I am thinking on what to eat for dinner and the truth is that I prefer a burger over a salad 99% of the time. Is not even a decision that I need to think, is ingrained in my genes. I want those calories.
The reward that I get from the delicious bacon, double meat, texture from all the ingredients, grease, salt, sugar, omg...Is difficult to say no. The downsides are obvious but are not instant. I know that my health will suffer, but that can wait, I say to myself.
The opposite is true for the salad. Is going to be great for my body but at the moment, it does not go so well with my movie.
We like instant gratification, not only in food but work, hobbies, relationships.
We are not so good at seeing the future and when we see it, our brain is capable of bending reality and changing our rational decisions.
Unfortunately everything with an immediate reward has his costs. We can end fat, broke, alone and even dead when we are addicted to immediate rewards.
Sometimes we don't even know that we have a problem with this. I know, because this happened to me.
Instant gratification is not good if we want to have prosperous lives. If we are capable of delaying gratification we are going to increase the reward, from a simple burger to a healthier body, from a TV paid with debt to a nice vacation with our family paid with the interest of our savings.
The switch is not easy, many of us will spend all our lives trying to be more mindful of our actions and be more conscious when we made an action driven by our needs of gratification.
Is in our nature and we cannot change from one day to another.
Fortunately there are tools to hack our motivation and start making better decisions.
The first one is, like I said, more mindful of this reality.
Second use positive or negative reinforcement of this behaviors in the form of rewards and punishments.
In my experience I have changed habits that I had all my life. Habits driven by desires of fun at the moment, avoiding boredom, look for pleasure in food, by using tools like beeminder.
Beeminder is a on-line services that charges you an amount when you break a commitment that you made with yourself.
For example I hated to write, do pushups, run, because the rewards of those activities were long term. But thanks to that service and many others I managed to make the switch.
You can make bets with friends. The idea is to see the consequences of no action immediately. This will make more appealing activities more beneficial to us.
Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash
