Mowditate
In the article ‘Why Meditation Is So Hard to Turn into a Habit’, we looked at why ten minutes of meditation can have surprisingly poor odds against five minutes of social media. Our brain learns fairly quickly which behaviours pay off, immediate rewards have a major advantage, and five minutes on a smartphone can therefore turn into fifty with ease.
If this is how our brain works, could we not simply use these mechanisms to meditate more often?
Could we, in a sense, trick our brain? Yes! Well, actually no…
At least, we are not really tricking anything. After all, our brain does not contain a tiny control centre determined to stop us from meditating. What we can change are the conditions under which our brain learns a behaviour. And if we understand which conditions make it easier for a behaviour to be repeated, we can give our meditation practice a little helping hand.
That is essentially the idea behind gamification.
Why a Small Reward Can Make a Big Difference
We begin many things because of their long-term consequences. We exercise because we want to become fitter. We learn a language because we want to speak it one day. We save money because we want to do something with it later.
The problem is that while a long-term goal may prompt us to start something, it does not automatically make us want to do it again tomorrow.
Research on long-term goals reveals something interesting: immediate rewards may be more closely related to whether people persist with an activity than the long-term benefits that led them to start it in the first place.1
This sounds contradictory at first. You may go to the gym because you want to be fitter in a year. But whether you go again next week may also depend on whether today’s workout felt good in some way.
With meditation, this creates a problem. Many of its potential effects are not especially easy to attribute to a single session. Remember: perhaps you react a little less automatically in a situation, or notice earlier that you are stressed. These are valuable changes, but after ten minutes of meditation your brain does not automatically receive a message saying, ‘Congratulations! Your ability to notice your attention has just improved by 0.7 per cent.’
A pity, really.
A small, immediate response can therefore make something visible that might otherwise go unnoticed: you have just performed the behaviour you want to repeat.
This is where gamification can be useful.
Gamification uses individual elements familiar from games outside an actual game. These include progress indicators, points, challenges, streaks, and badges.2
The aim does not have to be making an activity as exciting as possible. A tick after a meditation is already a form of feedback. A statistic can show that occasional sessions are slowly becoming a regular practice. A badge can mark a milestone that would previously have been invisible.
The behaviour itself remains exactly the same: you meditated. Only now, the behavioural chain does not necessarily end with: Meditate → finished.
Instead, it becomes: Meditate → finished → small visible response.
This does not suddenly bring the long-term benefit of meditation into the present. But the behaviour itself now has an immediate consequence. That is an important distinction.
Your Brain Needs to Know What It Should Repeat
Imagine that you want to meditate every morning. On the first day, you do twenty minutes. On the second, the same. On the third, you oversleep; on the fourth, you have an appointment; on the fifth, you do not remember until the evening; and at the weekend, you really want to sleep in. You have a goal, but not yet a particularly stable structure. For habits, it matters not only what we do, but also the context in which we do it. When a behaviour repeatedly occurs under similar conditions, those conditions can increasingly become the trigger themselves.
Wanting to meditate more often is therefore a lovely goal, but it is not yet a particularly good plan. ‘After brushing my teeth, I meditate for five minutes’ is much more specific. Brushing your teeth becomes the cue for the behaviour that follows. You do not need to decide again every morning whether this might be a suitable moment to meditate. The same moment keeps appearing and keeps receiving the same response.
Eventually, a conscious decision can increasingly become a habit. That is not a trick. You are simply giving your brain a very good opportunity to learn an association.
Make the Desired Behaviour Ridiculously Easy
When starting new habits, we like to make an odd mistake: because the goal matters to us, we make the beginning especially big. ‘Starting tomorrow, I will meditate for thirty minutes every day.’
That sounds serious. Five minutes, by contrast, almost sounds a little ridiculous. But that can be an advantage. A habit can arise through repetition only if the behaviour actually happens. If thirty minutes regularly leads you to postpone meditation until later, thirty minutes may be worse for building your routine than five minutes you genuinely do.
Those five minutes are not a magic number. It could be three, seven, or ten. What matters is that the barrier is low enough for you to begin even on a somewhat chaotic Tuesday morning.
You can always sit for longer. The hardest part is often not minute six. It is minute zero. That is why the Open Meditation Timer is also a good choice. You can plan to do five minutes and then meditate for longer after all.
Make Progress Visible Before You Can Feel It
One of meditation’s curious qualities is that you can make progress without feeling particularly advanced.
Perhaps you meditated on twenty days this month. Without a record, however, you mainly remember the three days when you did not manage it.
A history does not change that retrospectively. It simply makes visible what actually happened.
The same is true of a badge. It does not make you more mindful. It is not proof that you are especially good at meditating. But it can mark a moment:
You came back. And again. And again.
This gives a visible trace to a behaviour whose effects are often difficult to observe. Gamification can therefore be understood less as an artificial reward machine and more as a way to make progress visible and provide an immediate response to behaviour.
But more reward is not automatically better. If small responses can help, we could simply keep taking the idea further.
Points for every minute of meditation. Experience points for breaths. Daily missions. Leaderboards. Coins. Levels. Bonus multipliers. A treasure chest after twenty minutes and perhaps a rare golden Mow if you meditate at exactly 6:37 a.m.
At some point, we would probably have developed a rather interesting game.
Just perhaps not a particularly good meditation app.
Gamification can support behaviour, but its effect depends on how it is designed. Not every game element suits every behaviour, and not every additional reward automatically makes an activity more meaningful.
With meditation, there is something else to consider: in the long term, it would be rather unfortunate if you stopped meditating because you wanted to meditate and did so only because an app gave you points for it.
The support should therefore not become more important than the behaviour it is meant to support.
That is precisely why Mowditate tries to use gamification quietly.
You can unlock a badge when you have achieved something. Statistics show you what you have already done. A streak can give you a small additional incentive to return for a few days.
But Mow does not want you to lie in bed with a fever after 463 days and still start a meditation in a panic because otherwise a number will reset to zero.
That is why Mowditate’s actual streak reward ends after just seven days. You are, of course, still welcome to keep meditating afterwards. Mow will cope; she is a strong cow.
Nor should something constantly jump out at you to remind you of possible badges or a new streak record. Mowditate is designed so that you can use these elements, but they never become the app’s priority.
The Reward Should Become a Bridge, Not the Destination
This is probably the most important idea behind meaningful gamification.
Especially at first, a small reward can help bridge the gap in time between a behaviour and its long-term effects. The tick appears today. You receive the badge today. Your statistics show you today that you meditated.
Meanwhile, repetition slowly creates something else.
The place becomes more familiar. The timing becomes more natural. Eventually, brushing your teeth automatically reminds you of meditation. You spend less time debating with yourself whether you really have five minutes today.
And perhaps at some point you notice something much more interesting: you no longer particularly need the badge.
You meditate because meditation is now part of your daily life. Perhaps also because you increasingly notice what it gives you in itself.
Then the small piece of external support has fulfilled its real purpose. It did not trick you; it helped you stay with a behaviour long enough for your brain to learn that it belongs in your daily life. If it is constantly learning anyway which situations lead to which behaviours and which behaviours are worth repeating, you do not need to fight it. You can actively use this process.
That naturally sounds considerably less spectacular than ‘Trick your brain—hack your dopamine system and reprogram your brain’. Mow offers her sincerest apologies for the clickbait… But it is the more useful idea.
Mowditate uses a few mechanisms that can make behaviour easier to repeat. You will already know many of them from advertising, social media, and games. At the same time, Mow refuses to turn them into the actual product. She also wants to show quite transparently here how such mechanisms work and how you can use them deliberately for yourself, rather than so often being merely their passive consumer.
Conclusion
- You are not really tricking your brain. You are changing the conditions under which it learns a new behaviour.
- Give your meditation a clear trigger, such as brushing your teeth or having your first cup of tea.
- Keep the initial barrier low enough that the meditation actually happens even on less-than-perfect days.
- Mow makes repetition and progress visible. A history, a tick, a streak, or a badge can provide an immediate response to behaviour that would otherwise be difficult to see.
- Small, immediate rewards can help you persist with long-term goals. But they should not become more important than the goal itself.
- If you eventually meditate not because of a tick, but because meditation is simply part of your daily life, the support has done exactly what it was meant to do.