In my own life, I have been able to put future rewards at the front of my motivations and I’ve often wondered why people struggle with that. However recently I was watching a few videos on motivation for my own interests, and to find other studies like this one that I could research. We’ll look at what I ran into. A video by Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell, called Change Your Life – One Tiny Step at a Time where they discuss how we form actions and behaviors, and how this becomes more like muscle memory. They call this, “Forming brain highways”. Then they go over the differences between routines and habits. Routines are managed by the planner part of your brain and rewards from habits are urged for by the child. It’s always a balance between planning and the struggle of waiting for the future.
Yet we must somehow live towards truth in our life, that we must not live by the lies as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn the creator of the
They cover how small changes are the way forward paired with the perspective that “things are not a big deal”. You in essence have to train your child with triggers that are rewarding. To be able to pull all of this together into a healthy habit, the Kurzgesagt team even built a journal to work through this. It’s a difficult process and as they state in the video that it takes anywhere from 40-250 days before a habit is like muscle memory or you could say that it is at a level where the reward from it completes with the other habits
Over the time that this does take, which varies for different people, you run into a moment invariably where you want to turn around and give up on the progress, turning back to the habit that you are trying to move away from. This means to me that you have moved into something like a flog where it will get harder and harder to get back which I call the mirk. This is where the feeling of letting go of the security of something like a way back to something comfortable, like a life that you are tired of or trying to improve upon, yet this is because of the habit you are trying to change so it’s a dilemma. One that people know very well and many turn away from the struggle just when things are trying to change. In a way, you have to forget the way back for the way forward to become easier.
This process of growing, forgetting, and re-paving rewards is like the reverse effect of a process that is similar to memory where the recent events might be able to be indexed like the tasks of the current day, which you can recall clearly, however, things that are drawn out over a long period or things being remembered from the past come out more like the reminiscences in a director cut as per Psychology Today. It is that long period where the things that distract us are what we are trying to forget in a way. Yet, it is more technical than that since you have to achieve a state where old habits no longer rank as high in combination with the trigger you are using to elicit the habit working.
Simply put, from a perspective of a ranking system of reward from habits, what we are trying to do is level up the reward of the habit so that it outranks the other rewards available as distractions concerning, getting done what you want to do. So, instead of trying to remember what we need to do, we want to forget the things we don’t want in the sense of them not being at the top of what is rewarding. Just like when someone outranks someone else at something, the outranked person may slip to the middle of the pack or be forgotten altogether. This is a natural process that we can leverage if we acknowledge we can gamify learning new habits. It’s like falling in love in a way, with the person that you want to be and becoming the person that
Parallel with this is some foundational research that has been done by Jaak Panksepp on rats’ motivation for rough and tumble play as well as pairing that with the survival urge and therefore being able to observe the outcome’s potency. I first ran into this when Jordan Peterson was being interviewed about why men are retreating into video games and he talks about how Jaak found an unknown motivational circuit, tagged in the audio, which I agree that this man should have won a Nobel prize for. Check this out…
Panksepp demonstrated weaker rats will invite play with stronger rats only as long as the dominant rat allows the weaker one to win at least 30% of the time. This drive to play creates a game that rewards prosocial behavior. For the stronger rat to choose to lose it must have some moral sense about the other rat, it has to care about how someone else responds. This kind of cooperation is also found in humans and has been demonstrated to be at the root of humans’ learning to cooperate. These and other studies also suggest that altruism co-evolved with rough-and-tumble play.
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1993-98052-005
With parallel work on this here by Sergio M. Pellis and Vivien C. Pellis
Thanks to Tizzard on Reddit for the reference
So, we can take from this that out of play emerges an ethic. How emotional play encourages empathy where people learn that people are not more important than others whom they are playing with. Where bonds can be built at a level of “humanity”, a level of care. Wow, that is beautiful! This makes you more social, giving you more support to form habits. Then we use a leveling up system, that also makes us more connected with others by being aware of this, and the closer that these are to survival the more potent the will to change will be implying that changes closer to survival are made easier with the combination of something like Panksepp’s motivation circuit plus fight or flight.
If you understand your system you are then able to use it. Just look at the results from Neural Linguistic Programming (NLP) for a view of the tip of the iceberg.
