Wanting to sleep today and promising to start workout from tomorrow..
Wanting to eat unhealthy fast food which tastes delicious but is unhealthy instead of the healthy option which will not taste good now but will give healthy benefits later.
Wanting to check how many people liked or commented on your post from two minutes ago on social media.
All are examples of instant gratification! Instant gratification refers to the urge and resulting tendency, to ' let go' of a future benefit in order to obtain a less rewarding but more immediate benefit.
The famous Stanford marshmallow experiment was conducted in 1972 led by psychologist Walter Mischel. In this study, children were offered a choice between one small but immediate reward, or two small rewards if they waited for a period of time.
So the researcher would offer child a marshmallow and suggest to the child that he can eat the marshmallow now or he can wait for fifteen minutes and get two marshmallows. Then the researcher would leave the room for about 15 minutes and would return to check what choice the child has made. Children who chose to eat the first marshmallow opted for instant gratification and those who waited for fifteen minutes and got two marshmallows chose delayed gratification. In follow-up studies, the researchers found that children who were able to wait longer for the preferred rewards tended to have better life outcomes based on their health conditions, academic success and other important life choices.
Sigmund Freud, the father of psychology explained delayed gratification using id, ego and super ego.
Id says I want ice cream and I want it now ..
Superego says it's midnight, having ice cream now is not good for teeth. Also you have gained so much weight... can't have ice cream.
Ego says let's do a compromise .. go to sleep now, wake and do two hours of exercise in the morning then you can have an ice cream as a reward.
As a baby we only know instant gratification. A baby wants food now, wants to sleep now, needs change of clothes NOW. .. as they only know about basic urges and needs like thirst, hunger, feeling cold or hot and need of sleep. Babies have no idea that there is something called delayed gratification also.
Delayed gratification is an ability to resist immediately awaited rewards in favour of obtaining a larger reward in the future. If I behave good now I will get to eat chocolate later. If I work hard in my field now and harvest food then I will get to store and eat it later when extreme weather conditions hit me like snow, cold, heavy rain etc. So delayed gratification is a learned behaviour which comes from experiences we have.
What's happening in our brain when we chose instant gratification or delayed one?
Hippocampus the rational brain has this capability to weigh the consequences and chose rationally. Nucleus accumbens is the portion of brain which is a reward center or pleasure center. Any choice we need to make regarding our wants, urges if only nucleus accumbens is involved definitely pleasure seeking will be focus of the brain but if some time is given to think and other information is provided like how big is the reward that awaits and after how much wait, then the hippocampus jumps in. And then the negotiation happens between hippocampus and nucleus accumbens to stall the instant pleasure seeking and the brain gets ready to wait for the delayed gratification.
What are the negative consequences of choosing instant gratification over delayed gratification, every time?
first obvious problem is that you loose out on the reward which you could have gotten after waiting. But that's not all, there are some other issues as well.
Like we end up training our brain to not wait for hippocampus to get involved before taking any decisions and always focusing on pleasure seeking. Which results in increasing impulsive tendencies and lack of impulse control.
If urges like consuming alcohol, substances, smoking, gambling are not controlled by the rational brain then there is risk of addictions.
The individuals who are used to only instant gratification, when their needs, wants and desires don't get satisfied immediately, they can become victims of irrational self doubt, anxiety and depression which could result as worse as suicidal.
All of the following are results of today's world which focuses so much on instant gratification and every day new technology based inventions are coming to make the wait of something to happen even shorter than what it was Yesterday:
*We see individuals getting addictions like smoking, drinking, screen addiction, social media addiction which is want of immediate approval addiction.
*People finding it difficult to save for their future and spending all the money they earn on materialist wants of today.
*Young adults who are so used to get everything immediately as and when they want it, getting really nervous, anxious and depressed if they are deprived of pleasures of life due to some reasons.
What can we do to ignore instant gratification and wait for the delayed gratification which is a more healthy and appropriate choice?
1) Our self talk needs some work
We have been telling ourselves things like 'you live just once', 'who knows if there is tomorrow’,’ life is short, make most of it' all such statements conveniently gives control to nucleus accumbens and we focus only on pleasure seeking. Might be true, life is full of unexpected surprises and there are no guarantees. But still definitely investing in long term goals has its benefits. Imagine if the humans when first found mangos on mango trees, would have just ate these tasty fruits and no one would have thought of putting the seeds back in ground and tried to grow a mango tree so that he and his future generations can have plenty of mangoes in future. Can’t imagine world without mangoes, right?
2) Role of parents
Parents have to teach children by exposing them to different experiences that the reward of waiting is much more and important than choosing something which we are getting now. As parents we have to cultivate habit of keeping bigger goals and chunking them down into smaller objectives and staying focused to achieve them. Let’s take an example. If I want my child to learn skill of creative writing and he wants a new bicycle. I can tell him that if he writes diary for a month every night before bed, he will get bicycle at the end of the month. Here I am teaching my child to do a focused activity over a period of time for a big reward in the end rather than choosing the instant gratification of playing on his phone till late at night.
We also have to teach children to set the rules by themselves like setting appropriate goals, deciding interesting rewards if they achieve these goals and also deciding appropriate punishment if they fail to achieve the goals. Like if I finish this paper by Saturday, I will treat myself with a movie on Sunday but if I fail to do this task then I will have to clean bathroom super clean on Sunday.
3) Saying goodbye to procrastination
Procrastination happens when we postpone something important but unpleasant and instead engage in an activity which is not relevant but gives instant gratification. For example instead of finishing due homework a student keeps playing on his mobile. Instead of completing the presentation due tomorrow, somebody will just stall time eating chips. We need to handle our Procrastination better so that it doesn’t push us towards instant gratification. There are some systematic approaches to handle Procrastination like tasks, to do lists, commitments and agreements.
To conclude, today when we are facing harsh consequences of quick fixes, immediate responses and instant gratification, it has become so much important to master the art of patience, the skill of waiting and the habit of investing in delayed gratification.
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