Thousands of years ago, if somebody wanted to eat, they had to put in a certain amount of work to get food. They either had to hunt, or they had to plant. This is how our ancestors were able to get food.
Today, most people are lucky enough to have any food that they want at their fingertips. Instead of planting vegetables and waiting months for them to grow, now we can get in our cars and drive to the nearest fast food joint to get 1,000 calories for ten bucks. Your cravings can be satisfied in an instant.
This instant satisfaction doesn’t just apply to food, though. It actually applies to literally everything else in our modern culture. Whenever you want some dopamine and validation, your phone and social media beckon. Wondering what is happening in the world? The news is on 24/7. Want to be entertained? It seems like there is a new streaming service popping up every other week.
The world that we live in today is designed to satisfy pretty much every one of your needs in an instant.
The marshmallow test
Many of you have probably heard about the marshmallow test. Walter Mischel — a Stanford psychologist — gave children one marshmallow, telling them that if they waited 20 minutes and didn’t eat their marshmallow, they could have another one. This experiment was designed to see how many of the children were able to delay gratification for a bigger reward.
Studies later proved that the children who were able to wait the 20 minutes without eating the marshmallow performed better on the SAT’s, had healthier body mass indexes, and were overall much more successful than the children who ate the marshmallow right away.
This finding should not come as a surprise. If you want to find success in any field, you need to be willing to sacrifice feeling good right now for feeling good later. However, there is only one small problem: Most of us suck at sacrificing feeling good in the moment.
Why we eat the marshmallow
Most of us understand the concept of instant gratification vs delayed gratification. And most of us understand that delaying gratification is a much more effective strategy for success. But presented with a situation similar to the marshmallow test, we chose to gobble up the metaphorical marshmallow.
We eat the marshmallow right away because waiting is hard. Humans are driven to experience pleasure, and when presented with a small bit of pleasure in the present moment, it is very difficult for our brains to say no.
Psychologist Shahram Heshmat listed ten reasons why we all find it so difficult to say no to instant gratification:
- A desire to avoid delay
- Uncertainty
- Age
- Imagination
- Cognitive capacity
- Poverty
- Impulsiveness
- Emotion regulation:
- Mood
- Anticipation
All of these different factors somehow play into why we all eat the marshmallow and give in to instant gratification.
Why it is important to delay gratification
The old saying ‘nothing worth having comes easy,’ encapsulates why delaying gratification is the key to success. It doesn’t matter what you are doing, whether it be playing a sport, writing a book, or attending school. There are going to be times where you don’t want to do what you know needs to be done. When you find yourself in this situation, you have two choices. You can delay gratification, or you can give in to your impulse to find pleasure in the moment.
The more that you are able to make the decision to delay gratification, the more successful you will be in your field. The athlete that wakes up early in the morning even though they don’t want to will experience more success in the game. The writer that grinds out a couple of extra pages each day will improve their craft and earn more opportunities because of it.
I think that a lot of us make the false assumption that things come easily to people that are at the top of their field. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Anybody that has become extremely successful is very good at delaying gratification. And if you want to be successful, the skill of delaying gratification is something that you must learn.
How to practice delaying gratification
When learning to delay gratification, your goal should be to question your desires. Ask yourself why you want a certain thing in the moment. Once you understand why you want what you want, you will be able to better determine if you should delay your gratification.
Think about how you feel after eating fast food or watching t.v for two hours. I know that whenever I do these things, I don’t feel great after. Now compare this feeling to how you feel after you go for a run or read a book. Feels a lot better to do these things, right? Getting good at delaying your gratification means that most of the time you choose working out and healthy food over fast food. It means that you spend more time reading than watching t.v. It means choosing to journal instead of scrolling social media.
If you start to do this on a consistent basis, then congratulations are in order. You have just successfully learned how to delay gratification.
Learning and practicing the concept of delayed gratification is not easy. But that is the point. Anybody can binge-watch Netflix all day. That doesn’t take anything. But because it doesn’t take anything, you don’t get any satisfaction, either.
Becoming good at delaying gratification takes a lot. It takes discipline and a commitment to improving yourself. It is hard in the moment, but extremely rewarding in the end.
Now it is up to you to decide what you want. Do you place more importance on long-term success and fulfillment, or being happy right now?