There is a sticker chart on the kitchen cupboard in the Gray family home in Birmingham, England \u2013 the two Gray children, aged four and 10, get excited when it\u2019s time to add another gold star. But they aren\u2019t being rewarded for brushing their teeth or learning their spellings; this is someone else\u2019s chart entirely.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey know that mommy gets a gold star when she goes to the gym,\u201d says Bek Gray, a 33-year-old healthcare professional who has been using sticker charts to motivate herself<\/a> for one and a half years.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s only so many times you can get told off by an app or your watch,\u201d says Gray. \u201cThis is a nicer way of trying to motivate and discipline yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n Gray had a gastric sleeve in September 2024 and bought her first sticker chart shortly afterwards \u2013 since then, she has lost 142lb while simultaneously gaining muscle. \u201cIt sounds really silly but I don\u2019t think I would\u2019ve pushed myself as much without the stickers,\u201d she says. It changed her mindset from \u201cUgh, I\u2019ve got to go to the gym\u201d to \u201cI need to get my three stars this week!\u201d<\/p>\n Last year, my ability to self-motivate became so poor that I also started using sticker charts. I typed up a list of daily goals, printed out a bunch of pages and glued them to some cardboard backing, so I could tear off a new sheet each day. Instead of stars, I opted for little coloured dots \u2013 different colors tracked when I exercised, how many fruits and vegetables I ate and whether I\u2019d flossed or read that day. I wasn\u2019t motivated by the stickers themselves (although the constellation of gold, silver, purple and blue did look pretty), but by a sense of momentum and accountability \u2013 I didn\u2019t want to see an empty page when the evening rolled around. And if I already had four stickers in my \u201cfruits and veg\u201d box, I was often compelled to push for five, so I could achieve my government-mandated goodness<\/a>.<\/p>\n Lucy Mountain is the 34-year-old, London-based business owner of Silly Little Star Charts<\/a>, the brand Gray buys. Founded in 2024, the company has charts for chores, workouts, sobriety and even staying away from your ex. While the business was originally a side project for Mountain, who has her own fitness app, it proved so successful that as of last summer, it is now her main source of income.<\/p>\n double quotation markThis is a nicer way of trying to motivate and discipline yourself<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s been so amazing to see how many people really respond well to it,\u201d Mountain says. While critical social media commenters consider the charts infantilizing, users like Gray say their lives have been changed. One reviewer<\/a> wrote: \u201cSomething about getting to stick a silly gold star on to the sticker sheet keeps me accountable\u201d, while another claimed: \u201cThis chart is the only reason I got up to go to the gym today.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not just about tapping into your inner child,\u201d Mountain says. \u201cI do just think it\u2019s a system that works.\u201d<\/p>\n Why exactly might it work? \u201cHumans and animals work for rewards. That is their nature,\u201d says Kou Murayama, the principal investigator at the Motivation Science Lab at the University of T\u00fcbingen in Germany. Unlike a child, you might not find the sticker itself to be a valuable object, but you can nonetheless still feel motivated by it. \u201cHitting a goal itself serves as a reward for humans,\u201d Murayama says, \u201ceven if it does not give you tangible rewards such as food or money.\u201d<\/p>\n Rewards for repetitive daily tasks could help with the tedium. \u201cThe problem with long-term goals such as eating fruit and vegetables [regularly] is that the goal is never complete,\u201d says Thomas Webb, a professor of psychology at the University of Sheffield in England who researches self-regulation. After all, you won\u2019t one day have eaten enough fruits and vegetables for life. Webb says sticker charts create a mechanism to \u201ccomplete\u201d the goal, at least for a day.<\/p>\n According to \u201cgoal-setting theory\u201d, conceived by the psychologists Edwin Locke and Gary Latham, goals that are specific, proximal (that is, shorter-term) and challenging can be especially motivating, says Murayama. \u201cSticker charts at least meet the first two criteria \u2013 perhaps the third one too,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Photograph: Lucy Mountain<\/p>\n Gray has found her charts motivating for almost two years, but mine \u201cstopped working\u201d after a few months. If I had good momentum in the morning and quickly got a few stickers on the page, I could keep going for the rest of the day. But if I failed to get started, the stickers didn\u2019t entice me to begin, and I often wrote the rest of the day off. Amazingly, the technical, academic term for this is the \u201cwhat the hell effect<\/a>\u201d; once we\u2019ve slipped up, we see ourselves as failures and give up completely.<\/p>\n Mountain has a fix for this: silver stars can be used on skip days to prevent people from feeling demotivated. \u201cIt\u2019s trying to keep momentum going, because it\u2019s not about perfection,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s just about trying to be consistent as much as you can.\u201d<\/p>\n Murayama has a theory about why I couldn\u2019t, well, stick with it. \u201cHumans have a fundamental need to take control of ourselves or be autonomous,\u201d he says, arguing that sticker charts initially satisfy this need. But over time, one could come to feel that the chart is actually in control. \u201cHumans really don\u2019t like to be controlled. Once you come to interpret the charts that way, either implicitly or explicitly, it will backfire,\u201d Murayama says.<\/p>\n Nikos Ntoumanis, a professor of motivation science at the University of Southern Denmark, concurs. \u201cRewards can be a double-edged sword,\u201d he says. He believes that ideally, rewards like stickers should be gradually phased out, \u201cotherwise, they end up being the main reason for doing an activity\u201d, and then, \u201conce the rewards are withdrawn, usually the activity returns to a baseline level.\u201d<\/p>\n