Inhabit the Tallying Reminder
Or: the value of tiny rewards
When I was two months postpartum, I had a sudden, debilitating back spasm walking down the street. I took my baby out of the carrier, called my husband, and waited desperately for the pain to pass. When I asked my doctor what was happening, the explanation was simple: birth had strained my body. I needed physical therapy.
As anyone who’s done physical therapy knows, those two words—physical therapy—connote months of effortful habit adoption. They imply finding time in the day, and motivation, to do rote exercises over and over and over, with progress lagging weeks or months behind.
In my case, I would be expected to take on the habit while juggling another new set of habits: caring for a newborn. And I would have to do it on little sleep.
The exercises—clamshells, sit-to-stands, squats—seemed reasonable when I stood face-to-face with my therapist. I nodded along. I asked probing questions. Then I went home and did almost none of them. Some appointments I kept on the books, showing up sheepishly with little to show for progress. Others I rescheduled—an attempt to delay the shame.
The next pregnancy came and with it, the fear of pain. I signed up for physical therapy. But this time, I did it with humility: I had failed before. All signs showed I would fail again.
Strangely enough, the opposite happened. I kept up with the exercises. The stabbing pain did not return. Minor symptoms resolved within months.
What had changed?
In my case, it was one simple choice I stumbled upon by accident: a tallying reminder.
The first time around, I was emailed my assignments. I would go home and ignore the emails like I did most others on maternity leave. This time, my physical therapist printed out a paper with images of the exercises right there on the page. By whim, I tried doing one exercise and tallying a line when I’d finished. Then I did another. Then another.
Over the coming weeks, I progressed from simpler exercises to harder ones—seated clamshells to leaning, air squats to weighted. I felt encouraged enough to experiment with hacks: combining the timing of my exercises with my baby’s (the dreaded “tummy time” exercises) to preserve rest. One day, I showed up to an appointment to hear the magic words. My condition had improved. I was free to go.
The tallying habit seems laughably simple. How could one small change make the difference between searing pain and a symptom-free body? And yet, it rests on decades of research. It pares down to resolving several common problems at once: linking reminder to effort. Linking effort to reward. And reducing friction by making it clear how to do the effort.
No one wakes up every day and wants to do clamshell exercises. Even if you remember, the steps compound: how to do it, when to do it. The knowledge you should be doing them sits rent-free in your head as you try to go about your day.
But by breaking up the task into chunks, and by linking each chunk to a small reward—a tally or check mark—I managed to take the first step. By using printed instructions, I had reduced a major barrier—task switching—improving the likelihood I wouldn’t get derailed or distracted by emails or texts. The page served three purposes: reminder, instruction manual, and reward, all at once.
Since then, I’ve scaled the approach to address other habit goals. When I find myself falling off the exercise wagon, I place post-its and pens along the path to my first, hardest task: going outside. A post-it in my closet helps me choose workout clothes over jeans. A note in my entryway helps me choose sneakers over boots.
Sometimes it’s a longer paper with a list of benefits visible right there on the page, helping me progress along the early stages of change.
So what in your life might benefit from something as simple as a pen and paper? Where do you have high hopes…and low motivation? And what can you break down into tiny steps and tiny rewards?
The answers may bring you slowly, admirably toward a better life.
Yours in habit,
Julie
PS: Speaking of pelvic floor physical therapy…I will have the privilege of interviewing Dr. Sara Reardon (aka The Vagina Whisperer) this week. Please reply/comment with your questions!