How I Beat My Addiction to Food Delivery Apps
I lost 10% of my salary for 5 straight years
You’ve probably never had Manchow soup unless you’re Indian. On one fateful day in late 19th-century Kolkata (then Calcutta), an unknown Hakka Chinese trader decided to sell a savory and sour broth made with soy sauce, corn starch, sautéed veggies, chicken, and vinegar, garnished with fried Hakka noodles and MSG.
Today, Manchow soup reigns as the king of every Indo-Chinese menu across the subcontinent. Priced at just a dollar and a half for a bowl, it’s a quick and tasty mood-lifter on a rainy day.
And I guzzled 24 liters of it last year.
Welcome to my addiction. Read on to know how I beat it.
Swiggy is India’s leading food delivery app with over 300 million users. Of these users, about 5 million account for the majority of monthly orders; they’re called “power users” in product parlance. The company aims to keep these users engaged with their app as intensely as possible.
The orange font on my Swiggy app proudly announces that I saved $180 last year on my orders. I’ve made 213 orders in 365 days, or about one order every day.
And 160 of those orders were for Manchow soup.
Even at a conservative estimate, I’ve purchased and consumed 152g of sodium and 52,800 calories through this app — just under 6% of the average human’s annual calorie requirement.
This might lead you to conclude that I’m addicted to Manchow soup. I’m not. Manchow just happens to be the first menu item on the nearest restaurant that shows up on my Swiggy app. I’m addicted to ordering food when I’m bored.
Nir Eyal, author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, discusses how app-based products have cracked the code to get their users addicted. He refers to his framework as the Hooked model.
Trigger
An external event (such as an app notification or TV advertisement) or an internal change in state (such as boredom, hunger, or tiredness) that prompts the user to turn to the app.
Action
The habit, tic, or mannerism you execute in response to the trigger. In my case, I unlock my phone, open the app, and scroll through the endless list of restaurants and dishes it presents to me.
Variable Reward
Scrolling through the list and finding a restaurant or dish is never immediately rewarding. The app makes me jump through hoops before I zero in on my order. I have to:
- sort through multiple cuisines, multiple restaurants with high and low review ratings, and multiple menu items.
- customize my dish with free and paid toppings.
- select the best coupon from a long list on the payment screen.
Why would apps make it more difficult to buy instead of less?
Turns out, it’s a feature, not a bug. And it’s based on the principle of variable rewards.
Casinos figured out a long time ago that gambling addicts value the anticipation of a reward more than the reward itself.
Similarly, seeing search results, recommendations, and features that don’t match what the user wants can give them a bigger dopamine hit than a fully optimized search.
Investment
Any money, effort, or time that the user invests in the habit that prevents them from switching to another habit or stopping the habit entirely.
I have a co-branded credit card with Swiggy that gives me cashback and offers. I’m invested in using Swiggy to the exclusion of any other app/
Also, the time I’ve spent on the app means it throws up recommendations based on my order history. I have very little incentive to switch.
With the perfect loop of trigger, action, reward, and investment, Swiggy should still have me in its clutches. So how did I beat it?
Surprisingly, the answer lay in getting addicted to another app! Last month, I came across the Money Manager app that allows me to log and track my daily expenses. The app stood out to me for several reasons, the most important being its color-coded data visualization.
It addressed the root cause of my poor spending habit — having no immediate visibility into how much I’ve spent on Swiggy.
An issue I’ve faced with most other budgeting apps, which I don’t face with this one, is that they provide monthly or weekly views but don’t offer an option for custom periods.
My monthly credit card billing period starts on the 15th of every month, but my salary account statement starts on the 1st. As a result, I constantly have to make difficult mental adjustments when reviewing them side by side.
Most importantly, the app leverages the same Hook Model to encourage users to develop healthy saving habits.
Trigger: Every evening, I receive a push notification that asks, “Have you logged your transactions today?” Logging transactions is quite enjoyable and makes me feel responsible, so I look forward to it.
Action: Logging transactions on the app is easy. I press the “Add” button, select whether the transaction is an income or an expense, and then I’m led to a detail screen. Here, the app allows me to tag each expense with a custom category (e.g., Food, Rent, Shopping) and also records the mode of payment (e.g., Cash, Card, Bank Transfer).
Variable Reward: I want to limit my spending on Swiggy to less than 5% of my monthly salary. Watching Swiggy become a smaller portion of my expenses is my reward. The more I invest and save, the smaller their share of the pie chart becomes. Additionally, the satisfaction of keeping my finances organized in one place is another reward.
Investment: I’ve recorded expenses for 20 consecutive days, and I would hate to break the streak. This motivation keeps me invested in continuing the behavior.
What should you take away from my experience? How can you harness the power of habit, or even addiction, to establish healthy behaviors?
Here’s my 5-step formula for healthier digital habits:
- Recognize that habit more often than not beats willpower. Be more forgiving with yourself if you slip up from time to time.
- Identify the triggers that cause you to turn to your devices and apps. If it’s an external trigger, like a push notification, try to eliminate it or reduce its frequency. If it’s an internal trigger, label the emotion you’re experiencing.
- Substitute your addiction with an action that aligns better with your habit goals while still providing a dopamine hit. It doesn’t need to be another app; it could be something like folding origami cranes or journaling with pen and paper.
- Invest in your new habit. Build an origami crane sculpture or commit to filling up a shelf with your journals. This investment helps you return to your new habit more often than not.
My ultimate advice to anyone trying to escape an addiction is simple — prevention is better than cure.
Advertising and push notifications have invaded our psyche like no other form of marketing before. The world is designed to be addictive. Recognize this fact and be very selective about the apps you include on your devices.
Peace.
