E8: Overcoming the Instant Gratification Trap

Ever have the best intentions to make healthy lifestyle changes but always seem to get distracted, never have time or lack motivation?

Highly likely you are in the instant gratification trap!

Here are 5 tips to get out and start making progress with your health (and other areas of your life too).

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Transcript

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Speaker A: Hi, everyone.

I'm Ben Johnson, mental health and exercise coach, private gym owner from Newcastle Online, coach of the Revival program, and outnumbered dad of two strong independent daughters just like my wife, and I can't get.

Speaker A: A word in with them at home.

Here's my chance. Welcome to my podcast. This show is a combination of my own personal growth, life experience, experiences, and experiences of coaching people for over a decade to help improve their health, happiness and life fulfillment. There's a lot of people struggling to find sustainable physical and mental health solutions, so I want to provide you with some key insights and key tools to help. If you find this information useful or even just enjoyable, it would be absolutely amazing if you could hit the Share button or leave a comment. You can also follow me on any of my social media platforms that can be found in the description text of this show.

Speaker A: So habit and behavior changes for a healthier lifestyle can be ******* hard work. You can have the best intentions, but it just doesn't seem to ever happen. Or it certainly doesn't last. Things like I'm going to work out early in the mornings, hit this news button over and over. I'm going to walk to work, but you take the car every day. I'm going to listen to a podcast before bed, but end up binging five to ten episodes of House of Dragon, I'm going to consume nutritious meals, but then blast three takeaways a week. I'm going to start a dance class, a fitness class, but it's too late, too far away, etc, etc. You get the drift. Maybe you can relate to some or all of these examples. And these examples are all examples of something called instant gratification decisions, which we can and probably have become very accustomed to and constantly fall into the trap. Our human tendency to seek pleasure and avoid pain, also known as the pleasure principle, is the driver for instant gratification. Little side note before I go on with this, instant gratification decisions constantly and fall into that trap can be regularly triggered by unresolved traumas, which I'd highly advised, seeking other help, therapy counsel and professional help to help process alongside any of the tools and tips that I'm going to share today. So dopamine is a hormone that is our immediate pleasure given hormone when we make these instant gratification decisions. But when we are making these decisions over and over and it's an overused cycle, these instant gratification decisions, it can actually lead to things like increased anxiety and depression because we're not progressing with our own personal goals, our targets in life. But overusing these instant gratification decisions as well can create a thirst for satisfaction that's never feeling fulfilled. This can increase our aggressiveness, it can change our mood, and it can also create a lack of control over our impulsiveness. On the flip side of instant gratification is something called delayed gratification. And delayed gratification is basically making decisions and prioritizing things that might not spike our pleasure hormone dopamine in that moment, but that delayed gratification decision is going to provide much longer lasting benefits beyond an initial high. So instead of just feeling a short term pleasure, a delayed gratification decision can help increase long term fulfillment, greater self worth, more confidence, greater self esteem, sense of achievement, and increased personal growth, just to name a few things. Working on delayed gratification is probably going to help you improve your own self regulation, how you regulate your mood, your performance, and it's going to help you generally achieve more of your goals and more of your aspirations in life. I'm not saying don't ever reward yourself or don't ever do things that feel instantly good, but I am saying you need to practice more delayed gratification decision making. Not only will you probably achieve the things you wanted to do so for a long time, but also the times where you do choose that instant gratification that's actually going to feel more pleasurable. You're going to get more out of it. Because these instant gratification treats, if you like this feeling when the dwarf means reese, it can get diluted. If we're overusing and overstimulant stimulating them, the pleasure response is diluted. And this hence creates a trap where we're constantly chasing more and more and more, but there's this constant lack of fulfillment. You might be sitting there or whatever you're doing, you might be listening, thinking, ben, this is just all about being boring, not living for the moment, we could die tomorrow, etc, etca. Look, I'm well for living and adventurous and exciting and pleasurable life as well. I want to make the most of it. I'm not just waiting around until retirement and thinking that it's going to be something glorious. Not a chance. I want to live for the day. But actually making this flip from instant gratification to delayed gratification can actually be applied to improving that way of living, that way of feeling. If you're in a similar boat to me, let us explain this. You could have been so accustomed to instant gratification decisions in short term immediate pleasures that you could actually be shrinking your life. You could actually be depleting the things that you enjoy or you once enjoyed. Here's a few examples. Say you wanted to, or you used to enjoy going dancing with friends or whatever, or you want to start doing it, but you feel it's too much effort. Maybe you used to enjoy going skiing or snowboarding and you want to go with friends, but actually it's too much effort. Maybe you want to go ballen or do some sort of activity, but it's too much effort. The effort, the initial effort is a short term pain, but you're choosing short term pleasure by not having to go and get your clothes on, get changed, take a shower, prepare or chat with your partner about childcare. Perhaps change your normal routines. Perhaps just to drive somewhere or to get the bus somewhere, or to get a taxi somewhere. You're choosing the short term pleasure of just staying within your comfort zone. But what happens when you do that is that you're probably not going to benefit from long term pleasure. So you're choosing that short term pleasure and you're actually going to suffer long term pain. The flip to that is to choose a little short term pain. Yes, I'm going to have to make a bit of an effort, whatever that is. But then you're going to benefit so much with this long term pleasure that's a flip between instant to delayed gratification. The long term pleasure from these examples could be a better social life, more connection again, more laughter, more fun adventure, more experiences and push and comfort zones. In all of this, in my opinion, corbin has a lot answer for in relation to this. People seeking comforts from home and then fallen into this trap of a really small comfort zone where instant pleasures can be found via technology at your fingertips. So going somewhere, making an effort is far too much effort to feel a pleasurable response. And it's about breaking that decision making cycle from always instant or overly instant decisions to just some more delayed gratification decisions. And I know that right now it is harder than ever to reinforce decisions with delayed gratification because everything is at our fingertips. Modern technology and social media especially, they're designed for this. They're created with psychologists and experts in mind to play on your instant gratification trap. And the more that were offered this instant gratification, the more we become accustomed to it and the more we expect it and it becomes a habitual behavior and our habitual response. So what I want to do is give you some tips and tools that are going to help you with this flip from instant to delayed. It isn't an exhausted list, but I'm 100% confident that everybody listening is going to be able to implement at least one of these to help positively impact your health, your happiness, and your overall life. In fact. All right, so there's five first one first thing that you can do is ask yourself honestly, all your basic needs being met. When I'm talking about basic needs, I'm talking about or you're feeling tired constantly, or you're feeling hungry constantly, or you're feeling stressed constantly. All three of these things can and probably will impact your energy levels. This is indirectly going to impact your mood, which will indirectly impact your reasoning and your decision making and make delayed gratification much harder. And you're probably going to choose because you're not hitting these basic needs. You're going to choose instant gratification because you want some pleasure. You know something's not right. So you need to assess your basic needs first. If you're tired, you've got to look at your sleep patterns. If you're hungry, you need to have a look at your eating and nutrition patterns. Are you consuming nutritious foods? Are you feeling fulfilled? Are you spreading your meals out so you're managing your energy levels? If you're stressed, you need to look at your carbon patterns. Do you know what your triggers are? What's within your control that you can change? Do you have clarity on your values? Because that's going to help reduce your stress levels as well. All of these things that I help my private coaching clients with and for a lot of people, from my experience of coaching hundreds of people, this is the root cause of their instant gratification trap because their basic needs aren't being met. So I would always start there first. Number two, improve your weekly planning and improve your habits that are going to help prepare and help you make delayed gratification decisions. What I mean by this, here's some examples. Habit you could prepare some nutritious meals, so that's going to help you avoid instant gratification when your hunger levels rise. Habit you're going to prepare your workout clothes and then your work clothes and maybe your family's breakfast the night before. That's going to help you avoid instant gratification when wanting to do a morning workout. Habit commit to reading or journaling 20 minutes before bedtime, let's say at 09:30 p.m., for example. Do it for 15 to 20 minutes before bed. That's going to help your sleep length and your sleep quality. To then help you avoid the instant gratification when you might be feeling tired in the morning to roll over and hit the snooze button instead of doing a 20 minutes yoga session for example. These are just a few examples, tons. And this ties in nicely with number three. Number three, flip your focus from long term, large, probably overwhelming goals that seem far too distance and therefore you're going to lack motivation to achieve and therefore lead you to instant gratification decisions even more. Flip that to focusing on smaller, short term, probably habitual goals as we've just touched on there in .2. So have those as your goals rather than just some massive thing like I want to lose two stone or I want to run a marathon or whatever it is, I want to compete in something. Change it to these small habitual goals that I've just shared in .2, which is going to aid and drive your delayed gratification decisions. Number four, this is a big one, especially in our modern world. Create boundaries and limits with your technology. This is going to allow you to reset the overstimulation of your dopamine cycle. You're going to feel more connected. You're going to feel more peace. You're going to feel like you can self regulate better. Some good tips for this log out your social media accounts only. Log in maybe two or three times per day with a ten to 30 minutes window at each of those periods can guarantee that that's going to massively reduce your social media app timing straight away. You can log in morning, lunch, night, say ten to 30 minutes, check your notifications, have a little scroll, see what's going on, log back out that's one way. Another way, get outdoors for the majority of one full day every weekend, away from technology, completely switch off from it. Emails logged out, social media logged out, all of it. And get outside, back into nature. Another one with this one weekend per month, go and find a new outdoor adventure activity. Again, away from all technology. Log out of it. Another thing you could do is commit to orni mebby's one or two episodes of a series rather than trying to binge five or ten every night. Or you could even have certain nights where as a family, you do not watch TV at all. You do something else. You play a game or something. All of these boundaries and creating boundaries and limits with your technologies, these start with an honest reflection of where you currently are so that you can then first of all, monitor your distractions and your instant gratification decisions. And then you can make little reductions around your social media. You see TV, you see Internet use, there's apps that you can use for this where it'll tell you how much your screen time is. I think most newer phones have them anyway. And then finally, number five, empathize with your future self. Okay, so just create a little bit of space. Just before you make that impulsive decision based on what's going on, just ask yourself a couple of simple questions. How will your future self feel based on this decision? Will they be happy about that decision? And you just create a bit of space so you can make a conscious decision rather than a subconscious one. And then what you can do each week, it's not always going to be plain sailing. You'll still fall for the instant gratification trap. But even if you're just making less of those, that's progress. And each week you can learn from those weak decisions and see where you can make some changes. You can find patterns and then you can make changes from there. Like I said, this isn't an exhaustive list, but there's some tools there for everyone that could help if you wish to choose to implement them. It's up to you. At the end of the day, you know how much you are falling for the instant gratification trap and how much you need this help. And in my honest opinion, training yourself to make more delayed gratification decisions can have a huge positive impact on your health, your happiness, and your life fulfillment. If you've enjoyed this episode or found it useful, please do share with friends, family members, work colleagues, anyone who's going to benefit as well. Thanks again for tuning in. Remember to hit the subscribe button so that you don't miss any of the future episodes. And I hope that you have a good one. cheers.