Rewards

Rewards (What)

A reward is anything that increases the odds that a person or animal will repeat a behavior.

In general, a reward is something that an actor (person or group) likes. Here are some examples:

Internal rewards: - Satisfaction - Joy - Accomplishment - Sense of purpose - Personal growth - Relief from stress - Enhanced self-esteem

External rewards:

These examples illustrate the variety of ways rewards can manifest, helping to reinforce desired behaviors in both personal and professional contexts.

Rationale

Here are some reasons why it useful to be skilled with rewards.

  1. Continually get more rewards (more of what you like).

  2. Continually improve your behaviors in ways that lead to the outcomes you most desire.

  3. Make undesirable things more desirable.

  4. Recognize things that are not worth doing and stop doing them.

Rewards (How To)

Here is the logic for using rewards to improve wellbeing.

Long term goals and priorities in life align with specific behaviors and misalign with others. This alignment can be figured out by purposeful thinking.

Once a behavior that aligns with your well being is figured out, here it can be altered. Here is how.

  1. If something becomes more rewarding, you are more likely to do it. Similarly, if something because less rewarding, you are less likely to do it.

  2. Rewards and drawback can be revealed by paying attention to your thinking (metacognition).

  3. Rewards and drawbacks can be changed by changing your behaviors. Thus, change the rewards and drawbacks and this will on average lead to positive changes in behavior which in turn will improve your wellbeing.

Of course, changing behavior in productive ways is complex. But this is the basic recipe: align behaviors will aspirations and purposefully improve your actions in ways that drive up rewards and drive down drawbacks.