I got addicted to an app that helped me turn my most ambitious goals into daily routines
An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. It often indicates a user profile.I've been trying to learn the piano for roughly half a decade. I managed to get a handle on the basics years ago, but I could never get myself to the point where I was practicing consistently. So I've been stuck at the same subpar skill level.
New habits are hard to build. Jan Lindemans, a senior behavioral researcher at Duke University, told me that a habit needed to have four things to last: cue, response, reward, and repetition. Take something like brushing your teeth in the morning. The cue — waking up — triggers a response to brush, which leaves you with fresh, minty breath as the reward. Then you repeat that every day to incorporate it into your routine.
To me, though, many of these popular services felt bloated with options, and managing them was a job on its own. So I turned to a more minimalistic app called. The app works in a simple way: Each day, at the same time, it sends me a reminder to do the habit I'm trying to form . Once I complete the task, I mark it on a calendar in the app and a colorful streak grows. That visual reward triggers a dopamine response, which pushes me to repeat the habit and grow the streak the next day.
"You don't do your 10,000 steps because you care about going from a 37-day streak to a 38-day streak," Lindemans said."You do it because you don't want to fall back to zero." Signing up for Habitica felt revelatory since it not only let me regulate habits instead of relying entirely on the app but also helped keep my guilty pleasures in check. Because Habitica's personal rewards are self-enforced, and the app doesn't prevent you from, say, ordering takeout if you don't stick to your habits, it's not for everyone. But since I had already formed a routine by using Everyday, I was in a better position to self-regulate.
"If that habit is dependent on that particular app, there's the risk that that behavior will be discontinued when the app is no longer used," Gardner told me. In both Everyday's and Habitica's cases, I did notice, at times, how interwoven the rewards were with my actions, and I feared that leaving the apps would send me spiraling back to my old tendencies.
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