Reward (Bribe) myself with an iPhone

[dmaxdmax]

As a new empty nester I find myself wanting 3 things:

To meditate
To relearn the clarinet
An X-S (probably)

I’m going to use the phone as a reward for establishing discipline. I’m thinking that I get to buy for a new watch after:

Using Headspace 6 days out of 7 for one month

Practicing 6 days out of 7 AND logging a total of 30 hours.

Any thoughts?

 

[Lioness~]

Sounds like an undisciplined question, and that you seem to get it backwards

• Do you meditate to feel that you deserve the phone? If so, just buy the darn phone, and get over with the deserving thing.

• Set up to do meditation daily, for the sake of meditation. Not for anything else.

• Skipping one day a week isn’t going to help your meditation. Bargaining in terms of practice isn’t going to serve you in any way.

• If you can’t manage meditate every day, and know you have 'disciplinary' problems. Try another way of embracing meditation and yourself. Maybe practicing and do loving kindness meditations to start with, it sure can make it easier to be with yourself and your mind.

• Meditation isn’t an accomplishing thing, it’s about creating a habit that you enjoy and grow in. Sure there are days when maybe sitting 5 minutes even will feel like an effort. But once you often sit down, it’s often easier to continue to sit. Sometimes those 5 minutes will sure be enough, and sometimes it will lead into long very interesting meditations.

• The consciousness have many magical ways to lead us, while the ego have just as stupid ways of preventing awareness to grow.

I’ve practiced meditation a looong time, but only the latest yrs have it been a daily habit.


I actually practice the same thing with teeth brushing. Sometimes when very tired and/or already got to bed, I fool myself with, ahh get up, you only have to brush 1 minute. But once doing it, it will usually be the 2 or 3 minutes anyway. Not always though.


It’s all about that little step. And once we have established a habit of continuum, things gets easier and a lot more interesting down the road.

 

[yaxomoxay]

As a new empty nester I find myself wanting 3 things:

To meditate
To relearn the clarinet
An X-S (probably)

I’m going to use the phone as a reward for establishing discipline. I’m thinking that I get to buy for a new watch after:

Using Headspace 6 days out of 7 for one month

Practicing 6 days out of 7 AND logging a total of 30 hours.

Any thoughts?

Meditation IS a reward. If you link it to any other reward then it will become a mechanical task, which is NOT (see the meditation thread), and it will be forever linked with external circumstances which is exactly what you’re trying to avoid.

At any rate, I am reading “The Willpower Instinct” right now, which is not your typical self-help book (it’s definetely not). One of its most interesting chapters is exactly on this topic, that is how we reward ourselves when we do something good and how, in the end, we use this as an excuse (rooted in biological reasons) to end up doing worse. Even more so this is true if the “bad behavior/reward” is planned in advance. The book also mentions several researches on the topic, including one according to which people who share “good stuff” on social media (“save the whales!”, “help this”, “share and we will reach this objectives”) are way less prone to donate money to charity or to do any actual volunteering/activism but they end up doing the opposte. Another research actually shows up that if people reply negatively to a sexist question (“do you think that women are stupid?”) tend to be way more sexist when they have to assign jobs specifically because they rewarded themselves (and their egos) by identifying themselves as non sexist. The task-reward relationship is a very dangerous game.
I urge you to read this book asap, certainly before you begin your journey.

(In short, buying an iPhone should be only a financial and operational decision IMO).

 

[D.T.]

Yes, do all that - don't make life complicated.

 

[dmaxdmax]

Sounds like an undisciplined question, and that you seem to get it backwards

• Do you meditate to feel that you deserve the phone? If so, just buy the darn phone, and get over with the deserving thing.

• Set up to do meditation daily, for the sake of meditation. Not for anything else.

• Skipping one day a week isn’t going to help your meditation. Bargaining in terms of practice isn’t going to serve you in any way.

• If you can’t manage meditate every day, and know you have 'disciplinary' problems. Try another way of embracing meditation and yourself. Maybe practicing and do loving kindness meditations to start with, it sure can make it easier to be with yourself and your mind.

• Meditation isn’t an accomplishing thing, it’s about creating a habit that you enjoy and grow in. Sure there are days when maybe sitting 5 minutes even will feel like an effort. But once you often sit down, it’s often easier to continue to sit. Sometimes those 5 minutes will sure be enough, and sometimes it will lead into long very interesting meditations.

• The consciousness have many magical ways to lead us, while the ego have just as stupid ways of preventing awareness to grow.

I’ve practiced meditation a looong time, but only the latest yrs have it been a daily habit.


I actually practice the same thing with teeth brushing. Sometimes when very tired and/or already got to bed, I fool myself with, ahh get up, you only have to brush 1 minute. But once doing it, it will usually be the 2 or 3 minutes anyway. Not always though.


It’s all about that little step. And once we have established a habit of continuum, things gets easier and a lot more interesting down the road.

It's remembering to do the first 5 seconds that's the issue. I use my phone/iPad/mac every day and info on the new models is in my face constantly -- a reminder to keep at it. A one month timeline is arbitrary but about the right length of time for me to discover if I'm getting anything meaningful from meditation or music. By then I will either have established new habits or ditched them.

Tying a new phone to any of this is nothing more than a game I'm playing with myself. Like most people, I don't *need* a new phone at all but the X camera is pretty sweet.

The goal is to play and meditate every day but thinking of 6 allows for success without perfection. It's like I told my college Freshmen girls, don't aim for 4.0 because a 3.9 should be cause for celebration, not self flagellation.