Choose, Pair, and Scale Rewards To Start, Stick With, And Repeat Hard Tasks

How to choose effective rewards for your ADHD brain, rewarding yourself without guilt, and how to scale incentives.

• finding rewards that you truly care about
• adapting interests into short, medium, and large incentives
• pairing rewards with exercise, mindfulness, sleep, and food
• using immediate, drip-style motivation at each step
• planning milestone rewards for long-term goals
• keeping future rewards vivid with reminders
• using token systems when your favorite things don't scale down

Transcript

Why Rewards Power ADHD Motivation

Alex Delmar 0:00

Rewards are a vital component of getting your ADHD brain on board with starting, finishing, and repeating behaviors. In this segment, we're looking at what to try if you think rewards just don't work for you, or if you avoid rewards because you feel guilty about having other things still left undone. And how you might scale rewards relative to the magnitude of the associated goal.

Choosing Rewards That Truly Matter

Alex Delmar 0:27

I'm Alex Delmar, a certified ADHD coach and person with ADHD. Welcome to Thoroughly ADHD, where I share what I've learned to help other people with ADHD enjoy better lives. If you think that rewards don't work for you, it's likely that you're not using the right rewards. If you really don't care about whether something happens or not, that's not a good reward for you. If you're likely going to do this thing regardless of whether you've reached your target or not, that's probably not a good reward for you either.

Alex Delmar 1:01

To find the rewards that might be most effective for you, you can ask yourself three questions. What is something you've always wanted to try but haven't made time for? What is something you are doing now, and love, but wish you could do more of? What were the things you most enjoyed before you became overwhelmed with grown-up responsibilities? Your answers might be playing an instrument or a sport, writing poetry, bedazzling t-shirts, keeping reptiles, spending time with friends...whatever allows you to blow off steam or be creative or have fun or tune out the world without turning off your brain.

Alex Delmar 1:45

Once you have your list, you can brainstorm all the ways these things can be adapted to your reward system. What aspects can be broken down to short segments for small rewards, and how can you increase the stakes for more complex or long-term goals? It's important to prioritize sorting out which rewards are most powerful for you, especially as you start to experience success and set more important goals for yourself.

Adapting Rewards To Your Goals

Alex Delmar 2:15

If you have trouble allowing yourself rewards, a way to bridge that gap might be to combine them with one or more of the four cornerstones of ADHD symptom management. These are things you should be doing every day anyway, so you can make the activity rewarding in itself, or you can modify it on certain days as a reward for unrelated activities. For example, to be at your best, you need to engage in daily physical exercise. So if you love moving to music, you could do a daily Zumba class, or for every 25-minute work block you complete, you can have a five-minute break for an individual dance party, and then when the whole project is wrapped up, splurge on a night out club hopping; or combine all of the above.

Pairing Rewards With Daily Cornerstones

Food, Meaning, And Scaling Incentives

Immediate Vs Future Rewards

Keeping Long-Term Goals Top Of Mind

Closing Notes And Next Steps

Alex Delmar 3:08

Daily mindfulness has great benefits for the ADHD brain, and there are lots of activities in addition to breath work that might offer an intrinsic reward for you or that can double as a reward for accomplishing something else. You might like to try handicrafts or coloring books, jigsaw puzzles, being out in nature, gardening, making music, basically anything that gives you the opportunity to consciously focus for a length of time on one thing and observe the action and your internal state without judgment. I hesitated to include sleep here since you should already be aiming to get all the sleep you need, and that can be a reward in itself, but maybe if you get to bed on time you allow yourself something special in the morning, or you can reward yourself with a nap when you finish your work right away instead of procrastinating. And rewards don't have to be repeating. You could say order that silly bedspread with a print of your pet riding a rocket through outer space as an incentive for completing your term paper. Rewards work if they are meaningful to you. It can be tricky to use food as a reward because of the disordered eating associated with ADHD, and because it's just too easy to consume all the treats, regardless of whether you hit your target first. But if you're a total foodie, perhaps watching a segment of a cooking show, splurging on ingredients, taking a cooking class, or traveling on a culinary tour of your favorite cuisine would work for you. You may have noticed the items in this last example range from quick, easy, and free up to one potentially requiring a couple of weeks and an international flight. This is intentional. Once you've mastered using rewards to complete routine tasks like washing the dishes every day or turning in your weekly reports, you're ready to aim for more challenging goals, and you may find that the hard stuff requires more meaningful rewards to power the greater effort. For instance, you might listen to a band you like while you're doing homework, get tickets to see the concert film when you pass your midterm, and book a trip to see them live at Red Rocks when you earn your degree. Please note, though, that with ADHD, most of us can't just jump to big deal rewards. We need the small, continual motivators right up until we reach the end goal. This is because with ADHD, the more immediate the reward, the more helpful it is. You may want to have special incentives planned at milestones or at the end of longer term or multi-step achievements, but if a reward is more than a couple of weeks in the future, you should include frequent reminders that are representative of the reward to come. Like for an upcoming trip, you might put a photo of the skyline on your desktop, look over restaurant offerings online, or watch travel show episodes about the location. But even crossing the days off the calendar will help keep it top of mind. Remember that it's beneficial to have a reward immediately upon starting the first step of a task, like sitting down at your desk earns a reward, then reward yourself for continuing to work, and when you reach the goal for the day, a sort of drip method to get you to the end of the task. If you are unable to break down the things you love far enough to take advantage of short work breaks, you can use a token system and clearly indicate how many smiley faces you need on the chart or marbles in the jar to redeem the rewards. For more on this topic, check out the previous segment of Thoroughly ADHD, rewards as ADHD Symptom Management. As always, I appreciate your time and I hope you find this information useful. If so, please like or subscribe. Feel free to add your questions in the comments or contact me directly for coaching. Thank you.