THE LONG READ - Overcoming Temptation: Strategies for Resisting Instant Gratification

Do you struggle to keep your promises to yourself? Do you regularly find yourself at the end of your day, exhausted and yawning and yet disappointed because you haven’t managed to do any of the things you promised yourself you’d do, and yet you’ve been ‘busy’ all day?

Join the club. These kinds of struggles are the kind of thing which makes us uniquely human, I’m afraid.

Some examples of instant gratification include:

• Impulse shopping

• Gambling

• Social Media/doom scrolling

• Binge-watching TV

• Taking mood-enhancing substances

• Playing video games or games on your phone (Royal Match used to be my kryptonite!)

• Skipping your workouts

• Procrastination

• Ordering takeout instead of cooking

• Checking your email or phone constantly

• Surfing the internet aimlessly

• Buying unnecessary gadgets

• Overindulging on food

• Staying up late watching TV

• Gossiping or spreading rumours

• Daydreaming

• Lying to avoid conflict

• Hitting snooze on your alarm

These are just a few examples, but I’m sure you can think of many more to add to the list!

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Animals never fight against themselves like this, and this is a blessing for them, and yet it’s a curse at the same time. Because they don’t have the brain structure to be able to set goals, to have ambitions and to make life different for themselves.

We do.

It’s not easy being human, it has to be said. In the twenty-first century, we’re exposed far more to people whose opinions we would never have had to deal with, or attempt to process, via social media websites. This exposure leads to huge frustration and irritation, and can often draw people into the fruitless pastime of an online argument, whether it’s on Twitter or another forum, while your life slowly ticks away.

While it’s a blessing that we have far more information at our fingertips than our ancestors would have, it’s also a curse. We can spend hours at a time scrolling on social media, watching cute cat videos on YouTube or falling down a Wikipedia rabbit hole.

And this is before we even begin to consider how much other entertainment we have at our fingertips. Quite literally a lot of the time, as it’s possible to install streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu on your mobile phone, amongst many others. It seems there’s a new service you can subscribe to every week.

There are more games consoles than you can shake a stick at, and if you don’t want to spend money on one, or restrict yourself to only being able to play in your living room, there are handheld devices you can get, as well as a huge number of games you can download straight onto your phone.

So why are these things so hard to resist? It’s because of our dopamine receptors.

Human beings are hardwired to run after pleasure and to run away from pain or discomfort. It’s just a survival mechanism, hard-wired into us by our ancestors, who’d conserve energy rather than burning through unnecessary energy.

Lounging in front of the TV is comfortable. Laughing at silly videos gives you a small burst of pleasure, a mini high. And achieving something in a game is an immediate way of flooding your brain with a tiny burst of feel good chemicals.

With all of these temptations at our disposal, is it any wonder that it feels well nigh impossible to resist them, at least some of the time?

To start with, understand that this is all totally utterly normal. All of these things tap into the way our brain works. In a lot of instances, they’ve been specifically designed to do so.

So, are these things all terrible? Should they be avoided at all costs? Am I sitting here like some kind of killjoy, telling you to sell your games consoles, cancel your streaming subscriptions and to get rid of all your social media apps?

No. I’m not. Sometimes these things are exactly what you need. The things themselves are not the issue, it’s how often and why you choose to use them which is the problem.

Are you incessantly gaming or watching Netflix shows to avoid a difficult task you’d love to have at least started by the end of the day, such as an essay or a creative endeavour, or are you playing games so that you can put off having a difficult conversation with a loved one until tomorrow. Burying your head in the sand, if you will?

That’s when these things are an issue, in my opinion. If you’re flopping onto the sofa after a fulfilling and productive day, almost ready for bed, and looking for something to amuse you for a little while, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with a few rounds of a game, an episode of a TV show or a few funny YouTube videos.

But if these things are getting in the way of you living the life you’d like to have led, when you look back at it in your last moments, then that is absolutely a problem. And if you’re reading this article, then there’s a good chance that you agree with me.

You might look at other people, perhaps people you know or folks you interact with online, and wonder how on earth they manage to be so productive, how they maintain their honed physique, or how they’re so darned creative.

Don’t worry, it’s entirely possible for you to live the life of your dreams AND to enjoy these little pastimes.

What I’d like to do is to share some simple tricks and tips with you to help you to do this.

Are you ready? Let’s go.

Temptation bundling

I started using this technique before I realised that there was actually a name for it. In the year 2000, after having had a few gym memberships over the years, with varying levels of success, I decided that I was going to set up my own home gym.

There were several reasons for this. Firstly, I didn’t much enjoy sweating in front of other people. I come from a long line of what I call ‘head sweaters’ — my mum and my maternal grandmother were both the same (I assume they were both the same, I never knew either of them to actually work up a sweat on purpose) — with the result that in warm weather or after physical exertion I find myself with a tomato-coloured face, and sopping, dripping wet hair.

In short, I tend to look as if I’m about to die, even if I feel absolutely fine.

It used to earn me some startled glances at the gym, so you can understand why I didn’t particularly feel comfortable a lot of the time.

But, of course, this is just me being vain. That alone wouldn’t have been enough to see me spending £1,000 (that was even more money 24 years ago!) on an elliptical machine, an exercise bike and a treadmill.

The clincher for me was the fact that I liked the idea of being able to work out at any time of the day, and that I wouldn’t have to spend time in the car driving to the gym and then back again. As a busy secondary school teacher at the time, it meant I could squeeze workouts in as and when I could manage to.

However, even after spending all of that money on the equipment and getting myself some new gym clothes, I still struggled to make exercise a regular part of my week.

It wasn’t until I decided to mount a TV on the wall in the line of sight of all three of my cardio machines and to wire that TV up to a DVD player (yes, I know, it was half a lifetime ago), that I managed to establish a consistent habit.

Why did this work? Because I told myself I wasn’t going to watch another episode of the show I desperately wanted to watch (I suspect at the time it might have been Buffy, the Vampire Slayer) unless I was also working out.

This habit, it turns out, is called ‘temptation bundling’. Simply put, it’s when you combine something you’re less than enthusiastic about doing (in my case cardio exercise) with something you really do want to do (seeing what Spike might get up to next).

You can do this with many different activities.

Do you hate hoovering? Put your headphones on and listen to a podcast or an audiobook you’re dying to burn through. Dislike walking the dog? The same idea might apply.

When it’s late on in the day and I’m low on motivation (or spoons) to do something I’m really resisting, I might put something on the TV quietly in the background while I do it. For example, if I have some work to do, something which is admin-related like answering emails, rather than something that needs my undivided attention, I might put a Rugby game on and kind of cajole myself into it.

Take a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle, vertically. Make a list of the things you’re resisting on the left hand side, and then a list of things you love to do on the right hand side.

Which activities can you link together and combine? Give it a go, the ideas might surprise you!

What’s your MVP?

I worked in the field of information technology for most of my life, first as a programmer, then as a secondary school teacher whose specialist subject was computers, and then segued back into the IT field, into a series of development and managerial jobs.

In the world of software development, there’s a concept called the MVP - the Minimum Viable Product.

This is a way of rapidly getting prototyped ideas out in front of the eyes of the general public, so that you can get feedback and try things out without having spent years and millions of pounds on a product or functionality which doesn’t resonate with people or which they don’t actually want.

What you do is you define the smallest number of features and the most basic user interface or design that you can put out to market.

I do this in my own life as well. If I wake up one morning and I feel under the weather, or I’m exhausted, then I tell myself I’m having an MVP day.

During that day, I outline what the minimum requirements are, the basic things that I need to do. I don’t worry about bigger projects and I don’t allow myself to feel guilty if the pots don’t get washed or the clean washing isn’t put away.

Instead, I do the things I absolutely need to do to keep my life ticking over, and I ensure that there’s a small amount of time spent on something life affirming and creative.

Which leads me nicely on to the next tip.

Just do 5 minutes

Sometimes the main thing that holds you back from even starting something is the sheer magnitude of the task, as well as the fact that there are much easier routes to pleasure, such as Netflix.

It could be that you’ve followed all the recommendations if you have something on your to do list - you’ve set the end goal, and put a deadline on it, you’ve checked that it feels realistic, and you’ve made a list of tasks that’ll get you from A, where you currently are, all the way to B.

And yet you still can’t get the motivation needed to get on with it.

There’s a chance that your steps still feel a bit too big, too insurmountable, at least in your current state of mind.

So, what do you do?

You just promise yourself that you’ll do the task for five minutes. No more, no less. And you solemnly swear that if you still aren’t feeling it and you want to stop when those five minutes are up, then you absolutely will stop.

In order for this to work, you have to do as you promise. No trickery. If you absolutely want to stop after five minutes, then you can, and you can do it guilt-free. In fact, in my mind, you should celebrate it as a win.

Why? Because you’re still five minutes further along in the task than you would’ve been otherwise. That’s progress, in the right direction.

‘But Lou, I’m a loser, I’ve not finished the task, I gave up…’

Hush. You put some effort in, you should be proud of that. And there’s always tomorrow.

I’ll let you in on a little secret though, one which I don’t think will particularly surprise you. More often than not, once you’ve made a start, you don’t stop after five minutes.

Why? Because your momentum carries you along, and before you know it, you’ve got much further on with the job than you thought you would. Sometimes, you might even find that you’ve enjoyed the experience.

This works for all kinds of tasks, from big creative projects to tackling the pile of ironing that’s been mounting up, doing the washing up or the laundry.

Don’t believe me? Try it next time you feel stuck.

Use a journal

Are you reaching for that packet of cookies, or a second slice of cake? Are you on the verge of collapsing onto the sofa and writing off the rest of your evening, or your weekend?

Before you do, grab a pen and some paper and spend a few minutes writing down how you feel, what’s going on in your mind and everything that’s burning in your heart.

Be brutally honest. You don’t have to show this to anyone, and if you want to you could even burn it, shred it or rip it up and throw it in the bin when you’re done.

Why am I suggesting this, rather than just encouraging you to think about what you’re about to do and what you think you want to do?

When we write things down - or say them out loud - we use a different part of our brains, that’s why. Millions of people through the centuries have used a journal as a way of sorting through their thoughts, a way of speaking to someone outside of ourselves, if you will, without actually having to admit your deepest darkest feelings to someone else if you don’t want to.

Wait 5 minutes

Often an urge to do something which provides us with instant gratification is a reaction to an unwelcome emotion. Emotions are fleeting, they are not you.

We feel a certain way, we aren’t a certain way. This is why I’ve always tried to reason with myself like this:

“I’m depressed. No, you’re not depressed. You are feeling depression.”

There is a big distinction. Feelings are not facts, as therapists and coaches are fond of saying.

So, if you’re about to reach for that pint of ice cream, tell yourself you can have it in five minutes. Set a timer, and close your eyes. Take some deep breaths. Steady yourself and your thoughts, and see if the feeling passes. And if the feeling has passed when your timer goes off, has the urge to do the thing you’d planned to passed you by as well?

It won’t always happen. But you might be surprised by how often it does.

The Seinfeld chain strategy

When the comedian Jerry Seinfeld started out his comedic career, back in the mid to late seventies, he decided that the best way to be successful as a stand up, and to get better, would be to write jokes consistently. He decided that he wanted to write jokes every single day. (Opinions are divided on whether this story is actually true, but nevertheless, the tactic still works!)

In order to do that, he decided to buy a wall planner, and to get a red magic marker, and every day when he managed to write some jokes, he’d cross the day out with a big red X.

The aim was to go as many days as possible without breaking the chain.

I’ve used this to great success in my own life for different habits I wanted to form or projects I wanted to consistently work on.

More often than not, the very thought of a gap in a sea of Xs is enough to peel you off the sofa or to send you to your desk so you can do the task and have the satisfaction of uncapping the pen and crossing off that day, so the chain isn’t broken.

This doesn’t have to cost you any money. Get a piece of paper and a ruler and draw out a month’s calendar. Or find an online calendar generator so you can print out each month.

The 5-second rule

I love this one, but it’s not mine, so I won’t go into too much detail.

Sometimes what keeps you stuck on the hamster wheel of instant gratification is the fight between the two halves of your brain, the higher order part, which wants you to achieve things and doesn’t care how nervous you are about them, and the more ancient part, which is simply trying to keep you alive.

The 5-second rule is a tactic that an author I very much admire called Mel Robbins came up with.

If you don’t have time to watch the video, then here’s a brief explanation: when you think ‘Ooh, I’ll just do < insert task name here >’ and then a moment later, that little voice starts to say ‘yes, but…’, you simply count backwards from 5 to 1 and then you just get up and you do it.

Can’t motivate yourself to go and work out? The moment the thought crosses your mind, do your countdown and go and get changed into your gym gear. Leave that prehistoric part of your brain standing in the dust!

The principle is similar to the ‘Just do 5 minutes’ tactic I mentioned above, because often once you’re up and moving, it’s easier to keep going, rather than to backtrack and to sit back down.

If you’re interested in this idea, then you can pick up a copy of Mel’s book here.

Find your ikigai

This is one for the big hairy audacious goals and projects you want to work on.

Ikigai is a Japanese word, which means ‘a reason for being’.

Sometimes, it’s hard to motivate yourself to do something scary because you’re scared of failing. Or you’re scared of what people will say, what people might think. You might even be afraid of succeeding. The mind is a funny old thing, after all.

Is there a chance that you’re using these routes to instant gratification because you don’t yet know what your ikigai - your purpose in life - is?

This is a big topic and beyond the scope of this short guide, but I recommend this book if you want to think more about the idea: Ikigai: The Japanese secret to a long and happy life

Have an accountability buddy

I don’t know about you, but I know that one of the easiest things in the world to do is to break promises to myself. What’s sometimes helped me is to find an accountability buddy, someone who’s also trying to do the same thing as you, and you agree to check in with one another, daily, or maybe several times a day, depending on what it is you’re trying to do.

This is similar to the idea of having a sponsor if you’re in Alcoholics or Narcotics Anonymous, where you can get in touch with someone if you’re wavering.

Could the key to your success be as simple as having someone you can send a text message to as your thumb hovers over the play button on your remote control, someone you can say ‘I should work out, but I just want to watch < insert name of show here > all night instead’?

For this to work, they need to be committed to being tough with you. I wouldn’t advise someone like a parent or a sibling, as there’s a good chance that your emotional history with them might have left you with a lot of behavioural triggers - how likely is it that as an adult, if one of your parents tells you to do something, you’ll do the exact opposite because you’re a grown up now, and why should you do what they tell you do to any more?

Pretty likely.

This accountability buddy doesn’t even have to be someone you actually know in real life. It could be someone you’ve met online, perhaps through a social media site or group, such as the ones you get on Facebook. In this instance, it’s useful if they’re in roughly the same time zone as you, because you don’t want to be wavering and send them a message only for them not to reply because it’s the middle of the night where they are, or vice versa.

And in return for their commitment to be tough on you, you have to promise to be as tough on them. They’re relying on you to act as a second conscience, if you will.

You won’t be surprised when I say that there are a number of websites and apps you can get which will help you to find someone like-minded to support you. FLOWN Flocks: facilitated focus sessions is one.

Make it impossible to fail

What’s the thing you’re tempted by that you’re trying to avoid?

Perhaps, like the famous author Victor Hugo - who penned Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, amongst other works - you have a deadline to hit for a piece of work, and your friends are asking you if you’d like to go out and meet them. This is a bit of an extreme example, but he used to get his housekeeper to hide his clothes, wrap himself in a blanket and make them promise not to give him his outdoor clothing back until he was finished with his task, thereby making it impossible for him to step a foot out of the house and into polite society, for fear of being ridiculed, imprisoned for indecent exposure or possibly committed to an asylum.

You might be chuckling, but you can absolutely do something similar, without having to get someone to empty your closet and leave you shivering in your underwear.

Like Victor Hugo, are you also desperate to go out with your friends, but keen to get some work done?

Get your partner to hide your car keys and your wallet. Make them solemnly swear that they won’t give them back to you until you prove you’ve done what you’re saying you want to do.

Finding it impossible to resist the siren song of social media sites? Give them your phone, and get them to turn off the internet.

Are you mindlessly watching a steaming service? Turning the internet off would work. Or they could change the password on the Netflix account, if it’s a shared one.

Some modern broadband routers even have the functionality whereby you can set access schedules for specific devices, so you could make it so you don’t have access to the internet on your laptop and phone between certain hours of an evening or during part of the weekend. Set a random password and don’t save it anywhere so it’s hard to change the settings.

Finally, there are a number of apps you can get for your phone if you absolutely cannot part with it, and some of them work on your laptop as well. You can set them up to only allow you access to certain apps or websites for a period of time or on a schedule.

Some examples of these are:

• Freedom for blocking distractions on all your devices at once

• Cold Turkey Blocker for scheduled system-wide blocking

• LeechBlock NG for free browser-based website blocking

• RescueTime for time tracking with built-in website blocking

• Forest for motivating you to put your phone down

• SelfControl for a nuclear option 💥

• Focus for a combination Pomodoro 🍅 timer and distraction blocker

• PawBlock for distraction blocking with cute animal pictures

My personal favourite is Forest - the added advantage with this one is that when you’e earned enough tokens through planting trees, you can cash them in and they’ll plant a real tree.

This works on the phone and on computers, and along with the cute forest of trees you can plant on your screen that graphically represent all the time you’ve spent concentrating without interruptions, you can do some real good in the world!

The Bad Habit Kicker

This last section will be a shameless plug for my own work, but I believe so strongly that it can help that I make absolutely no apologies for that. So there!

Often you succumb to that instant gratification and its ugly sister procrastination, because the effect of the thing you want to do is just so nebulous or so far off in the future that it’s easy to just wave a dismissive hand and claim that you’ll get to it tomorrow. Spoiler alert: you rarely do.

For example, say you want to work out more. Why? Because you know it’s good for you. Many studies show that people who regularly exercise live longer.

Sounds good, right? The problem is, that if you don’t exercise today, then you aren’t going to instantly feel unwell. If you eat that extra cookie or the sneaky midweek takeaway, you aren’t going to wake up the next day having put on fifty pounds. You can’t see the positive or negative impact of your actions.

And so it’s all too easy to just coast along until something happens that scares you into taking action, like your doctor looking shocked when they weigh you or a cancer scare or something even worse.

So, what can you do?

You need to bring future events right into the here and now, so that you take action. I won’t go into how I came up with this idea, you can read my book The Bad Habit Kicker) to find out a bit more of the history and the ideas behind it, but in short you answer these questions:

1. What is the bad habit that you’re trying to break?

2. What benefits/advantages does this habit give you? (Why do you do it?)

3. What is this habit preventing you from getting?

4. Imagine you’re at the end of your life and you’ve kept the bad habit: What does that look like? Paint a vivid mental picture (or add photos)

5. Imagine you’re at the end of your life and you kicked the bad habit: What does that look like? Paint a vivid mental picture (or add photos) How does that make you feel?

Once you’ve filled that out, in as much detail as you can, with supporting photos to really scare (question 4) or inspire you (question 5), you put a reminder in your phone or in your calendar, so that you review that template, that is, read through it, twice a day.

You make sure you carry it with you, either in digital or paper format, and if you waver, if you’re about to fall back into your old habit, you re-read the answers you’ve written down.

The more emotional impact you can give this, the better. If my own template for the thing I’m currently working on doesn’t bring tears to my eyes, I keep editing it until it does.

You need to really feel the negative impact of staying on the path you’re on and the and positive impact of striking out in a different direction. What you’re doing is forming new neural connections in your brain (going back to Hebb’s law, which I mentioned earlier) and forcing yourself to confront the reality of the outcomes you’re facing.

If you want to know more about The Bad Habit Kicker, you can find my book here.

Conclusion

So, there you go, I hope that one or more of the techniques I’ve outlined above resonates with you and you can use them to defeat the pesky instant gratification monster as much as you can.

Why not choose one technique and commit to trying it for a month? Although opinions vary on how long it takes us to shake off a bad habit, with the range going from 18 to 254 days, a good month of trying a tactic should give you an idea about whether or not it’s a helpful one for you. They won’t all work, and some may well work better for different habits, or in delaying different kinds of instant gratification than others.

I find it helpful to keep a journal, where I can reflect on my day, either last thing at night, or perhaps the first thing in the morning about the day before. I also do a review at the end of the month, where I look back at the last thirty or so days and reflect on how well the things I’ve tried have worked. Think of life as a giant experiment, if you will, and just because you try one thing and it perhaps doesn’t work all that well, it absolutely doesn’t mean that you’re a failure, it just means that the tactic wasn’t the right one, either for you or for the thing you’re trying to change. Shrug it off, inspect and reflect and then adapt. Dust yourself off and try something else, it’s not the end of the world, after all.

Just remember, all of this is totally normal, we all struggle with distractions, we’re all running after pleasure and away from discomfort, and if it weren’t for the fact that the real satisfaction in life comes from doing difficult things, then that would be fine.

But if you want more out of your life, there’s a good chance that sometimes it just feels like an impossibly steep mountain to climb.

Will you win out every single time? No, of course not. But again, that’s absolutely fine. What matters is that you keep fighting the good fight, and that you win as much as you can.

I wish you all the luck in the world in your journey, and my plea to you is to be kind to yourself. The voice in your head and what you allow it to say to you matters more than you might think.

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As always, if you have questions or if you’d like to give me any feedback, I’d love to hear from you!

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