In 1999, Janet Polivy and Peter Herman recruited eighty students and asked each of them to pick something to change over the next two weeks. Some chose to lose weight. Some chose to study more. A control group was told to change nothing at all.
Then, before anyone had done anything besides answer questions, the researchers asked them how they felt about themselves.
Those who picked something to change already felt better about themselves. Their proposal was that the initial decision to change delivers its reward immediately, in the form of a better self-image, and does it regardless of how the attempt eventually turns out.[1]
Ten years later a different group wanted to see if being seen made it worse. Forty-nine psychology students wrote down two study intentions for the coming week. For half of them the researcher read what they'd written. The other half were told the page had been included by mistake and would be thrown away. A week later, the students whose intentions nobody saw had acted on them about three days out of the week. The ones whose intentions were read managed about two.[2]
They ran the same thing on law students who'd said they wanted to make the most of their education. Half handed the form to the researcher, who looked it over in front of them. The other half dropped it anonymously in a box, knowing nobody could trace it back to them. Then everyone was offered optional case work. The ones who'd seen the researcher read their response quit sooner.
Then they measured why. Two dozen law students wrote out their three most important career intentions. Half read them aloud to the room. All of them were then asked how much they felt like a lawyer right now. The ones who'd said it out loud scored higher.[2]
Saying it made them feel more like the thing. Then they did less of it.
Polivy and Herman called this False Hope Syndrome.[3]
What we get wrong
Across their work they found four expectations that consistently run too high. How much we'll change, how fast it'll happen, how easy it'll be, and what we'll get out of it once it's done.[4]
Focused on all these outcomes, we stop caring about whether we're getting closer to our goals, and instead care about whether it's giving us exactly what we've been looking for. Sixty women entering a weight-loss program were asked, before they started, to name the result they'd consider a disappointment. Forty-eight weeks later almost half of them had not reached it.
They had lost real weight, in a program that worked, and they'd still landed short of the number they'd already decided would let them down.[5]
Accounting for false hope
The truth is, we're not really after the habit. We're after what we think the habit will get us.
Which means the habit can be going perfectly fine, life can genuinely be moving toward what we want, and it can still feel like it isn't working.
Habits take months to settle in, and most of that time is spent waiting on a payoff that hasn't shown up yet.
The progression system gives you something to focus on in the meantime.
The goal you set in our app, the ceiling, grows as you exceed it. Instead of deciding upfront how often you should be doing something, you start with what you can manage and let your results tell you when you're ready for more.
You don't have to guess the right goal. You earn your way to it. Frequency stops being a commitment you make and becomes a variable your results solve.
That progression takes about as long as a habit typically takes to form, so you're not spending those months waiting to find out whether it's working. You're spending them building the habit, and every raise is proof you're closer to your end goal.
By the time the outcome is all that's left to focus on, you'll already be months into a habit you've steadily built.
