As a person that loves to-do lists, I was immediately intrigued when my sister-in-law showed me the app Habitica about a year ago. You can either download the app on your phone or log in to your account using your computer. It’s essentially a to-do list app that gives you points for completing your tasks. It combines lists with a game so I downloaded it right away!
When you open an account, you make an avatar that has health and experience. You gain levels by doing tasks and increasing your experience. If you don’t do your tasks, it damages your health. If you lose a lot of health, it decreases your level, thus sabotaging your progress. (You can do a lot more than this in the app, like purchase armor with the gold you earn, hatch animals with items you receive, and battle your friends, but I use it in a simplified way for now.)
It breaks down your lists into “To-Dos”, “Dailies”, and “Habits”.
All of your regular tasks go under “To-Dos”, like “Order Greg’s birthday gift”, “Schedule dentist appointment”, or “Do taxes”. You can add notes, alter the difficultly level, schedule a due date, and even create a checklist within the task. I use the checklist feature when I’m doing laundry since there are multiple steps involved and I can check off each step (wash, hang, fold).
“Dailies” are things you’d like to do every day (or certain days of the week). I use this to remember to take my multivitamin and write in my journal every day. There are other tasks, like watering my plants, that I need to do once a week, so I set that for Sundays. If you complete all of your Dailies that day, you get rewarded with more points for having a “Perfect Day”. If you don’t complete all of your Dailies that day, you lose health.
I didn’t use the “Habit” list right away because I wasn’t sure what behavior I wanted to change. There are three ways you can use the Habit list: positive habit, negative habit, or both. An example of a positive habit that I have is “Cardio”. I strive to do this most days, but I don’t have a routine schedule so I don’t list it under the Dailies. Every time I am able to do some cardio exercise, I hit the “+” button and get points! If I don’t get a chance to do it that day, no harm done. An example of a negative habit would be “Bite Nails”. I don’t have this as a bad habit, but many people do. Every time you bite your nails, you press the “-” button and you lose health. Combination habits with both the “+” and “-” buttons are opposing behaviors, like “Take the Stairs” (positive) or “Take the Elevator” (negative). If you want to take the stairs more, you can click the “+” button every time you do and the “-” button every time you choose to take the elevator instead.
After using the app for a while, I figured out a behavior I wanted to stop: chewing my cheek. I had a bad habit of biting the inside of my cheek when I got stressed. It probably started when I had accidentally bitten my cheek once and then used my teeth to bite away the excess skin from the cut. It turned into something I did almost all the time without even realizing it. Whenever I noticed myself doing it, I would try to chew some gum instead. But chewing gum for too long would tire out my jaw muscles and give me a headache. Often, I wouldn’t even notice I was biting the skin because I did it subconsciously. I wanted to stop because I was worried I was causing damage.
So, I listed “Chew Cheek” as a negative habit in my app! Since I had been using the app for a bit, I had completed many tasks and gained several levels. I committed myself to being honest about pressing the “-” button EVERY time I chewed my cheek, no matter how many times or how small the nibble. It was brutal. I watched as my avatar’s health bar went down and my levels decreased. All of the points I had slowly gained by cleaning the bathroom, making my lunch every day, and working out were rapidly going down the drain due to this bad habit. It motivated me to stop because I didn’t want to undo all of the progress I was making.
After the first day of losing lots of levels, I eventually started to catch myself when I was about to do it. I was able to prevent myself from actually going through with it because I didn’t want to press that button and lose more points! After a couple of days, I found I rarely did it anymore! Sometimes my teeth would start to go for my cheek, but I would gently bite down on my tongue instead to satiate my brain. In a little over a week, I wasn’t doing it at all!
Now, it’s been several months and my brain has deleted that desire. I can’t believe it only took a week to cure the bad habit that I had been doing for YEARS! If you like lists and are interested in exploring a new app to help keep track of your task list, I highly recommend one like Habitica!
Thanks for reading!
-Rebecca
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