Instant Gratification Vs. Delayed Gratification
The CRAVE Cycle: The Victory Stage
Your world is now filled with super stimulating activities. Super stimulating activities are things that have been optimized to hijack particular brain processes. Whether it’s your alert function, your nervous system, or pull of incredibly high rewards. All around us, all the time, there is some form of super stimulus.
The CRAVE Cycle is a powerful habit model that has been adapted from common habit frameworks to include the influence of super stimulating behaviors.
This is the fourth blog post in the CRAVE cycle series by Mito Coaching.
The Right Kind of Gratification
Instant gratification is the result of a super stimulating behavior offering an immediate reward. They supply you with a quick spike in dopamine and an immediate crash. You want to feel good, you can open your phone and start scrolling social media or take a hit from your bong. Shortly after you get bored and want to do it again. Society has been built in a way that anytime you want to avoid something you can immediately do so. Over time this consistent avoidance of difficult and boring things makes you unable to commit to long term goals.
We have easy access to high reward and low effort activities like social media, Netflix, and potent drugs. These all offer easily accessed dopamine, otherwise known as instant gratification. Things that offer instant gratification will give you incredible satisfaction now but in the long run will cause you tremendous turmoil. Delaying gratification is the ability to put long term goals ahead of short term impulses. Long term goals such as stopping smoking often take more time than the rewards of smoking right now. Especially when you're stressed. You can stop smoking for a few days and see no results, while you can smoke a cigarette and immediately feel calmer and at ease.
Delaying gratification will not pay off immediately. You don’t see the mental benefits of quitting smoking 3 days into quitting. You are still the same weight whether you skip that donut today or not. Delaying gratification is about seeing the long term effects. Like when you finish the year having eaten 365 less donuts or smoked 300 fewer times. Habits with long term payoffs are often much more difficult to do versus habits that payoff now. That is what separates successful people from not successful people.
You have a limited amount of dopamine per day to pursue your goals with each day. Spending that dopamine on cheap thrills like sweets and social media takes away your motivation to pursue other things that are more important to you.
“All of our life is but a mass of small habits – practical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual – that bear us irresistibly toward our destiny.”
— William James
Making Delayed Gratification Easy
Add on an exciting reward: I’m just gonna come out and say it: Working out, eating healthy, going to bed early, and other good habits are difficult and boring. You are putting in all this effort and everyone wants you to do it “for the long run”. Honestly, it kind of blows.
That doesn’t have to be the case though. You can make unsatisfying behaviors more exciting by attaching a reward to them. You went to the gym 3 times this week? Book a massage. You didn’t smoke this month? Have a little party with your friends. Give yourself something to reward your hard efforts.
(The one caveat here is that you cannot pick behaviors that are counterproductive to your intended habit. A donut is not an appropriate reward for going to the gym and making healthy choices. Smoking a pack of darts after refraining for a month is not a good reward.)
Define your character: Every behavior, every action that you do is a tally for the person you wish to become. When you’re thinking about your habits, you are deciding the person you’re going to be in a month, year, or decade. Knowing who you want to be in the future can help you make the decisions needed now to get there.
When you know you are trying to be a healthy person in the future, the decision to order a salad instead of a pizza is more satisfying. You will feel like you are on the right track and can get excited by your choice. The tally in the healthy person column is often enough to keep you on track.
Make the behavior additive: Behavior change is very difficult when you are removing something. It’s very unsatisfying to stop smoking, stop eating unhealthy foods, and stop playing video games. The way that you can make it more satisfying is attaching the removal of the behavior with the addition of something else.
Say you want to stop drinking alcohol. Instead of just stopping, each day you decide not to go to the bar you can take that $30-50 dollars you would’ve spent on alcohol and put it toward a large purchase like a vacation. Once you have put together a string of successful days, you will be able to afford a big chunk of your vacation or that new piece of workout equipment you wanted. This will help you reaffirm your new character as well.
Making Instant Gratification Suck
Make the behavior subtractive: It’s easy to get caught up in highly addictive behaviors. Things like scrolling social media, using drugs, and watching porn typically offer very high mental rewards during the behavior and the side effects can be dulled. A way of tacking on a little extra motivation is to have a subtractive behavior attached to it.
That same vacation fund you set up as a way of making a positive behavior additive, can make a negative behavior subtractive. Each time you do the behavior you want to change you remove from your vacation fund. If you never change this behavior you will never go on vacation. This results in the behavior taking something away from your life. The next time you get an urge to do the behavior, your vacation to Europe will make you think twice.
Track your behavior: This can work both as a way to form new behaviors and change them. Tracking your behavior allows you to see how often it is happening and even look at the root cause. When you’re trying to quit drinking, having a calendar to put checkmarks on for days that you won can help. That check mark becomes very satisfying and the Xs are disappointing. Ruining that streak you were on is disappointing and will make you want to jump back in as soon as possible.
Correct the behavior immediately: The quicker you are able to feel the negative repercussions of a behavior, the more likely you are to stop it. Our brains are meaning making machines, we look for reasons and rationale for why things happen and create mental relationships to make decisions easier. If every time you decide to do a behavior, it is followed by immediate negative reinforcement, you will stop wanting to do that behavior. Creating an immediate feedback loop will help you curb the behavior as soon as possible.
For example: Say you are attempting to eat healthy but all your strategies for curbing a donut craving fell short. You eat the donut. Now, a good negative feedback would be to have to text your personal trainer and say “I ate a donut”. Disappointing someone who has invested time and resources into your progress is a pretty negative experience. Your trainer might share a little disappointment or make your next workout a little bit tougher. The next time you go to eat a donut, you’ll certainly pause and think “Is this really worth it?”
Get off the Slide
Okay, so you were on a winning streak (5 days, no cigarettes or 2 weeks without junk food) but you got a craving you couldn’t kick and today you smoked or had an unhealthy dessert.
That’s okay!
In the same way that going to the gym once won't make you strong, one day of junk food won't make you fat and unhealthy. Long term goals and behaviors take time to build up to tangible results. Each day you are tallying up scores in the positive and negative direction. The goal, over a long period like a month or year, is to have more wins than losses. That’s how you progress.
When that streak you were on ends, you are still up 5 wins to 1 loss. It is common to get caught up with your recent loss and start to lose over and over again. That one day of smoking turns into two, 3, 4… and then you look up and that one loss turns into 30. You need to get off the slide. The slide is the downward progression you go on with the disappointment of that first loss. You get upset, angry, or shameful. These emotions cause you to continue your downward trajectory through negative thought patterns.
You will say things like “Oh, you’ll never be fit if you can’t go one week without eating a donut, why even try?”. Eating healthy 5 days a week is still way better than no days a week. The 5 tallies you're making toward a healthy lifestyle will outweigh the 2 negative tallies over long periods of time
So get your ass off the slide. Take your one loss and get back in the win column. If you can stop yourself from compounding losses then you will be winning more than you are losing. That alone is enough to achieve your goals.
