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How To Enjoy Doing Things You Don’t Want To Do
The bitter truth about how reward systems don’t work
Reward systems are a scam.
Yet they are so ingrained in society from the first day of kindergarten till the day we die. We give cute, smiley stickers to toddlers in preschool when they put their toys away. We treat ourselves to a brownie after we’ve completed a sweat-drenching BootCamp class. We plan and look forward to luxury vacations after enduring months of 80-hour weeks at work.
All of these reward mechanisms are telling us that if we can survive a difficult task, there’s a happy ending waiting for us on the other side.
“Just get through it! Joy cometh in the morning!”
Hmm, okay… and then what?
Then there’ll be another arduous thing you will yourself to power through until you can get to another happy result.
And after that, there’ll be another one.
And another one.
Reward systems make perfect, logical sense but it’s actually a mindset trap that lures us into a yo-yo way of thinking and behaving. We know that yo-yo dieting is not effective and actually damages our metabolic health in the long term.