Instant Gratification vs Delayed Gratification
What is Delayed Gratification and Why is it Important to Mental Health?
“ Nobody wants to tell you why discipline is so important. Discipline is the strongest form of self-love. It is ignoring current pleasures for bigger rewards to come. It’s loving yourself enough to give yourself everything you’ve ever wanted.”
Delayed gratification.
We’ve all heard this term before. We might think of it as sacrificing something in the present to teach us more patience in getting what we want later.
Instant gratification is another term we might define as falling prey to our urges and weaknesses - we experience satisfaction right away but close on its heels may be feelings of guilt and anxiety. Let’s dig into these concepts.
Neither instant or delayed gratification are good nor bad.
It’s how we engage and the personal and global impacts that are crucial.
And while both have their uses, it really is apparent that we are leaning a little too much on instant gratification and losing touch with delayed gratification and the skills that it helps develop. So, how does this show up? Often its in our levels of consumption, be it food and dining, entertainment, social media, clothing, electronics, and other easily consumed and disposable items. When we overconsume, the consequences can be seen in our environment, in our communities, our relationships, as well as our personal lives.
We live in a world where it’s easier than ever to purchase items or services that make us feel good quickly.
And that’s part of what drives instant gratification – is the need to experience pleasure and avoid pain.
That’s also part of what makes delayed gratification challenging – the temporary discomfort of forgoing something pleasurable in the short-term for a better benefit in the long-term can be exceedingly difficult. We don’t always give delayed gratification a fighting chance and instead succumb to that immediate hit of dopamine which we get as part of the brain’s reward system. But the catch is that the effect is usually only temporary, and a deeper need persists underneath. We rely on the external things outside of us, to fulfill our needs and often they are not enough because it’s a bandaid solution. A quick fix when what we really need is to nurture our internal resources and skills.
When you delay instant gratification, you will experience long-term satisfaction.
What would happen if we allowed ourselves to be uncomfortable for a limited amount of time, and in doing so, temper our patience, our resolve, our confidence, and ultimately our own resilience and self-worth?
We might just learn something new about ourselves on our journey. We might learn to trust ourselves more, to test our limits, to discover that we can reach new heights. Perhaps we’d no longer try to escape the pain and discomfort that we’ve been conditioned to avoid and have labeled as “bad” and so we’d no longer try to escape an essential part of the human experience. We’d learn to accept and embrace our experiences as potential for growth and evolution.
So, what can we do? Where do we start?
The first step is to understand what’s important to you.
What are your values and goals? What changes and adjustments would you like to work toward in your life and what have been challenges or temptations that get in the way? Journalling about these concepts or making a vision board are ideas to get creative with visualizing what you are aiming for.
Time to get real.
Self-awareness time –does instant gratification really work in creating the long-lasting change we need? Do we find ourselves stuck in an endless cycle of repeating patterns and feel like we’ll never break out of it? Knowing our triggers as well as our temptations, developing our emotional intelligence is a starting point to getting off the hamster wheel.
Try to be mindful.
What can especially help in this area is developing a mindfulness practice to help ground and center us while cultivating a more non-judgemental approach to our thoughts and feelings. Additionally, mindfulness and meditation is a great way to keep us focused on the present moment and experience and develop healthy control over our feelings and emotions, so they don’t have control over us.
Start small, build up those habits, and be consistent!
Making such huge shifts can feel as daunting as climbing Mount Everest even on the best of days. Train your brain with smaller experiments of delayed gratification. Create a consistent and steady practice that you can scale up and remember that if you do miss a day, try not to let it get you down. Getting back on the horse is more important than trying to be perfect – understanding that you are human and experimenting goes a long way to cultivating more self-compassion.
Reward yourself!
You’ve just done something incredibly difficult – breaking patterns and cycles, resisting learned behaviours and temptations. Reinforce how far you’ve come with something you’ve promised yourself and have been looking forward to throughout this journey. Give yourself permission to celebrate your commitment to yourself and your goals.
You can train your brain.
Luckily, delayed gratification is often conceptualized as a “muscle” that can be trained just like a skill that can be learned. This has been demonstrated through studies such as the famous Marshmallow Test where children’s delayed gratification skills were tested by researchers and their development in key aspects of life followed up on throughout the next 40 years. A second Marshmallow Test with a key difference was conducted in another study where children demonstrated how this skill could be learned through experiences.
How can a professional help with delayed gratification.
If you’re finding it difficult to practice more delayed gratification in your life or would like more support, consider reaching out to a therapist. They can be an important resource in further understanding how delayed gratification works and creating strategies to develop and practice this important skill so that we can all reap the long-term benefits.
If you’re interested in seeing how we might be able to assist you with your health and wellbeing goals, we offer free 15 minute consultations.
Connect with us and let’s talk about how we can help you.
