Your Streak - Don't Let it Break!

 What's really important? 

If we believed our phones, the only thing that should be on our minds is our streaks. 

Our games (I'm looking at you NYT games!), our learning (that angry little green dude named Duo), and our engagement (Reddit scores!) -- everything has its counter, reminding us that it will reset to 0 the moment we are inattentive. 

I get it, we are creatures of habit. Psychologically, we are drawn to patterns and are rewarded by these little dopamine rushes. Our brains seem to thrive on the creation of the neural pathways that are our habits, for good or ill. (Here's a good discussion of the psychology behind it.)

If you've ever played D&D or other such games, maybe you've run across apps like Habitica - a habit tracking tool that truly takes the game to another level. In it, you choose a "class" (fighter, mage, etc) and "defeat" foes by dealing them "damage" from completed tasks. I used this for awhile, in a group of friends (we were a "party"), and found it amusing. You amass coin, gear, experience and pets. The key thing that I liked about it was that it wasn't as much about not breaking the streak as it was about fighting on the quests. 

This gamification (Wikipedia link: Gamification) is a common element in motivating people to create and change habits - this is a common theme among many phone apps. As one research paper puts it: "Gamification can make behavior change easier by awarding points for the desired behavior and deducting points for its omission."

Do broken streaks sap your motivation? This article discusses some of the studies behind the phenomenon, which seem to show that if there's no recording of the work done, then there's less desire to do the task, and the reverse. People will even do "expensive" things to repair a broken streak - watch an ad, pay in-game currency to "repair" it, and the like. 

Or can breaking a streak be powerful? Are we kept in a prison of our own making by being held hostage to these apps? Here's a brief discussion with one game designer who asked exactly that: "What if we reward people for breaking a streak?" Would they appreciate the release of the stress or would it ruin the gamification of the app? 

Strong motivation, powerful freedom, or irrelevant? With this current state of the world we're in, with its threat to the most vulnerable around the globe, it seems frivolous to be trapped in these streaks, whatever the result. 

I think the habits we need to develop include putting our phones down and doing good works.