We live in an instant world.
When you are talking with someone and a question is raised, before you
know it they’ve whipped out a smart phone and are looking for the answer. We have instant mashed potatoes, instant
pudding, instant messaging, and instant credit.
A lot of work has been done around the importance of delayed
gratification. Below is an article that
you might find interesting.
“In 1970 psychologist Walter Mischel famously placed a cookie in
front of a group of children and gave them a choice: they could eat the cookie
immediately, or they could wait until he returned from a brief errand and then
be rewarded with a second. If they didn’t wait, however, they’d be allowed to
eat only the first one. Not surprisingly, once he left the room, many children
ate the cookie almost immediately. A few, though, resisted eating the first
cookie long enough to receive the second. Mischel termed these children high-delay
children.
Interestingly, the
children who were best able to delay gratification subsequently did better in
school and had fewer behavioral problems than the children who could only
resist eating the cookie for a few minutes—and, further, ended up on average
with SAT scores that were 210 points higher. As adults, the high-delay children
completed college at higher rates than the other children and then went on to
earn higher incomes. In contrast, the children who had the most trouble
delaying gratification had higher rates of incarceration as adults and were
more likely to struggle with drug and alcohol addiction.
Which all suggests
that the ability to delay gratification—that is, impulse control—may be one of
the most important skills to learn to have a satisfying and successful life.
The question is, how do we learn it?
The answer may lie
in the strategies Mischel's high-delay children used. Rather than resist the urge
to eat the cookie, these children distracted themselves from the urge
itself. They played with toys in the room, sang songs to themselves, and looked
everywhere but at the cookie. In short, they did everything they could to put
the cookie out of their minds.
Taking his cue from
these high-delay children, in a second study, Mischel placed
two marshmallows side by side in front of a different group of children to whom
he explained, as in the previous study, that eating the first before he
returned to the room would mean they couldn’t eat the second. He then
instructed one group of them to imagine when he stepped out of the room how
much marshmallows are like clouds: round, white, and puffy. (He instructed a
control group, in contrast, to imagine how sweet and chewy and soft they were.)
A third group he instructed to visualize the crunchiness and saltiness of
pretzels. Perhaps not surprisingly, the children who visualized the qualities of
the marshmallows that were unrelated to eating them (that is, the way in which
they were similar to clouds) waited almost three times longer than children who
were instructed to visualize how delicious the marshmallows would taste. Most
intriguing, however, was that picturing the pleasure of eating pretzels
produced the longest delay in gratification of all. Apparently, imagining the
pleasure they’d feel from indulging in an unavailable temptation distracted the
children even more than cognitively restructuring the way they thought about
the temptation before them.
In other words, one
of the most effective ways to distract ourselves from a tempting pleasure we
don't want to indulge is by focusing on another pleasure. So the next
time you find yourself confronted with a temptation—whether a piece of cake, a
drink of alcohol, or a psychoactive drug—don't employ willpower to resist it. Send your attention somewhere else by imagining a
different pleasure not immediately available to you. For if you can
successfully turn your attention elsewhere until the temptation is removed from
your environment or you remove yourself from its
environment, the odds that you'll give in to your impulse will decrease more
than with almost any other intervention you can try.”
If
you’d like to learn more about this topic, check out Dr. Alex Lickerman's book,
The Undefeated Mind, which is available at Amazon.com. You might be an interesting read.