Best Practices

New York Times

a day ago

Every app I use is trying to get me to start a streak. My Kindle praises me when I read a few days in a row. The New York Times Games app gives me gold stars if I do the crossword puzzle every morning. The clothing resale site Poshmark offers me a vague promise of 'rewards' if I keep listing my old pants at a regular cadence. I like to think of myself as a person who can't be swayed by shallow blandishments, but I am attracted to these incentives. I'm a pleaser. If there's a good grade to be gotten, I want the A.
In her recent Times story about the benefits of streaks, Nell McShane Wulfhart humbly admits that she has run at least a mile a day for seven years and counting. I read this with a combination of awe and self-recrimination. She even ran her mile when she had Covid! She once ran it naked in a hotel room! This commitment to consistency and fitness seems noble, almost heroic. What am I doing with my life (besides selling my old pants)?
Well, I am flossing my teeth. I haven't flossed every single day for seven years, but I have flossed every day since the last time I went to the dentist, which was several months ago, and the pride I feel in this streak is completely out of proportion with the size of the achievement. I wouldn't dare miss a day at this point, not because I'm worried about tartar buildup, but because of how wildly good it feels, at the end of even the worst day, to be able to say, 'Well, at least I have my flossing streak.' I'm aware this sounds pathetic, but it works for me.
Once you're on a roll, each day that you add to your streak feels like a prize, an economist told Wulfhart. Of course you want to continue — there's so little in life that offers regular, guaranteed wins. Then there's the loss-aversion motivator: 'Research shows that once you're on a streak, the fear of losing it is stronger than the motivating power of just gaining another day,' Wulfhart writes. Yes, it feels good to tick off another day of flossing, but the idea of losing my months of perfect performance, the disappointment I'd feel in myself if I went back to being a mere mortal with no special dental regimen, keeps me at it.
We learn to love streaks as children, when good habits are gamified and there's no feeling so pleasurable as seeing the accumulation of metallic star stickers on a chart. Do we ever outgrow this? It's tempting to observe the patterns of one's life and think, Where might I start a streak? You're looking for things you're already doing that you could continue to do regularly. You're actively identifying things you can do that will make you proud of you.
Streaks are really just rituals dressed up in the language of self-optimization. A meditation streak is the same as a meditation practice, only with different framing. Whether we call the activity a streak or a practice, a ritual or a ceremony, it's serving a similar purpose: adding structure, purpose, predictability, meaning to our days.
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