Holiday Season: The Real-Life Stanford Marshmallow Experiment

Use the holiday season to build your willpower

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The holiday season is here. It’s the season to be jolly. One of the ways we achieve this goal is through sweets, confectionaries, and not necessarily very healthy food. Moreover, its ready availability tends to lead to overindulgence. In my experience, this is also the case metaphorically about other kinds of consumption, like watching too much sports or TV, playing too much Chess, sleeping excessively, or missing exercise. I have found that the fundamental issue is going deeper into the comfort zone than is necessary for recovery and relaxation causing me to lose some good habits developed over the rest of the year. I used to think that it was just me, but then I found that slipping too much into the comfort zone comes naturally to us, just like falling due to the effect of gravity [1]. During the rest of the year, our motivators (External, internal, fear, and greed) help us keep on counteracting this pull. During the holiday season, these tend to soften before we can react and adjust to them.

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Reasons for Overindulgence

In this article, I will list some of the curve balls of excuses and rationalizations I tend to come up with some ways to mitigate them. It does not mean canceling the holiday season and completely abstaining from the fun. It means taking the middle path: the most difficult of the three (the other two being abstaining and fully indulging) to master.

After many iterations of the holiday season over several years, I have become aware of common reasons for overindulging and breaking good habits developed over the rest of the year.

The first mistake is never the one that ruins you. It is the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows. Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit. — James Clear [2]

Of course, we can recover the lost habits, but I believe prevention is better than cure.

1. Once-a-year thing: This time only comes once a year, so eat some more dessert or have food or drink. I have fallen prey to this, especially during the multi-course Thanksgiving dinners.
2. Social Pressure: Everyone is overindulging and enjoying, and they seem not to be in any trouble. Moreover, we have an innate evolutionary need to conform and be a part of the group. This is because non-conformance in our hunter-gatherer days was extremely risky.
3. Boredom: The work pressure (and hence time pressure) diminishes suddenly. Therefore, all the distractions, the so-called mental candy, start intruding and occupying more time. For example, I broke my regular sleep routine the evening before Thanksgiving, by staying up late at night watching some 4-star movies on Amazon Prime. Now, my sleep routine, which I had developed through extensive effort, seems to be in jeopardy.
4. Recovery: The holiday season allows us to recover from exhaustion, whereby I find an excuse to oversleep. I call this phase R&D: Rest and Digest. It is a known fact that too much sleep and inactivity are not very healthy and do not support recovery.
5. Exhaustion: On the other end of the spectrum, the holiday season can also be a busy period, with additional festive activities (that are fun) piling up on top of the regular work schedule. I have seen improper recovery tends to weaken our will and self-control, leading to a slippery slide into overindulgence.

I have realized that the fundamental reason is a priority inversion from long-term to short-term. When making decisions, we are in a perpetual tug-of-war between short-term versus long-term priorities. In most situations, the short-term priorities are costly in the long term and vice-versa. Moreover, our natural tendency is to overdo it when the going is good due to perceived future uncertainty. Consequently, during the holiday season, whether it is busy or not, the focus becomes limited to a few weeks until the new year.

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Train Your Mind

I think this is an opportunity to train our willpower. It is as if the universe is giving us the marshmallow trials [3], a well-known experiment on delayed gratification and self-control. A scientist puts one marshmallow in front of the subject (a kid) sitting in a room. The scientist tells the kid that they (the scientist) have to leave the room for 15 minutes, and if the kid does not eat the marshmallow when they come back, the kid will win two of them. Just make the holiday season a game of marshmallow experiment.

1. The two marshmallows: Setup a long-term reward for January: a brief vacation or a hike. Furthermore, review and remind yourself daily to anchor yourself to a priority beyond the holiday season.
2. Feedback: Keep a daily score (say, on your phone) of how many times you exerted self-control by forgoing overindulgence with a short note of the temptations you overcame. This note will act as evidence to improve your confidence about your willpower.

Final Thoughts

I don’t consider myself qualified to preach temperance, as almost every year, I have faced the holiday season struggle that causes excessive distractions, binge-watching movies, breaking good habits, and time waste. Through personal review and analysis, I found several personal reasons and causes. I hope treating the holiday season, with all the desserts and comfort foods, as a game of marshmallow experiment is an opportunity to will us build our self-control muscle.

References
[1] Goggins, David. “Can’t hurt me : master your mind and defy the odds.” Cork : BookBaby, 2018
[2] Clear, J. (2018). Atomic habits: tiny changes, remarkable results: an easy & proven way to build good habits & break bad ones. New York, Avery, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment

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