Why You Should Reward Yourself

Have you tried to lose weight in the past?

Did it go agonizingly slow?

Did you eventually quit?

It’s hard to stay consistent when you don’t see immediate results from whatever it is you’re doing, which is one of the problems with long-term goals and why many of them fail.

The solution?

The solution is to break your larger goal down into mini-goals and then reward yourself each time you reach a milestone that brings you closer to your end goal. Attacking your goals like this helps release dopamine, a pleasure hormone that increases your chances at success towards completion of the overall goal by increasing motivation, with the reward acting as tangible proof that your efforts are worth the time, pain, aggravation, inconvenience, and other things that could otherwise make you question whether you should proceed.¹Yeah, what’s described is essentially a mechanism of positive reinforcement that can be used by adults, of whom the pride and satisfaction of a job well done should be reward enough but apparently isn’t because some of us are still nothing more than grown-ass children.

As beneficial as rewarding yourself is, the trick is to do so in ways that don’t sabotage your goal, such as turning to food to celebrate the loss of a few pounds, for example. While eating a specific food or consuming more than you normally do won’t derail your weight loss efforts at that particular moment if you resume your diet immediately after, repeated instances can be self-destructive. That’s because food stimulates the release of dopamine. And with enough times of employing food as a reward, the release of dopamine can get attached to that behavior, which can cause you to seek out reasons to engage in it more often. For example, you might go from treating yourself to a slice of cake for completion of a small goal you spent weeks and months on to eventually treating yourself to the entire drive-thru menu just for making it through a difficult day. To avoid this possibility of common everyday things being used as a license for celebratory indulgence, it’s wise to reward yourself in ways that don’t involve food.

So how can you reward yourself without food?

Well, go ahead and buy a new outfit. Get a massage. Call into work and take the day off. Have a movie marathon. Bring your car to an auto spa for detailing. Sleep with that person you’ve been eyeing and keep it a secret from your significant other. Fuck, there are a million ways to reward yourself without food when you reach a milestone in weight loss or any other goal you’ve been working on!

Glossary: diet, goal, hormones, motivation

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Monster Longe

Monster Longe is a personal trainer in San Diego. He has been lifting weights for +25 years and training clients in the gym and online for about half of that time. When not working with clients or making content that's easy to read, understand, and apply to everyday life, he enjoys long walks and leaving buildings crushed and entire city blocks decimated in his wake.

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