancy have started to smoke again. They drop the smoking habit for months, and they kick the chemical addiction out of their systems, but when they cross the finish line, they start smoking again.

The reward of the finish line has a particularly bad effect for people on a “diet.” Despite its popularity—in 2012,
about one in five American adults
was on a diet—dieting has an abysmal track record.
According to a review of studies
of the long-term outcomes of calorie-restricting diets, one-third to two-thirds of people who dieted eventually regained more weight than they initially lost. Why? Perhaps because people are encouraged to set a goal weight, and once they've hit that finish line, they slide back into their old eating habits. As one reader explained: “I followed the Atkins diet to fit into a dress for a wedding, wore the dress, then ate whatever I wanted. The weight came back, but it was really hard to start Atkins again. I didn't have the wedding to keep me motivated.” Maintaining a healthy weight requires us not to follow a temporary diet, but to change our eating habits
forever
.

True, some people do seem to have the energy for successive fresh starts, at least if the goals seem valuable enough to them. A friend told me she'd had knee surgery and endured the months of required physical therapy.

“The rehab must have been tough,” I said. “I know you've never liked going to the gym.”

“No. And now I go regularly.”

“How were you able to stick to it?” I asked.

“I had a goal—to go skiing with my children. I knew that if I didn't do the rehab, I'd never be able to do that.”