3 Everyday Games You Can Play to Delay Instant Gratification
40 years of Stanford research says doing this makes you more likely to succeed.
Picture this.
You’re sitting and reading your book. You get a notification that your best friend texted you. Now, you’re really engrossed in reading but hey, one text won’t do any harm.
Maybe it’s important. You’re a good friend, and you want to be there, right?
You reply to her text; she texts you back. You have a brief conversation. It’s only a few minutes long. Then you get another notification from Instagram and other apps. Just two minutes more, you tell yourself.
Once you’re done, after 10 minutes or an hour, you open your book to read again.
Now, it all started with that one notification. But what you’re doing here is giving into pleasure, so subtly that you won’t realise it. To make matters worse, this behaviour has become so normalised so we don’t feel that checking our phone frequently is messing with our brain.
This is the same pleasure principle that comes into play when you want to lose weight and you see a cookie. Or when you open YouTube for something specific and jump to binging on videos.
