My wife and I were talking about her ADD the other day and she brought up the lack of intrinsic motivation that comes with ADD. I thought back to the most successful time she has had regarding goal accomplishment, and it was a time where we were rewarding her for success.
We came up with the idea to try that again on the thing she is struggling with the most right now, eating at home. Our budget has been exploding because she has felt overwhelmed and just goes right to eating out. So what we are going to try is rewarding her for every meal she makes at home. It’s small ($1/meal), but has the potential of adding almost $100/ month for her spending money and saving us $400 of eating out per month. That’s a huge net win.
I don’t know if it will work. I’m sure someone will say that we should be focusing on improving intrinsic motivation. Fortunately that’s what we’re doing! We can use extrinsic motivations as rewards that will create positive associations in the brain which in turn will provide a foundation for intrinsic motivation.
I’ll report back on how it goes!