MOTIVATIONAL MONDAY – STEP 12: Learning how to defer gratification

Last week we’ve talked about deferring gratification – does it apply to you? 🤔 Does your brain demand a reward here and now? 😬 Do you forget about your goal when you see something you want (e.g. a cake while being on a diet) and you easily succumb to temptation? 🧐
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Don’t worry! The art of deferring gratification can be learned, same as you can train your willpower 💪.
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Try this exercise from Kelly McGonigqal’s book „The Willpower Instinct”: It appears that 10 minutes is not a long time to wait for something we want. Neurologists however discovered that it has great impact on how your brain processes the vision of reward 🏆. If instant gratification is supposed to come after 10 minutes then our brain sees it as future benefit 🔜. Hence the system that processes the promise of a reward calms down and strong biological impulse to instant consummation weakens ⬇️.
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In order for your brain 🧠 to think straight try waiting 10 minutes before you succumb to temptation. If after 10 minutes you still want it, take it/do it 😄. Before the time passes though try to think of long-term benefits you’ll get for resisting temptation. If it’s possible, try also creating some physical or visual distance ↔️.
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If you need to do something you don’t feel like doing you can also use „10 minutes rule” to help you resist the temptation of delaying necessary actions and to force yourself a bit to do them😉. Try making it „do it for 10 minutes, then you can stop”. Let yourself stop working after 10 minutes – it might turn out that as you already had started you will want to continue 😉. For me, it’s always the most difficult to start working and when I do I usually want to finish so this trick works on me quie well 👍
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Try doing that excercise and write down your results. „10 miutes rule” might work great when you don’t feel like working! ☺