Once my streak got long enough, I knew I was helplessly hooked on Wordle. For 222 straight days, I opened the New York Times Games app and dutifully completed the daily puzzle amid a slot machine-like spin of yellow and green squares.
Early on, it was genuinely a fun challenge, a pleasant little ritual as part of my evening wind-down scrollfest. But somewhere along the way, the game stopped being just a game, and keeping the streak alive became the whole point.
I often went to great lengths to protect my Wordle streak
I started organizing my behavior around protecting it. I set a daily alarm on my iPhone so I didn’t accidentally let the day go by and forget to play, no matter how busy I got. I played while sick (reasonably easy). I played while exhausted (harder). And I played while traveling internationally with rigorous itineraries in upside-down time zone situations (hardest).
Once, while returning from a remote island trip with my family, I erased all my vacation zen by struggling to find WiFi in a low-tech airport so as not to break my streak (and then, when I couldn’t, I paid $30 for WiFi on the long-haul overnight flight home for the explicit purpose).
Then one day, not as a result of some dramatic life event or connectivity flameout, but just because I ran out of guesses, I lost. And just like that, 222 days of consistent positive reinforcement went away.
I was surprised by how upset I was when my streak ended
When I saw my new current streak at “0,” I felt disproportionately upset. I felt like I’d lost something meaningful to me — a sign, perhaps, of my smarts and dedication. As one does, I texted my woe to the group chat: “I can’t even have this?!”
My sister replied immediately: “Streaks are a conspiracy to keep us enslaved.”
My longtime friend wrote: “You smashed it. Mission accomplished. Goodbye! On to the next mountain!”
With that encouragement, my thinking completely shifted. Instead of focusing on how I blew it, I internalized a sense of — what was this new feeling? — freedom. For the first time in more than seven months, I no longer had this digital obligation in addition to all my regular daily tasks of parenting, work, and everything else. Talk about reframing the narrative.
I started thinking about ‘streak culture’
After my epiphany, the idea of streak culture got under my skin. Streaks are everywhere now: Wordle, Duolingo, Peloton, meditation apps, fitness trackers, and on and on. Modern life is increasingly organized around maintaining visible continuity, often through brightly colored counters, icons, badges, bursts of digital confetti, and other celebratory notifications designed to make us feel accomplished for simply showing up repeatedly.
And to be fair, streaks absolutely can be helpful for motivation. Plenty of people genuinely benefit from the structure and accountability they provide. The reason so many apps use them is that they really do work.
But they also create a dynamic where skipping a leisure activity is psychologically fraught.
“Every time Duolingo shows you a flame icon growing higher or Wordle tells you your streak is still alive, your brain releases a small hit of dopamine,” Mel Plourde, LMSW, a psychiatric technician and program case manager at Eagle Creek Ranch Recovery Center, told me.
None of it is accidental. “These apps are designed to produce a neurochemical reward system that makes you keep coming back,” she said.
She explained that losing a streak can feel surprisingly painful because of something called “loss aversion”— the psychological principle that losing something tends to feel more emotionally powerful than gaining something of equal value.
Missing one day of Wordle did not objectively change anything about my life. I hadn’t lost money, status, relationships, reputation, or opportunities. And yet emotionally, it felt weirdly significant. But once the streak disappeared, I realized how much pressure I’d attached to something that was supposed to be fun — and I was quite glad to be rid of it.
I lost the love of the game — and now, I have it back
Plourde also mentioned the “overjustification effect,” in which external rewards replace internal motivation. In other words, you start learning a language because you genuinely want to learn it, but eventually, you’re opening the app mainly to protect the streak counter.
If I’m being honest, by around day 100, I wasn’t really playing Wordle because I loved Wordle anymore — and it certainly didn’t feel like a wind-down brain break. I was playing because I didn’t want to lose.
Now that the streak is gone, I still play occasionally. But I definitely deleted that daily alarm. Now I play because I feel like it, not because of an app holding me hostage. And that feels a lot healthier.
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