Have a bigger reward for completing your habits

Rewards are a fundamental part of habits. Therefore having a reward right after you do the habit is crucial to it's survival. We applied small rewards (for example: small dry macaroni that we placed from one place to another as a sign that we are progressing with our habits) to our habits but we also got an idea to apply an even bigger reward to a certain number of these "macaroni rewards".

We love going on trips. We live in the city and often become overwhelmed by the pace of it all and the lack of nature. Since there’s always more to do, we rarely take trips because we feel guilty about spending time away from the things “we should be doing”. At the same time, not taking trips makes us feel like we’re not living the lives we want and often feel burnt out. After reading Atomic Habits, we changed the way we approach our studying and our trips. We have set up a system which rewards the main thing that we should be doing (studying) with the main thing we want to be doing (trips).

It’s often hard to decide when to take a break from working. We often did things by feel - when we felt really burnt out or tired, we took a break. But the emotions of guilt and feeling like we’re not doing our best always popped up during our break times. So we sat down one day and talked about what we feel is the right balance between work and rest. We agreed upon a number of hours of work vs number of trips. Then we converted the time into small pieces of pasta and started moving them from one container to another. When all the pasta was in the Trip Jar we went on a trip. We adjusted the amount of hours of work vs trips a couple of times and found the balance where we don’t feel burned out or too tired from our work. That makes work much more fun and satisfying. The guilt from taking breaks is also gone, because we always feel like we earned a trip. Ever since we’ve built this system the trips have been free from negative emotions.

It's really important to note to not give yourself big rewards that reward or vote for the opposite identity of the one you are trying to build. We almost made a crucial mistake in this system and almost wanted to give a reward of playing games for successfully studying. While this may perhaps work for some people, it would be very destructive for us since our studying usually suffered due to playing games or watching movies and TV series. Thus a reward like that would just bait us into again becoming the opposite of good students.

So keep in mind that the big reward shouldn't be some bad habit that you are trying to avoid or even worse, a bad habit that clashes with the identity you are trying to build. A good example from the book is someone who is trying to lose weight and rewards themselves with ice cream for keeping themselves on the diet. They're two opposing identities and therefore should be avoided.

So for the best big reward we suggest a good habit that you want to have more of and that excites you. Make sure to not miss the "excites you" part for that one is of course crucial for it to work as a reward.