Why You Keep Doing the Things You Said You'd Stop Doing

Find the hidden rewards that are running your life.

You’ve probably had this experience. You set a goal, genuinely mean it, and then spend the next six months watching yourself not pursue it.

And the weird part is that you’re not lazy. You’re working constantly. You’re just working toward something else entirely, something you never consciously chose but somehow ended up optimizing for anyway.

That’s a misaligned incentive problem. And there’s a meaningful difference between this and being lazy.

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What’s Actually Happening

Every system, including you, does what it gets rewarded for. The rewards don’t have to be formal or conscious, as long as they are consistent.

Maybe you keep saying yes to things you resent because the short-term reward of being seen as reliable outweighs the long-term cost of being overextended.

Maybe you avoid difficult conversations because the discomfort of having them is immediate and the benefit of having had them is weeks away.

Or maybe you spend your evenings scrolling instead of writing because scrolling delivers a small hit of something now and writing needs likes to deliver dopamine, which will not come for a very long time. Ask me how I know.

None of this makes you a bad person. It makes you a person. The system is just doing what systems do.

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Step 1: Name the Behavior You’re Auditing

Pick the thing you keep doing that you don’t want to do, or the thing you keep not doing that you say you want to do.

Be specific. “I procrastinate” is not useful. “I open my email first thing every morning even though I’ve said I won’t” is useful. “I don’t exercise” is vague. “I sign up for gym sessions and cancel them the morning of” is something you can actually work with.

The more specific you are, the more honest the audit gets. Which is also why it’s tempting to stay vague.

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Step 2: Map What Your System Actually Rewards

Ask what happens, concretely, when you do the behavior you’re trying to change. Then ask what you’d lose if you stopped.

This is where it gets uncomfortable, because the rewards are often embarrassing.

Staying busy rewards you with an identity. Complaining about your job rewards you with commiseration and belonging. Avoiding a hard conversation rewards you with the temporary absence of conflict. Checking your phone rewards you with the possibility, however slim, that something interesting happened in the last four minutes.

Now leave that embarassment aside for a second. The audit asks you to see them clearly, not to feel bad about them.

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Step 3: Identify the Loop

Now we connect them. If you do the behavior, you get the reward. Because you get the reward, the behavior makes sense to repeat. Because it makes sense to repeat, you repeat it. The loop closes and gets a little stronger every time.

Draw it out on paper if you can. Something about making the loop visible, rather than just knowing it exists in the abstract, changes how trapped by it you feel.

I say this as someone who drew a loop about his own avoidance of admin work and then immediately had to go do admin work.

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Step 4: Locate the Delay

The reason changing behavior is hard is that the rewards for new behavior are almost always delayed, while the rewards for old behavior are almost always immediate.

You stop saying yes to everything, and the immediate experience is guilt and the vague terror that people will think less of you.

The reward, feeling less overextended and more in control of your time, comes months later.

The loop doesn’t care about months later. The loop cares about right now. So look at the immediate bad feeling as the pain of breaking the loop, which, in this case, can be called a vicious circle.

When you understand the delay, you stop treating your own resistance as a character flaw and start treating it as a structural problem with a structural solution.

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Step 5: Find the Leverage Point

Not all the rewards in your loop are equal. One of them is load-bearing. It’s the one the whole structure depends on.

For the person who can’t stop overcommitting, it might not be the fear of disappointing people in general. It could be the specific fear of disappointing one person whose approval they’ve been chasing since 1997.

For the person who can’t sit with unfinished work, it might not be perfectionism broadly but the very specific panic of being seen as someone who doesn’t follow through. Hi, it's me.

The leverage point is the reward you’d be most reluctant to give up. Which is exactly how you know it’s the right one.

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Step 6: Pick a Measurable Signal

You need something small and observable to know whether anything is shifting. An actual data point you can check in a few weeks.

How many times did you do the thing you said you wouldn’t? How many times did you do the new thing instead? Aim for one measurable difference between this month and last month.

Small is fine. Small is actually the point.

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Step 7: One Next Move

The audit will surface more than you can act on. That’s by design. You act on one thing.

Pick the smallest intervention that touches the leverage point. Don’t try to do a complete life overhaul at one. Run that one little thing consistently, for long enough to get past the delay period. Then check the signal.

I cannot stress enough how much of self-improvement fails because people do ten things at once and then can’t tell which one worked or didn’t.

Stop.

One move. Measure. Adjust.

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The Part Nobody Wants to Get To

At the end of this audit, you will almost certainly find that the behavior you’ve been judging yourself for makes complete sense given the system you’re living inside.

You want to go to bed earlier, but every night you find yourself watching the third episode of something you don’t even like because you’re avoiding lying in the dark thinking about going to work tomorrow or something else you’re avoiding.

Or you keep writing that report every week, even though you know nobody reads them, because it shows effort, and effort is what gets noticed in performance reviews.

That’s not a reason to keep doing it. It’s a reason to stop blaming yourself for it and start changing the structure instead.

The goal is to build an environment where the thing you want and the thing you’re rewarded for are pointing in the same direction.

That gap, right there, is the whole problem. And it’s also the whole fix.

Happy building,

— R.