Everyday Rewards
A SENSE OF ENTITLEMENT
The payoff.
You’ve finished the training week—maybe even just one session. You’ve eaten in line with your (health, aesthetic or performance) goals. You might have strung a few early nights together or a mere couple of hours without looking at your phone.
You did the thing. Good job. Time to cash in.
A meal. A scroll. A sneaky treat. Some retail therapy. A drink or few. All stock standard. Any means—fair or foul—pitched and promoted by the well-meaning, so long as it arrives at some good end.
And end it assuredly does.
To be fair, it works for a while. You get yourself moving, string some sessions together, you build enough momentum to believe you’ve found something sustainable. A system. A way in. Which is why it’s so widely adopted. Entire training systems are built on it, and most behaviour change models lean heavily in the same direction.
And why the problem goes unnoticed. Because the issue isn’t that this approach fails, it’s that it works for the wrong reason. Motivation, we’re told, needs reinforcement. Effort requires recognition. Compliance commands compensation.
And damn near everybody has tried to get fit—or eat and sleep well—for a while.
Because the second you attach a reward to the behaviour, you define that behaviour as the cost. You may be thinking, err, yeah. Next to anything else I could be doing, the time, inconvenience, effort and discomfort all make it rather costly.
Which is both an interesting way of looking at it and a costly one.
It might seem harmless—and by comparison to not exercising, it is—but if you have any hope of staying fit, sooner or later, this is what, in engineering terms, they call a single point of failure.
Because rewarding exercise doesn’t reinforce the behaviour, it reframes it.
Dopamine is often reduced to a “pleasure chemical,” which is another close-but-no-cigar explanation that obscures more than it reveals.
A more accurate— and therefore useful— way to think about it is as a signal of salience. It tracks what the brain learns to care about, based not just on the activity itself but on its context—what precedes, what follows it, and what it predicts. In other words, the value is not fixed in the activity. It is assigned.
So when you consistently follow training—or other desired behaviour— with a reward, the brain does exactly what it is designed to do, and assigns value to the reward. The anticipation builds around what comes after, and the behaviour itself becomes the bridge to that outcome rather than the outcome itself.
The thing has now been voluntarily tagged as something to get through. The price you pay. The unpleasant bit before the good part. And the "reward"—whatever form it takes—becomes relief, escape, the thing you actually want.
The same pattern appears in more structured forms. Tracking, logging, sharing, and building streaks shift focus from the behaviour to the scoreboard. Which works until the streak breaks, or the novelty wears off, or life disrupts the pattern. Then motivation collapses, because the behaviour was never valued, only the metric was.
If the act only feels worthwhile once it has been seen, then the act is not the reward—the response is. Remove the audience, and the structure weakens. What remains is not a practice, but a performance.
You decide where the value lives. And so through reward you don’t simply overlook the agency you can bring to bear on this mechanism of motivation; you turn it against you.
A dynamic amplified by the modern day, where daily life is saturated with low-effort stimulation: coffee paired with scrolling, music layered over everything, notifications punctuating the day. Cheap, no-effort hits of stimulation stacked on top of one another. Small peaks, constantly chased, each one followed—inevitably—by a dip.
Each minor in isolation, but taken together, they redraw your baseline. Dopamine responds less to any absolute value than to contrast, and when your day is filled with easy, immediate hits of stimulation, anything that requires sustained, undistracted effort— read anything worthwhile— begins to feel disproportionately difficult. Certainly so, relative to everything else.
So you sweeten the deal. And sour your chances.
All the while creating more reward rod for your own back, because whatever it was, that reward will soon lose its potency. And you’ve got to keep paying the piper.
But who are you horsetrading with? There is, of course, no distance between the body and —for want of a better term— self, but this illusion persists for most of us, myself included, so if we see unity of body and mind as a distant sun, in the meantime, we still have this schism to navigate.
And with any gap— any two objects, near or far— comes relationship.
And you are choosing to make it— your relationship to your body— transactional. Imagine that in any other context. Tell one of your mates you expect some sort of payment for your next visit. Not financial, necessarily, that would be unseemly. It doesn’t need to be a big deal, just a little sumthin. See how that lands.
And hey, if you want some extra motivation to exercise, run it by your partner.
Get ready to run.
And where I have made an arguably transactional— give-and-then-get— case before, this is less a shakedown than the simple observance of how things work.
Bringing us, once again, to your foot. And the rest of you.
You don’t reward yourself for taking the stairs down to breakfast in the morning. Or seek applause. No pat on the back because you didn’t throw yourself over the bannister to see if gravity was operating that day.
No, you accept gravity. You work with it. And you’re better for it. That’s the relationship. No celebration required. No incentive needed. Just alignment.
You might see this as hyperbole, and while I don’t suggest the effort or corresponding outcome are the same—certainly not as immediately realised—the ‘negotiation’ with what is is not analogous but the same.
Because you are negotiating nothing, and it is juvenile to think so.
Have a break. Have a KitKat. Have 15 if you want to, but let’s not forget that our physical capacities, while in part determined by age, stage, sleep, diet and so forth, are a direct reflection of our efforts in a specific fitness domain.
So in fitness terms, it’s always all very clear: you deserve what you have.
But it’s not just that any further effort to justify our choices, good or bad, with our reconciling of some universal ledger is a superfluous fairytale. After all, a story can be useful.
It’s that whatever justification you’ve conjured is more likely you trying to sand off the sharpest edge of all—knowing full well you don’t deserve it. Ask any addict. And more so, it’s just the sense of entitlement. You want a reward—for what? For not trashing the joint?
And besides—what’s in it for you? Are you serious? Well, if you’ve somehow missed the living-in-line-with-what-you-are memo, I can tell you it’s a damn sight better than an ice cream.
Or the alternative.
Nonetheless, it is hard work. But your discomfort, fatigue, and hunger are not the problem; they are the point. Assuming a common sense and, hopefully, integrated practice approach, these all serve as evidence—confirmation that you are on the path to what you want.
Effort that is alignment with what you are, not the fanciful and futile resistance to it.
And so the inversion is simple, but not easy:
You decide—accurately—to see the hard parts as the reward. You’re not pretending or forcing some positive spin, only recognising them for what they are: the very markers of the process working. And in doing so, you immediately switch this powerful driver of behaviour— the driver— to the solution side of the equation instead of the problem.
And so all deals are off the table. No carrot. No stick. Just alignment both with what you are, and when. Focused not on after but during.
And during is all there ever is.
Enjoy your weekend
- OLI