Why the reward has to come right away

The gap between doing the thing and feeling it

Most of the things worth doing pay out late. The run pays out in months. The unsent message you finally sent pays out never, in the sense that nothing happens; the dread just stops. In between the doing and the payoff there is a gap, and the gap is where most good intentions quietly die.

We built Touchward to close that gap by a few hundred milliseconds. You did the thing, you tap, your phone buzzes back. That is the whole idea. It sounds too small to matter, so it is worth being honest about what the research does and does not say.

Immediate rewards predict whether people keep going

In 2017 Kaitlin Woolley and Ayelet Fishbach published a set of studies on long-term goals like exercising and eating well. Their question was simple: what predicts persistence, the delayed reward the goal is for, or the immediate reward of the activity itself? Across the studies, and in a meta-analysis of them, the presence of immediate rewards was the stronger predictor of actually persisting. In their first study, immediate rewards such as enjoyment predicted people's current persistence at New Year's resolutions, and delayed rewards did not.¹

Read that carefully. It does not say the long-term reward is unimportant. It says that when you look at who is still going, what separates them is whether the activity paid off in the moment. The people who kept exercising were the ones for whom exercising was, in some small way, rewarding now.

What the brain does with a reward that arrives on time

The neuroscience behind this is older. In 1997 Wolfram Schultz, Peter Dayan and Read Montague described how midbrain dopamine neurons respond to reward with a burst of activity, and how those same cells respond to cues that predict reward. As learning proceeds, the response shifts from the reward itself to the cue that predicts it.² The system is, in effect, learning what leads to what. A signal that arrives right after the action gets attached to the action. A signal that arrives next month gets attached to nothing in particular.

That shift is the part we find most useful to think about. The buzz is not the point. The buzz is a marker that lets your brain file the action under things that pay off. Over time the action itself starts to carry a little of that feeling, which is the closest thing to a habit that a phone can help with.

How long it takes

Longer than the internet says. Phillippa Lally and colleagues followed 96 people adopting one new daily behaviour for 84 days and modelled how automatic it became. The average time to reach the plateau of automaticity was 66 days, and the range across people ran from 18 days to a predicted 254.³ Early repetitions produced bigger gains than later ones, which means the first couple of weeks are where an immediate reward earns its keep.

What that means for a button

• Tap right away. Not at the end of the day, not when you remember. The moment you did the thing. The closer the buzz is to the action, the more the two get filed together.
• Make it feel like something. A checkbox is information. A buzz you chose, at a strength you chose, is a small event. The difference matters more than it looks.
• Expect the middle to be boring. Somewhere past week three the novelty fades before the automaticity arrives. Touchward's Random mode exists for exactly that stretch: one press, a new look, and the tap feels new again.
• Do not wait for the delayed reward to motivate you. The research says it mostly will not. Let the immediate one do the work.

Touchward is not a medical device and makes no health claims. This article is general information, not advice about your health. If you are working with a clinician, keep doing that.

Sources

1. Woolley K, Fishbach A. Immediate Rewards Predict Adherence to Long-Term Goals. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 43(2):151-162, 2017.
2. Schultz W, Dayan P, Montague PR. A Neural Substrate of Prediction and Reward. Science 275(5306):1593-1599, 1997.
3. Lally P, van Jaarsveld CHM, Potts HWW, Wardle J. How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology 40(6):998-1009, 2010.