Streaks Are Broken

Lex Friedman, writing at Lex on Tech about streaks in apps and games:

A streak is a loss-aversion machine you carry in your pocket. Every day you extend it, it gets a little more painful to lose, which is exactly why day 500 is harder to skip than day five. Apps with streaks aren’t building habits. They’re building hostages.

As someone who’s addicted to checkmarks, I feel the pain of being bombarded by streaks acutely. They’re everywhere, and they’re alluring.

I play six short games as part of my daily morning routine (Wordle, the Apple News+ Mini Crossword, Good Sudoku, Jeopardy!, Wheel of Fortune, and Family Feud), and each one of them has some kind of streak mechanic meant to keep you coming back every day. They’re built into social media (thanks, Snapchat), fitness apps, and habit trackers. At one point, even my banking app encouraged me to build a daily streak of checking my balance by literally paying me to do so. (Joke’s on them; I would do that anyway because I’m a budgeting maniac.)

I believe there are specific instances where streaks can be beneficial, such as when you’re just starting to build a new habit and need all the motivation you can get. But before long, the point of any streak becomes keeping the streak alive, not actually improving your life or having fun, and that’s when they become a problem.

This is yet another example of companies trying to hack our natural brain processes for financial gain. Using positive reinforcement, they shift our motivation away from the initial intent (such as learning a new language) to a goal that benefits them (opening the app every day to continue the streak, thus boosting usage metrics and company profits). On the surface, it seems like a fun mechanic, and maybe that really is the intention behind some who implement it, but the impact is detrimental to users in the long run.

It was a hard-fought battle, but I’ve gotten to a place where I actively choose not to care about streaks of any kind. (The one exception is my 2,300-day Snapchat streak with my spouse, which in my heart of hearts I wish would break so I could get out from under the weight of it.) I ignore them as much as I can, and if I ever notice that I’ve broken one, I just move on and let it go without even looking for a loophole to restore it. I’ve had to do this for my own mental health; otherwise, I’d spend my days obsessively extending streaks that do nothing to make my life better.

This dynamic has also led me to cut down on the tracking apps I use. Habit trackers are amazing for forming new habits from scratch, but after a certain amount of time, any good habit tracker should render itself obsolete. If an action is truly a habit, you don’t need any external signal to perform it. At that point, tracking becomes all about streaks, and that’s where I say, “Thank you, next.”

Streaks aren’t required to have a successful app or business. I’m grateful for developers like Rebecca Owen of Chronicling who purposefully exclude streaks so users don’t feel pressured or guilty when tracking events. And I also appreciate what Florian Grossmann has done with On This Day, where streaks are available but can be hidden completely with a single toggle. I turned streaks off the day I downloaded it and haven’t been bothered by them since.

The fewer streaks in my life, the better. May it be so for each of us.

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My thanks to Lex for writing about this subject, which I obviously feel passionate about as well. If you haven’t yet, check out his new website, Lex on Tech, where he's doing some really interesting writing every day.

Phantom Stress

It’s a busy time of year for Apple fans and commentators. If past is precedent, we’ve got a lot to look forward to over the next two weeks:

• new iPhones, Apple Watches, and possibly other hardware announced this Wednesday
• online preorders for the new hardware this weekend
• major updates to the operating systems for every Apple product early next week
• new devices in customers’ hands and storefronts at the end of next week

That’s a lot to pack into such a short time period, and it’s part of why I enjoy this time of year so much.

Normally, all of this excitement comes with a ton of work for me. In addition to new iPhones, early September has to come to mean event coverage, visionOS review writing, and editing other OS reviews under short time constraints that have the potential to change as quickly as Apple can publish a footnote in a press release. In short, September used to be a whirlwind.

This year, the winds have died down. I’m not furiously writing chapters, sending off editing notes, testing last-minute beta changes, or outlining which parts of Apple’s announcement video I’ll have to take extra-detailed notes on. I’m just… getting ready to watch and react along with everyone else. There’s no stress at all.

So why is it that I’m feeling stressed all the same? As I read about the rumors and count down the days to the big event, I find there’s a pressure building within me, a feeling of urgency with no real source or outlet. It’s like there’s a voice telling me, “You’re missing something!” but I check my to-do list, and there’s nothing there.

I’m a naturally anxious person, so I’ve experienced this sort of thing before, but it’s been a while. This time around, I’ve put a label on it that I’m finding helpful: phantom stress. There isn’t actually anything wrong, but I’m used to being under a lot of pressure this time of year, and the gap between expectation and reality gets filled with worry and distress.

Basically, I’m stressing myself out about not having anything to stress about. Productive, right?

Maybe you’ve experienced something like phantom stress before. If so, you’re not the only one. It’s bizarre, and it’s ultimately pointless, but it’s human, too.

Our brains are amazing things that are far more capable than we often realize, and sometimes, that capability can have unexpected consequences. In my case, my brain is so used to running in overdrive this time of year that it’s searching for something to latch onto, some external deadline or task to direct its energy towards. That practical motivation may be missing, but the habitual energy is still there, spinning in circles, waiting for me to redirect it.

I guess that’s what I’m doing right now, writing this and forcing you to come along with me on such a meandering mental journey. Maybe this is my way of turning phantom stress into something positive – for me, at the very least, and hopefully for somebody else. Investing more energy into this little online space lately has been great for me on a lot of levels, and if a story I publish here does end up helping someone out there, then it’ll certainly all have been worth it.

Besides channeling my creative energy in a different direction, the other thing I’m trying to do is just take it easy on myself. It would be easy to beat myself up for wasting time on worrying for no reason, but I’m not sure that anyone’s ever shamed their mind into working better. The best thing I can do is recognize this feeling for what it is, remind myself it’s temporary, and do what I can to make something positive out of it.

Eventually, my mind will adapt to a new schedule, the sting of realizing things are so different will wear off, and I’ll feel lighter. I look forward to it. But even as I’m working through it all, I’m not going to let phantom stress keep me from enjoying a time that I truly love. I’ll carry on and lean into the strangeness of going into an event day on the sidelines. After all, there’s no time to fold to the pressure when there are so many exciting things to focus on.