Marshmallow Experiment

I just heard about an experiment over a podcast called The Marshmallow Experiment — In this experiment you are given a marshmallow/chocolate and you can eat it if you want to, but if you wait for an hour you will get one more. This experiment was primarily aimed at children, to understand and study how kids try to teach themselves self-control they have and how easily they give into their needs at the moment.

An experiment as simple as this can teach us a lot about the importance of self-discipline and delayed gratification. This is what I learnt from it — Until very recently, I used to spend a lot of my free time watching some TV series on Netflix or HBO GO. It usually starts off when I am off-work and I’m having my meal. The TV series gradually grows on me and 4hrs later I find myself still lying down in my bed and watching the Season 2 at 3am. I always found myself tired midway through my workday due to this. I realized I was giving into the momentary pleasures. I had tried to move away from my habit of binge watching series by blocking these sites on my Chrome but they never really worked. The need to watch something online always overpowered my willpower. Whenever I felt bad about wasting my time by watching any of the shows, my alter ego usually kicks-in and convinces me by highlighting all the work I had done that day.

Coming back to the experiment, most of the kids give in to the momentary need and eat the chocolate but the ones who don’t, they distracted themselves from the situation at hand by talking about different things. Some go about by asking the same rhetoric question “How many more minutes to go?” and others went about running around, doing different things. Now, I do the same as well, I distract myself by having my meal with different people, reading about sports or watching news. Today, I moved away from this need by writing this!