I've been thinking about something I will clumsily call paraddictions: desires that don't quite rise to the level of an addiction, but that have a disproportionate and hard-to-moderate influence over your behavior. Can they be used as a tool for motivation and behavior change?

epistemic status: Most of the ideas here are generally solid behavior change principles that I'm just applying to a specific type of situation. The larger thesis of "this kind of strategy works and might be generalizable" is one I have less evidence for, and experimenting with it could have significant downsides. 

My story

In 2011 my life wasn't going well. I was doing a postdoc in which I felt cynical yet overwhelmed, and thanks to depression and academic brainwashing, I felt like I wasn't good for anything else. A lot of the time I was spending most of my workday taking naps and playing flash games^[1], and the high point of my day was when the clock hit 19:00 and my daily turns in Kingdom of Loathing would refill.

KoL is a turn-based HTML MMO^[2] and I was deeply into its strategy, seasonal events, and community. You only get a limited number of turns per day, and if you miss them, they're gone.^[3] I was intensely motivated to play those turns and missing a day felt like it would be a disaster.

One day, I'm not even sure why, I said to myself, Michael, you are going to get three hours of actual work on the diabetes study done today, or you're not playing KoL tonight. Michael, to his credit, accepted the challenge.

If you deal with depression or ADHD, you might not be shocked to hear that getting myself to start work was incredibly painful, and that once I started it went pretty well. I made honest-to-god progress and played my turns with extra gusto. I renewed the vow the next day, and kept adapting and expanding it over the weeks and months that followed.

There were a few days when I got distracted and didn't hit my goals. Not getting to play felt so unfair and awful, I just wanted to throw a tantrum. And after each one I tried to make hella sure it never happened again. 

My life is better now! I eventually drifted away from KoL. I still use other rewards and scores and systems to keep myself on track, but nothing has ever motivated me like those daily KoL turns did. I'm not sure how I'd have been able to start working my way out of my hole without a reward I wanted so badly. Is there a way to find other motivators like that -- or at least to put them to use if you have them?

"Addiction"?

Was my relationship with Kingdom of Loathing unhealthy? It met most of the non-biochemical criteria for substance use disorder from the American Psychiatric Association. The most interesting ones were "cravings and urges", "continuing to use, even when it causes problems in relationships", and "continuing to use, even when you know you have a physical or psychological problem that could have been caused or made worse by the substance". But another way of looking at those patterns is that I had a disproportionately powerful reinforcer on my hands, one that could push my behavior in directions I wouldn't take from purely endogenous motivation.

In everyday language people usually refer to this as an addiction, and I think that most people would say an addiction is one that by definition can't be controlled or put to constructive use. I don't see any value in arguing that point so I'll just call the things I'm talking about paraddictions.

Identifying a paraddiction and building systems

How can you identify if you have a paraddiction like this in your life that might be useful for changing your behavior? Some proposed criteria:

• The reward is under your control and can be dispensed at any appropriate time -- you don't want something that you might have to do due to social pressure, or that might not be available at the time you earn it.
• The reward can be dispensed, or missed, in small doses that match up with your commitment cycle (eg, meet work goals for one day = play turns that day)
• It's good for use to be self-limiting. eg, KoL only lets you play a certain number of turns per day, so it's hard for a reward to turn into an unregulated binge.
• For me it helps for the reward to be purely hedonistic. If it were something deeply meaningful, I'd risk motivated-cognitioning myself into deciding that I should do it even if I didn't earn it.

Questions and answers

Is it really a good idea to toy with a potentially harmful addiction in order to regulate your behavior?

You know what else is a disproportionately behavior-shaping response that people engage in even when it's harmful? Ugh fields. Procrastination. Depressive withdrawal. Maybe it takes something equally irrational to get past them.

If the whole point is that the behavior is abnormally compelling, will you really follow through on withholding it?

My process only worked because even though I wanted to play KoL so badly I'd push myself in new and insane ways, I was also able to deny it to myself. 

To some extent that's just me -- I've always been hyper-responsive to gamification, rules, and reward/punishment systems. But I think there are a few features of what I did that could be generalized:

• The punishment was small. If I missed one day, the next day I could start with a clean slate.
• Because I'd already succeeded a number of times, I didn't feel like maintaining the system was setting myself up for long-term deprivation and failure, or punishing myself for not doing something impossible.
• Because I was pleased with and proud of how the system was working out for me, accepting a punishment felt like a way of showing that it was for real.

It also illustrates a couple of general good motivation hacking / gamification practices:

• The rules were ones I'd created and accepted myself. There was no one else to blame and no way to feel like a victim.
• I'd written the rules down (and signed them), so I couldn't conveniently forget them or decide I hadn't really meant it.
• Sometimes people are at elevated risk of falling off the wagon after they break a streak. I think this didn't happen because even after breaking my streak of work goals, I still had the chance to maintain a streak of following the rules -- by accepting the penalty and continuing to try. 

What about rewards that actively impede your goals? 

For example, if I had been binge drinking every day, the best way to make progress on my work would have been to binge drink less.

A: That might be a fake alternative. If it wasn't in my power to immediately and completely stop drinking, maybe transforming it into a reward would help me bootstrap my way to doing better and drinking less. 

On the other hand, that also sounds like a bullshit excuse that someone would use to keep binge drinking when they might really be capable of cutting back. I do see the risk. My advice would be:

1. Be honest with yourself about the extent to which your paraddiction is a direct cause of your problems and/or the main problem you currently have. If so then you should start with a strong prior that anything that maintains it will be bad for you.
2. If you do get a reward system going, do a high-level review to see if it's making your life better or worse on net.
3. Once you're past the initial activation barrier, actively look for other primary or secondary reinforcers that could start to replace your paraddiction. 

Are you saying I should go get sort-of-addicted to something?

First of all, definitely not. I'm not sure if anyone should ever take life advice from me, but  especially not if it's about a behavioral pattern that could go very badly wrong. 

I have toyed with doing this from time to time, taking up dumb little mobile games with brain-hijacking reinforcement loops just so I'd have something to reward myself with. But I don't even know how I'd find something I wanted as badly as I wanted to play KoL! Overall, this advice applies best if you already have a paraddiction in your life. 

A third option might be to take something it's normal to want desperately and hold that back as a reward. Food? Sex? Sleep? If you fail to hit your goals rarely enough, missing out won't do too much harm. But that feels fundamentally inhumane in a way that withholding a non-necessary reward doesn't.

I wonder if paraddictions naturally appear when they might be useful and go away when they're not. That is: If life sucks (in at least one domain), it's easy to develop a dependence on whatever lets you escape. If your life improves, that almost by definition means that you're developing options that are close to your paraddiction on some combination of reward and meaningfulness. Then you're less likely to be dependent on any one thing. That again would suggest that this advice is most applicable if you already have both an existing paraddiction and a lot of room to make improvements in your life. 

Other risks

• As with all gamification, this kind of system relies on extrinsic rewards. Some people feel that this erodes intrinsic motivation. In my life this has consistently proven false when the extrinsic motivation can bootstrap me up to achieving intrinsic rewards. YMMV.
• It keeps a risky, time-consuming compulsion in your life -- not just early on, when it was there anyway, but later, when you might be able to let it go. This could increase the risk of lapses.
• If the reward is a game, or something else with repeated engagement loops, it might keep you in an easy-gratification mindset that makes it harder to engage with real work. I don't know about this either way but if you're the kind of person who does "dopamine fasts" it might be a consideration.

Conclusions

I got tremendous benefits from taking a compulsive behavior and regulating it for use as a motivator to do other things. I'm not sure if it's possible, or desirable, to engineer situations like that but if there's already something that you find disproportionately and intensely reinforcing, you might be able to put it to use. 

This advice is potentially dangerous depending on the nature of your (para)addiction and its current effects on your life, so you probably should not listen to me without hard consideration and input from others.

I would love to hear if anyone else has tried something this, if they think it worked well, and how they responded if the motivator started losing its power. 

1. ^{^}

   If you weren't around for the golden age of games made in Adobe Flash, substitute "mobile games"

2. ^{^}

   Also notable for peak Gen-X-ironic stick figure art, They Might be Giants references, and a 15+ year catalog of interacting mechanics that makes Magic: the Gathering look tastefully minimalist.

3. ^{^}

   KoL players, this is a simplification but you know what I mean. 

4. ^{^}