Can we get Addicted to our Goals?
Applying the addictive qualities of video games to the work we avoid.
August 18, 2025
People who put their goals above everything.
Of course, I'm talking about people with an addiction.
I remember hearing about one guy who spent $600 dollars on an anime girl computer game, and when confronted by his wife, he doubled down!
They ended up getting divorced. That's real motivation.
Then, we could theoretically use that system to become "addicted" (in a sense) to the work we should be doing.
The key word is theoretically - so we're going to find out.
We can't exactly replicate substance abuse. Addictive substances like fentanyl or nicotine cause real changes in your brain that some system or routine cannot replicate.
But, there are plenty of people with behavioral addictions that we can learn from.
1. Reverse engineer a behavioral addiction.
2. Turn it into a system.
3. Use it that system to motivate myself.
And then in 3 months, we'll come back to it and see what worked and what didn't.
I do want to say that addictions of any kind are harmful. I'm comfortable generalizing that.
What we're doing here is learning from behavioral addictions and how they're encoded in our brains to help us get more motivated. I'm going to joke around in this blog, please don't take that as me making light of or trivializing addictions. I've spent enough time in pretty gnarly addiction wards from my old job to know how absolutely crushing addictions can be. So if you're watching this and you're struggling, I wish you all the best.
- Do the thing (behavior or substance)
- It feels good.
- Dopamine is released which reinforces the behavior
- stop doing the thing
- good feeling goes away
- Cortisol and Adrenaline are released which contribute to a feeling of stress and anxiety.
- we want to feel good again
- Dopamine isn't just released when we get a reward, it's also released when we expect or anticipate a reward.
- we start craving the behavior or substance
- Dopamine is released because of the anticipation which again reinforces the importance of the behavior
And then we're back to Binge.
And as the cycle continues, it gets stronger and stronger.
"Addictive behaviors," like scrolling through social media, aren't inherently bad... But, doing them all the time strengthens that cycle so much that we feel we HAVE TO play them.
That's addiction. And it's exactly what we're going for. The kind of motivation that says: "I have to do this"
The key here is a reward. If we can get the reward right, we might be onto something.
Research shows that rewards are more powerful if they are 4 things:
1) if they are definite
2) if they are immediate
3) if they are large
4) if they are easy
If I said, you can give you 100 dollars today or 500 dollars in a year, most people will take the 100 today. It's immediate.
If I said I'll give you 100 dollars, or you have a 20% chance of 500 dollars, most would take the guaranteed 100. (although now that all my friends are addicted to sports betting... maybe I'm wrong.)
I'm also comfortable assuming that it's easier to get addicted to better rewards.
That's probably why we have more people addicted to alcohol than to lettuce.
If we want to get addicted to our goals:
- We have to make better rewards. Ones that are definite, immediate, large and easy
- We have to make a series of rewards so that we can get more addicted over time. Remember the cycle.
- We have to add a some kind of punishment to push us back into the addiction after a certain amount of time. Like withdrawal.
The best thing that comes to mind...
Video games are perfect because they can be massively addicting- while also being very difficult.
Let's look at why:
Something like a video game is a great reward:
1) It's definite: your console or computer will always turn on, and your game will always load
2) It's immediate: it takes about 30 seconds to turn on and load up a game
3) It's large: many video games are awesome and fun as hell. It's a great reward.
4) It's easy: many video games are easy to start, allowing you to stack small wins in the beginning. There's an important challenge curve that we'll talk about later.
The disclaimer here is that I am not a gamer. I played pokemon on the game boy advance back in the day, and I played PUBG on my school ipad in high school. So I got most of this information by observing others.
Lets go.
We could go the Strava route and allow you to compete with followers.
But for now, I want to also see how picking a person to beat can impact this.
Just pick someone who is chasing a similar or same goal, and commit to putting in more effort.
This is similar to the Rival in Pokemon. Who you battle 4 or 5 times over the course of the game as you both get stronger.
I'm also going to make sure I structure competition such that it's effort based, not reward based, because I want to judge the things I have full control over.
My rival is a guy named Noah Rolette. He's a founder of RawDawg Run Club, an Austin TX based run club that looked grimy and fun. I followed them for a while, but then they came out with some merch that never got delivered. Instead of taking accountability, Noah travelled the world and dodged questions.
I don't hate the guy, he's cool and obviously smart, but selling merch and not taking accountability doesn't sit well with me. I want to beat him.
So I will be tracking how much content he posts, and I will ensure that I am always posting more.
The best games get more and more difficult as you move through them to create a feedback loop. The levels make you better, which allow you to unlock harder levels, which make you better, and the cycle continues
If a game gets this wrong, the motivation to play goes down the tubes:
- either you get stuck on a level that you're not ready for and quit
- Or the whole game is so easy it's boring.
According to early research on Self-Determination Theory, there is an optimal level of difficulty that promotes a feeling of challenge, but also efficacy.
Finding this optimal level would be pretty difficult. But hugely impactful. That's the goal.
It's not something I will do perfectly on the first try. So we'll come back to it after some testing.
Imagine if Pokemon was just the champion fight.
You started with Charmander (cause you're not some dweeb who picked the turtle) and then you fought wild Pidgeys for hours until you got to the Indigo Plateu. That would suck.
Instead Pokemon gives us small wins.
Trainers: like Rival fights, gym leaders, and bug catcher joey.
Leveling up: so our pokemon can learn new moves or evolve from some dumb helmet dinosaur to the actual god of the sky
All of these are little wins that reward and incentivize us to keep going, while also preparing us for the final boss.
Without any indication of small wins or little rewards, the game would be boring and un-addictive.
And on top of those small goals, the progress is obvious. You see the XP bar go up on each pokemon, that tells you how close you are to the next level (or the next small win).
If the big goal is distant, then rewards won't be immediate, and it's hard to stay motivated.
To counter that, we're going to do what pokemon does and break down goals into smaller challenges, and show consistent progress so that we're constantly and immediately rewarded with wins.
We're getting there, but there's more...
A lot of mobile games give you rewards for logging in every day, which encourages you to come back, but eventually I feel like they get old.
Games like League of Legends and Fortnite have Seasons:
Each Season lasts between 3-4 months and has exclusive rewards and changes. If you miss a reward from that season, it's gone forever, so you're encouraged to come back to the game every few months.
This lines up pretty well with motivation. Sometimes you don't want to do something forever. Doing it for a season gives you a definite end date.
The Goal Gradient Effect shows that moving toward a finish line increases motivation and effort towards a goal. So having some kind of finish line is important.
I could see this being really useful for things like:
- Temporary breaks from social media or alcohol
- Short term goals that you want to do once, but not forever *(running a marathon)*
- Periods of really difficult work and sacrifice to set yourself up for the future
*As I edit this, I'm realizing this is a pretty long blog. There isn't too much more, but if you're still reading freakin kudos on the attention span.*
A game dies when people stop working on it. And a game thrives when it continues to evolve.
A good example of this is League of Legends.
It came out in 2009, and still has between 10 and 11 million players every day. Apparently because they're consistently adding and improving the game.
As we grow, we also change. And our goals should change as much as we do.
Having a set time to re-evaluate goals is important to staying motivated, and to staying addicted.
I think this lines up really well with seasons. After each season, we'll look back on the goals and the progress and see what needs to change.
Many games have used gambling as a way to draw people in.
Research shows that unpredictable rewards activate different parts of your brain than predictable ones. And that unpredictable rewards might even be more pleasurable than predictable ones.
To harness this- we need a bit of unpredictability when it comes to rewards. But, I also want the stability of predictable rewards. They activate different parts of your brain's reward systems, so let's use both.
For every win, there should be a set reward. Something good, but not amazing. Then, there should be a random chance to get nothing extra, a slightly better reward, and an awesome reward.
The show Solo-Leveling does this well. When the character completes daily quests, he gets a set reward, and then a random one as well.
I think doing both will make working towards our goals more addictive. So, set up a mediocre reward for various actions and then a wheel that you spin after completing a number of actions in a row with some awesome rewards (like getting sushi for dinner).
Getting both random and predictable rewards is great, but what happens if you want something different?
This is why many games have a "shop" feature.
Instead of grinding away for an item, or hoping you get it randomly, you can save a resource and buy a specific reward.
I like this idea because in goal achievement and video games, rewards often fall into a cycle:
- If you beat a Pokemon trainer, your reward is a stronger Pokemon, which makes you able to fight more trainers.
- If you run a lot, your reward is the ability to run longer distances, which allows you to run even more.
I think that cycle can get pretty repetitive and therefore boring.
And for me, there is nothing less motivating than being bored.
So let's spice it up a little with a shop.
Having a shop allows you to exchange some kind of currency for rewards that fall outside the cycle.
Things like:
- Get sushi tonight (I freakin' love sush)
- Do nothing all afternoon
- 2 day trip to beach
Something we often lose in motivation is BALANCE.
I hope that allowing rewards that are completely separate from the goals will help to maintain balance in my life.
After all, there is no point of doing any of this, if you're not enjoying it.
A lot of people (myself included) have a problem prioritizing.
A buddy of mine recently tried to:
- quit social media
- quit smoking cigarettes
- start running every day
- and stop watching adult content (let's keep it PG here boys)
All at the same time.
He failed all of them... Duh.
He wasn't prioritizing. And as a result, he made no progress in any of those areas, and burnt out completely.
Pokemon inadvertently created a great system for this:
- You can only carry 6 pokemon at a time. Every other pokemon you have stays in the PC.
- Pokemon only get stronger if you use them in battle
- Which means you can only make 6 pokemon stronger at a time
This also means there is a cost to adding a new Pokemon, because you have to take the time to make it as strong as the rest of your team.
If you've been rocking with Geodude for a while and put 10 hours intro training him up into a Graveler, but now you want to swap him for a new Rhyhorn, you're going to lose those 10 hours.
That cost forces you to prioritize.
Addiction is all about prioritization. You put one thing above all else.
That also happens to be a pretty good definition of motivation.
So, there should be a cost to switching goals. And a strict limit on the number of goals you can have at a time.
We'll make it so that goals can only be switched between seasons. Because switching a ton ruins consistency and completely crushes the possibility of getting addicted to the work.
So far we've made goals easy and simple.
And we've added various rewards to reinforce behaviors.
But, addictions aren't just powerful because of the positive reinforcement of a reward:
We need to add a withdrawal system.
A punishment
Withdrawal is the time when you're not binging. It's an incredibly powerful tool to force you into anticipating a reward.
Here's why it works:
- Withdrawal sucks. I used to work with people dealing with substance abuse. Withdrawal SUCKS.
- Removing that suck reinforces the use of that substance or behavior that made you feel better. *(that's negative reinforcement)*
- Withdrawal also gets worse for a while before it gets better. Which adds urgency, or a deadline, to getting your fix.
To really get addicted, we need a Withdrawal Mechanism. Which means we need a way to make not-working-towards-our-goals... suck. And we need that suck to get worse over time.
I don't really know if there's a way to do this that's both effective and ethical...
So instead, I'm going to say we lose access to rewards if we miss something. And we have to buy it back.
So missing 1 day of a daily task is cheap to buy back. But missing 3 days in a row will bankrupt me.
Something like that...
I do fear getting super far into debt will make someone just give up on the goal, so maybe there's a grace period where you can get it back faster.
But I'm not super sure yet.
Video games track all your data for you. They track experience points and items and skills and so that it's super easy to see progress.
Having a Built in Data Tracker is Important because it gives us constant feedback on how close we are to our next small win - which is motivating and addictive.
My data tracker is a very simple excel spreadsheet, where I track all of my daily progress tasks, hours worked, XP, coin, and Rival's stats.
I'm sure I'm misguided on a few of these and probably missing some. I know the major limiting factor is that this is mostly self-policing, but that's the world of self-improvement so I'll suck it up.
The goal of this experiment, and of WiseDown Research Co. as a whole, is to give dudes the tools to Be Better. We do real experiments, we simplify the science and our findings, then you can use that science to improve yourself.
I'm not even CLOSE to the first person to consider gamifying goal achievement. There are some really cool projects out there right now.
*(I really like this one by HeyAlbert - here's the video of how me made it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EW8uhqEsNKc)*
But, I haven't seen nearly as much research or science integrated into anything else.
So maybe this will be better. Not right now, but eventually.
Unpredictable vs Predictable Rewards:
Optimal Level of Difficulty and some data on Competition: