Why You Should Stop Gamifying Your Health and Fitness
Whenever there’s a task you don’t want to do, there’s a guaranteed way to feel worse: just add a whole layer of guilt and frustration on top. Bars you’re bound to break, icons you don’t care about, registration notifications that annoy you when you’re just trying to relax. Yep, gamification.
Before we talk about all the reasons why gamification is bullshit, let’s talk about why games work the way they do. In a role-playing game, you earn “experience points” as a metaphor for real life experiences. You are making fake money because it is supposed to mimic the concept of real money. You have been given a quest because in real life people work hard to achieve goals. Games have these metrics and structures because the game is trying to mimic real life .
Real life does not require fake indicators. You don’t have to earn XP because you get real experience. You don’t need a fake quest because you are on a real quest. Whether it’s deadlifting 500 pounds or improving your cholesterol levels the next time you go to the doctor, your health habits have real rewards and consequences.
So let’s take a look at how gamification of healthy habits can backfire. Lifehacker staff writer Steven Johnson explains the game’s most common tactics here , and it’s well worth reading if you haven’t checked it out yet. Usually gamification is just manipulation and often has more disadvantages than advantages.
Instead of chasing game metrics, what if you focused on the real results of your habits? That’s what I mean.
Strive for Consistency, Not Stripes
Stripes entertain you during good times with the express purpose of disappointing you when you are wrong. And this is a particularly harmful type of misdirection because people easily become more focused on the lane than on whatever reason they did that lane in the first place.
I contend that if you ever get caught up in chasing a lane, you must break it before the lane interrupts you. No healthy habit should be done every day without fail. While rest days are good and often necessary for physical and mental reasons , do you think your body can tell the difference between 9,999 steps and 10,000?
Long term consistency is what matters to your body. The stripes only matter to application developers. Why do you think the Apple Watch wants you to stand still for 12 hours every day? This means that you wear their watch all your waking hours . The “stand” goal is programmed into the app because it benefits Apple, not you.
So how do you achieve consistency? Well, you can keep track of your workouts or habits on a calendar or workout log . No, I’m not just reinventing the series. If you did your habit seven times the first week, six times the next week, and then four or five times a week for the rest of the year, excluding holidays, you were extremely consistent. (Thanks to the Peloton app for counting weeks in a row, not days.)
In this case, the streak tracking app will consider you a loser. But if it was training, you’ll end the year much fitter, stronger, and more flexible than when you started. If you were to floss your teeth these days, you’ll end the year with a much lower dentist bill. You get the idea.
I like to think of habits not as streaks on a calendar, but like coins in a bank. Every day when you eat a vegetable or go for a run, think about the fact that you are tossing another coin. Sometimes it’s a penny, sometimes it’s a quarter, sometimes it’s nothing, but no matter what, this jar fills up.
Compete in real competitions, not fake competitions
Some apps try to harness the power of the community by asking you to join a group of people you barely know, either to cheer each other up with emoji or to challenge each other on the leaderboard (or both).
But… who cares about the people on that leaderboard? If they are not well matched, you don’t need to beat them. And if they’re not your real friends, you won’t care about their high fives.
Now, here’s another idea. What if you had real teammates and gym buddies? What if you signed up for a real competition? This can take many forms, but here are a few examples:
- Run the local 5K and try to finish in the top X percent of your age group.
- Competing in something like a powerlifting competition , where you try to show the highest amount possible on the day of the competition.
- Join a recreational sports league and get to know the members of your softball/football/pickleball team while crushing your opponents or empathizing with your inability to do so.
Pursue goals, not quests
Gamification, like the overrated SMART goal system , is what you end up with when you let someone else tell you what your goals are. No one is born with a deep, sincere desire to earn a digital badge.
So why did you go to the gym if not for the digital badges? Probably because you wanted to get in shape. Well, what does it mean for you? Squatting with a certain weight? Walk without stopping and rest? Cleaning up the driveway without spending the next day on the couch?
Whatever it is, it’s your Big Goal. Next, you need small process goals. that mean something. You have to squat 200 pounds before you squat 500. You have to follow a good training program to get your squat up at all. So your process goals could be (1) finding a good training program, (2) following the specified program, (3) completing the program on schedule, and (4) retesting the max squat.
You don’t need stripes, badges, or marks to do any of this. You don’t have to chase a fake target to be able to chase a real target. Just go for the real stuff and get rid of the digital middlemen.