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Comment by shock | Hacker News Reader

I've read the book The Power of Habit and found it enlightening, but the bits I'm having most trouble with are choosing rewards and getting started. The part about choosing rewards is, by far, the most difficult for me. Everybody keeps saying "make sure to reward yourself after doing the thing you want to make habitual" but nobody provides actual examples of rewards that work and are not harmful (no, I don't want to eat a cookie each time I do the habit).

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From personal experience, starting with a cookie (I used a piece of chocolate, because small individually wrapped units) is really the most effective way.

However, I always congratulated myself (outloud, by name) when giving myself the treat, and pretty soon, the congratulating myself was conditioned as a reward for the activity, letting me drop (most of) the usage of actual treats.

Just treat yourself like a particularly stubborn and clever dog/cat/animal you're trying to train -- if marketing has taught us anything, it's that cheap psychology tricks work.

How did you choose your initial rewards? Did you just start experimenting with things that popped in your mint or did you find a list of suggested rewards? I'm trying to limit my sugar intake otherwise I would've gladly used the sweet treat reward.

I just went for the first thing that popped in to my mind that is a primary reward -- something biology has conditioned me to want, and will activate reward pathways (quickly!) when ingested/experienced.

Honestly, you could probably just start with the secondary reward of congratulating yourself -- it's just important that you do it out loud and call yourself by name (eg, "John, you did a good job of running today"), so you hear it happening, instead of it being part of your mental dialog.

Generally though, I find that speaking to myself is psychologically different than talking to myself internally, so YMMV if that's not true for you.

My app helps people build better eating habits through these sort of positive reinforcement techniques (although virtual rewards in this case). So far the results are quite promising.

https://www.thefoodstand.com

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