There is a sticker chart on the kitchen cupboard in the Gray family home in Birmingham, England – the two Gray children, aged four and 10, get excited when it’s time to add another gold star. But they aren’t being rewarded for brushing their teeth or learning their spellings; this is someone else’s chart entirely.

“They know that mommy gets a gold star when she goes to the gym,” says Bek Gray, a 33-year-old healthcare professional who has been using sticker charts to motivate herself for one and a half years.

“There’s only so many times you can get told off by an app or your watch,” says Gray. “This is a nicer way of trying to motivate and discipline yourself.”

Gray had a gastric sleeve in September 2024 and bought her first sticker chart shortly afterwards – since then, she has lost 142lbs while simultaneously gaining muscle. “It sounds really silly but I don’t think I would’ve pushed myself as much without the stickers,” she says. It changed her mindset from “Ugh, I’ve got to go to the gym” to “I need to get my three stars this week!”

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 – different colors tracked when I exercised, how many fruits and vegetables I ate and whether I’d flossed or read that day. I wasn’t 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 – I didn’t want to see an empty page when the evening rolled around. And if I already had four stickers in my “fruits and veg” box, I was often compelled to push for five, so I could achieve my government-mandated goodness.

Lucy Mountain is the 34-year-old, London-based business owner of Silly Little Star Charts, 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.

“It’s been so amazing to see how many people really respond well to it,” Mountain says. While critical social media commenters consider the charts infantilizing, users like Gray say their lives have been changed. One reviewer wrote: “Something about getting to stick a silly gold star onto the sticker sheet keeps me accountable”, while another claimed: “This chart is the only reason I got up to go to the gym today.”

“It’s not just about tapping into your inner child,” Mountain says. “I do just think it’s a system that works.”

Why exactly might it work? “Humans and animals work for rewards. That is their nature,” says Kou Murayama, the principal investigator at the Motivation Science Lab at the University of Tübingen 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. “Hitting a goal itself serves as a reward for humans,” Murayama says, “even if it does not give you tangible rewards such as food or money.”

Rewards for repetitive daily tasks could help with the tedium. “The problem with long-term goals such as eating fruit and vegetables [regularly] is that the goal is never complete,” says Thomas Webb, a professor of psychology at the University of Sheffield in England who researches self-regulation. After all, you won’t one day have eaten enough fruits and vegetables for life. Webb says sticker charts create a mechanism to “complete” the goal, at least for a day.

According to “goal-setting theory”, 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. “Sticker charts at least meet the first two criteria – perhaps the third one too,” he says.

Gray has found her charts motivating for almost two years, but mine “stopped working” 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’t entice me to begin, and I often wrote the rest of the day off. Amazingly, the technical, academic term for this is the “what the hell effect”; once we’ve slipped up, we see ourselves as failures and give up completely.

Mountain has a fix for this: silver stars can be used on skip days to prevent people from feeling demotivated. “It’s trying to keep momentum going, because it’s not about perfection,” she says. “It’s just about trying to be consistent as much as you can.”

Murayama has a theory about why I couldn’t, well, stick with it. “Humans have a fundamental need to take control of ourselves or be autonomous,” 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. “Humans really don’t like to be controlled. Once you come to interpret the charts that way, either implicitly or explicitly, it will backfire,” Murayama says.

Nikos Ntoumanis, a professor of motivation science at the University of Southern Denmark, concurs. “Rewards can be a double-edged sword,” he says. He believes that ideally, rewards like stickers should be gradually phased out, “otherwise, they end up being the main reason for doing an activity”, and then, “once the rewards are withdrawn, usually the activity returns to a baseline level.”

Regardless, adult sticker charts are rising in popularity. Google searches for the term reached a five-year high this February, and Mountain’s business has just moved into a warehouse. But why are people willing to pay for them when there are countless free habit tracking apps? Mountain got the idea for her business after she started marking her workouts with a gold star emoji in her phone – so why didn’t she just keep doing that? “I think we are just generally so fatigued by being on our phones,” she says.

Mountain’s charts come with magnets so you can stick them on the fridge. That means users are constantly reminded of their goals without the need for a pushy app notification.

Gray loves her charts, and is not deterred by people who might find them childish. “We all get caught up in wanting to be grownups, and having to be serious,” she says. “There is no harm if people want to go back to their childhood ways to little extents like this.”

Sticker charts could help people, but we can’t necessarily rely on gold stars forever or for everything, warns Murayama.

“One needs to find a more intrinsic source of enjoyment,” he says, arguing this can sustain your motivation for longer. “If you decide to do exercise to reduce your weight, you may find that running itself is a joy,” he says.

Still, there’s no one magic trick to remaining productive. “It is important to understand that there is no panacea for motivation,” Murayama says. “If so, I wouldn’t need to do research any more.”