Happily Gamble Your Life Away — Variable Reward System
Wether you know it or not, you are an addict. We all are. It’s not really our fault but it kind of is too. As hard working as we think we are, when given the chance we tend to always pick the path of least resistance. Which is why we seek out hits of dopamine wherever we can find them.
Dopamine is a chemical we produce in our brain that helps us with movement and emotions through pleasure. When doing something we enjoy, our brains will release dopamine and we’ll get happy. So naturally — we are going to want to get as much of this happy chemical as possible.
When we use a basic reward system of — complete task, receive reward — dopamine is the base of this reward. Which is a good gateway to starting something. The unfortunate reality is that eventually we tend to just do the thing in order to get the reward. Over time, this leads us to putting in less effort into the task, just getting through it and then expecting a reward.
The cost of this newly formed habit is not actually being focused on the task and therefore not actually learning / benefiting from doing it. The reward is actually all we want now because it means — dopamine!
For many years, without our knowledge, a variable reward system has actually been in use, most prominently in the gambling industry. Today it is social media. Endless scrolling allows you to get all those dopamine hits one after another. Maybe it’s a good video, maybe it’s not. Who knows. TikTok does! And they keep you coming back for more!
We don’t get that much real-world reward from the endless scrolling. But we can if we just use the same system in our everyday lives. Helping us to form habits, keep them interesting and maybe even forming a healthy addiction!
🐀 A Happy Accident 🐦
There was a bloke in the 1950’s, a psychologist, B.F Skinner, that did some experiments on pigeons. The initial experiment was to see if it was possible to teach a pigeon to do something by giving it rewards. The reward system was the one we typically use — do a task, get a reward.
The pigeon had to peck at a white plate to receive food. After some time the bird understood this and hit the plate when it was hungry. Then one day, Skinner was running low on food pellets and couldn’t give the bird its food on demand. This is when the discovery was made. From then on the bird only got its food every now and then — at varying intervals of pecking at this white plate.
This completely transformed the bird from only ever pecking when it was hungry to pecking at the plate as if the bird were a deranged drug addict desperately trying to get its next high — in a manner of ‘this might be my last high’.
One pigeon pecked at a rate of 2.5 pecks per second for 16 hours. Another pecked 87,000 times over a period of 16 hours with a success rate of LESS than 1 percent.
Skinner tried the same experiment on rats which had the exact same results. Clearly this method works well because Meta (Facebook, Instagram), TikTok, Snapchat are doing this to us — with incredible success too.
It’s quite frightening to think about if you take a step back.
Anyway, if we have the information and the method — instead of it being used against us, why don’t we just use it to our benefit then? Apply it in our lives to help us perform?
🔍 Recognising the Pattern 🧬
If you’re engaged in a deep work session doing well and you think to yourself ‘Damn, I am really spitting some kick ass words onto this paper’, then your dopamine levels will rise, a lot.
However, if you have an interruption — say a phone call or you break your own protocol by going on social media — your dopamine level will drop way below baseline.
Bruh — below baseline. That means below the levels of what you went in with at the start of the task. That right there, is not a vibe.
This is a system that predicts whether or not a reward will come. When we think we are going to receive a reward, our body starts to hit us with the dopamine earlier. This is called positive anticipation.
Like telling a child you’re taking them out for ice cream. Immediately the dopamine rushes in and strikes hard. The child jumps around, screams and shouts in excitement. You go to the ice cream parlour and Wham!, another rush of dopamine hits. Hopefully this time with a little less jumping and screaming.
Believe it or not, that announcement of going to get the ice cream, pulled in more dopamine than the actual act of eating it. The ice cream will still taste incredible and the child would have enjoyed it a lot more had the positive anticipation not happened but we won’t get all into the dopamine buzz right now. The point is that you get the point. Right. There’s a pattern here.
Anticipation of reward -> huge dopamine spike -> gets reward -> dopamine spike
🔬 The Experiment 🧪
If this all seems like too much for you and you’re not actually convinced it will work for you, don’t fret. I am going to be doing this in my life, applying it where I can and I shall be updating you with how it’s going through Twitter and an article to come in the future — so consider subscribing to keep up with how it goes.
After 29 days of MonkMode, I have become a tad bored with my system.
The protocol is actually quite phenomenal, with great progress made, it’s just that I have now become quite accustomed to my routine. I am not going to stop with the protocol, not a chance, instead I am going to try and spice things up a bit. To lessen the monotony of each day.
In the book Atomic Habits, James Clear asks an elite coach, that trained many athletes and olympians what the difference is between the best athletes in the world and everyone else — what sets them apart?
“At some point it comes down to who can handle the boredom of training every day, doing the same lifts over and over and over”
Gym is my favourite part of any day. Usually I take some pre-workout then go to gym with my earphones in and listen to either music or a podcast. Recently though, the entirety of the session has become a bit more dull. I still push myself hard but I just don’t get as excited as before — the music doesn’t pump me like it used to and the pre-workout just ain’t workin’ out.
As I have done before in my dopamine reset week, I could cut out all my music for a week or so. This would do the trick for a bit but I know I will have to keep doing this music fasting every so often. Instead I am going to use the variable reward system — because gambling is addictive and I’ve already built up some positive anticipation towards hitting that jackpot!
~ Feeling the dopamine levels rising ~
🎲 Gambling the Gains Away 🏋🏼
The sweet spot of desire occurs at a 50/50 split between success and failure. So I’ll stick to that — kinda.
You can do this too — take a coin and flip it. Or we could make it a little more interesting and ever so slightly harder to hit the jackpot — using a dice. It’s still basically going to be a 50/50 split but the full-on jackpot win will be slightly harder to get.
Typically we are doing the task to get the reward however, I really enjoy working out, so instead of getting a reward for afterwards, it will be for during the session.
Rolling a:
6 ->
The jackpot with a 16% hit rate. Hitting this will allow me to take some pre-workout and listen to music.
4 & 5 ->
The mini reward with a 33% hit rate. This only allows me to take some pre-workout.
1 & 2 & 3 ->
No reward with a 50% hit rate. Just me, myself & I and the clanging and banging of the weights.
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PLEASE NOTE:
This is subject to change — I may still be consuming too much pre-workout at this rate. So the middle reward may be swapped out for something else after some trial days.
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Feel free to adjust these rules as much as you’d like. To make it harder, you can roll the dice twice. The only way to get the jackpot is if you roll the same number both times.
The greater the variance of reward, the greater the spike of dopamine will be. Whether you do 50/50 or less is up to you. I would recommend giving this method a try though — the pigeons told me that it will help greatly with improving your performance, commitment and enjoyment whilst doing the task.
⏳ This is the end my friend 🏁
So, what if instead of traditionally rewarding ourselves at the end of the day, regardless of how we performed in our tasks, we replace it with a roll of the dice? It just helps to eliminate the reward-seeking and lets us focus more on the task. It will help to take back the half-arsed effort of just completing something for the sake of the reward.
I will definitely write an entire article on dopamine, it’s truly fascinating. There is also a benefit to understanding dopamine — you will quite literally be able to trick yourself into doing hard things. Crave hard things. You can become a master of self manipulation by using dopamine correctly.
I dig that — the more I learn the more experiments I can try on myself, the more progress I will be able to see and the more fun I will have writing about it all.
I really hope you managed to get something out of this article. I’d love to hear any thoughts you have in the comments below or on Twitter — both positive and negative. Please like and subscribe for more.
Check you soon 🤙🏼
