The Fishbowl Game for Executive Function
- Thomas Harper LMSW
- 4 days ago
- 4 min read
This is one of my favorite ideas from The Willpower Instinct, which is a treasure trove of executive function strategies. I’ve played it with various friends, individually or in groups. It was a great relationship builder to play it with my mom. And I’m about to try playing it by myself (or rather, with just an accountability buddy to witness my accomplishments and lack thereof!--but without any other fellow players). When you’ve set your SMART goals for the week, sometimes the fishbowl game can give you that little bit of oomph to power through the depression/anxiety/what ails you, or to gather some momentum towards your goals. Here are my original notes on the fishbowl strategy:You can reverse the power of dopamine and put it to work for you. Consider the fishbowl exercise on p. 123; prize drawings are regularly conducted from a fishbowl full of paper slips. Half of the slips say only “keep up the good work.” The other half have prizes ranging in value from $1 to $20, with just one that has a $100 prize on it. Weekly drawings kept 83% of addicts in treatment and 80% of those clean, compared to 20% in treatment and 40% of those clean without them—and it continued to correlate with positive results after the drawings were no longer being performed.
And here’s one of the ways I’ve implemented it in everyday life:
Prize structure/rules:
Each of 3 players puts in $125 initially. -1 slip is worth $100 -5 slips are worth $20 -7 slips are worth $10 -15 slips are worth $5 -30 slips just say "keep up the good work" We used a random number generator instead of a physical fishbowl, and assigned numbers 1-30 to the “good work” prize, numbers 31-45 to the $5 prize, numbers 46-52 to the $10 prize, numbers 53-57 the $20 prize, and number 58 the $100 prize. Each player records three goals at each meeting. At the next meeting, each player can get a maximum of three draws—one for each successfully completed goal. There’s an element of honor system involved in the game; for the game to work, each player must be trusted to choose goals that feel challenging but possible to them, and must report back honestly. You can tell you’ve set your goals at the right level if you are successfully completing most, but not all, of them. Aim for the higher side of a 70%-90% rate.
Almost everyone starts off by making their goals too hard. We think that we should be able to easily start meditating for 20 minutes every day, but really we need to start with 3 minutes three times a week–or once a week. We think we should be able to sit down and record a podcast for an hour sometime this week, but actually we need to clear the laundry from the chair in the studio and then muddle around with the software for five minutes before getting stuck, and judge ourselves really hard about it for a day and a half, and then maybe take another day or two before we figure out how to get the help we need to take the next step (whatever it is) towards that one hour of recording. So maybe the right goal is, “spend 15 (or 10, or 5) minutes moving the ball down the field towards recording.” Or, “get everything set up and record something at least 10 seconds long.” Or, “record something bad.” Because these are all steps towards the place we want to go.
Drawings happen at 1-2 set/recurring times each week. Prizes will be replaced on a delayed basis, every month, from a second cash input from all parties which is re-filled whenever it runs out. Cash will be disbursed directly upon drawing of a prize; must be spent and folks report back to the group on their treat within 48 hours.
A variant of the fishbowl is “Cheese Bet.” Cheese Bet eliminates any “taking each other’s money/having an incentive to root for the other person’s failure” aspect of the situation, while leveraging benevolent social pressure and some randomization (provided by relying on the other person to complete their goals). In Cheese Bet, the players meet regularly to set goals and document their success or failure. After some set amount of time, say, two weeks, if all players have met all their goals (or 90%, or whatever the players agree on), they go out together and try a new fancy cheese.
Adjust the size and nature of the prizes based on what feels motivating to you. “A new fancy cheese” can become “see a movie they’re both interested in,” or anything else that all the players experience as motivating. Just don’t make the prizes too large–that can make it feel like it’s about the prizes. It should feel like the prizes are a way to celebrate your efforts and your success.
I hope you give this a try and comment here how it worked out for you. :)
Thomas Harper LMSW
The Executive Function Therapist
Supervisee in social work
Providing individual therapy in Virginia
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