The Power of Delayed Gratification & How Small Changes Can Yield Big Results

If you're a regular reader, you know that I gave up caffeine for Lent. If you know me personally, you know how much I love my coffee and can therefore appreciate the extent of my sacrifice :-) I'm no martyr, but I did gain an appreciable amount of perspective through this mentally-and-physically-taxing exercise in self-control. Not only did this experience teach me how much I took my coffee habit for granted, but how valuable it is to practice delayed gratification.

GIVE ME ALL THE COFFEE!

Let's face it: we live in an age of instant gratification. Texting, Tweeting, and instant messaging are the favored forms of communication. Who has time to look at a map when you have an app for that? Why call in a food order or *gasp* pick it up yourself when you can order from your mobile device and have it delivered? We even browse and "order" dates online! Don't get me wrong: I do not disparage any of these remarkable advances in technology; in fact, I think technology has democratized information and access, and in many ways has made the world a better place. However, I sometimes wonder what we give up when we give in so easily--to the ease of distraction, impulsivity, immediate gratification, etc.

"Don't care how, I want it NOW!"--Veruca Salt

My experience giving up caffeine was an exercise in discipline. In order to succeed, I had to harness my capacity for visualization and draw on past experiences where the sustained effort I put into a task paid off. I had to make myself see "the bigger picture": how sustained effort over the long term would yield a more favorable outcome than the pleasure of immediate gratification.

In his groundbreaking study, now simply referred to as The Marshmallow Study, Dr. Walter Mischel tested children's ability to delay gratification for a greater reward. Mischel's methodology was simple: he gave each child a choice between one marshmallow now and two later. He brought each child into a room from where they would be recorded. There was one marshmallow on the table, but Mischel told each child that if he or she could wait in the room alone for twenty minutes, they would be rewarded with a second marshmallow. Once he exited the room, each child was left alone to ponder their choice. Understandably, some children gobbled the marshmallow as soon as they were alone. Others, however, held off and were rewarded with a second marshmallow after twenty minutes like Mischel promised.

It was not the initial survey results that were revelatory. Rather, extensive follow-up with the children years later revealed an interesting corollary: there appeared to be a link between a child's ability to delay gratification and her level of success later in life. The parents of the children who managed to resist the temptation to gobble up the first marshmallow reported that their children had higher SAT scores, lower likelihood of obesity and instances of substance abuse, better responses to stress, better social skills, and general greater overall well-being than their more impulsive counterparts. The researchers continued to test these children over and over for more than forty years, and the group that waited patiently consistently performed better on various rubrics of success.

Understandably, these results astonished Mischel and his colleagues, but they warned that they cannot be taken entirely at face value. For example, the extensive follow-up led the researchers to conclude that a child's ability to delay gratification is not some inherent trait, but rather a learned behavior influenced by his or her environment and experiences. In other words, we are not born with a "willpower" gene; it is a trait that we can practice and get better at. Just like recent studies have revealed that our DNA is not static, so to can we improve our capacity to harness discipline to achieve success at things that may have formerly alluded us.


The key is to take action because without it, there is no success. We see how practicing delayed gratification plays out for the better in many different scenarios in life:

• For example, if you delay the gratification of going straight to bed after a night of drinking and drink water, take off your makeup, wash your face, and brush your teeth, you'll feel better the following morning, have better skin, and have less cavities;
• If you delay the gratification of eating the entire chocolate cake tonight, you'll consume less calories, gain less weight, be healthier, and enjoy the cake for longer; and
• If you delay the gratification of ending your workout earlier, you'll be stronger both mentally and physically. 

The bottom line is that if want to succeed at something, sooner or later you will have to put forth some effort and forego the easy way out to achieve your ambition. However, you must be strategic about how you employ effort--otherwise you'll burn out. The key to success is sustained effort over the long term, and that's best achieved by building smaller goals into your bigger ones.

My big goal is to have an online personal training and health coaching business. This is a massive, multi-pronged undertaking that I have to break down into smaller, incremental pieces. One piece is crafting my message and my brand. To do this, I have to write: blogs, Facebooks posts, Tweets, copy for my future website, my manifesto, my core beliefs, etc. I know that I am not going to sit down and produce all of this in a weekend, or even a week. I work full-time, have some side gigs, and want to enjoy my life. So on January 1st, I set a goal: to write something, every day, for at least 15 minutes a day. My goal was small and easy: it was impossible for me not to stick to it. With each passing day, I became more confident and more capable. Plus, after four months, I have a LOT of work to show for my efforts! Recently, I felt confident enough to dedicate more time to my goal on a daily basis: now I try to write for at least 30 minutes a day. 

This exercise has taught me the value of marginal gains. We often overlook the small efforts that must be put forth daily in order to achieve a goal; the tendency is to focus on the "game changer." In other words, change is not meaningful if it's not accompanied by some dramatic, visible improvement. When it comes to weight loss, this is many folks' downfall--if they're super-strict and leave no wiggle room in their initial plan and fail to see the dramatic results they were hoping for, they abandon the effort. But anyone who's ever lost weight and kept it off knows that it's the small successes that really add up.

Whether your goal is weight loss, to build a business, to quit smoking, or some other goal: commit to the small, incremental changes that you can make on a daily basis that won't disrupt your normal routine. Build in rewards. Increase your efforts at a reasonable rate, and don't get discouraged if you slip up a bit because it will happen--you are human after all! Always keep the greater goal in mind, visualize what it will feel like to achieve you dream, and let that feeling sustain you, day-to-day.

Good luck! Let me know your goals and how you're going to achieve them by posting here, heading to my Facebook page (Hil4Health), or Tweet me: @hil4health. I can't wait to hear all about it!