How to Overcome Instant Gratification and Stay on Your Path

Of all the areas of self-improvement that people struggle with, falling to the temptation of instant gratification and immediate pleasure has to be one of the biggest ones.

I get it, it’s difficult to resist the calling of instant, easy, and now.

Because of this fact, our world has become filled to the brim with ways we can achieve instant, easy, and now. There’s nothing inherently wrong on the surface with this, it has made our lives easier and less painful.

However, while instant gratification may be good for us on a macro level, on the individual level it can be devastating.

Sexual addiction, excessive credit card debt, shattered career outlooks, and a mis-lived life are some of the effects of not managing or overcoming instant gratification.

It’s hard to act against the forces of instant gratification in society, so I’ve enlisted some help. A great resource I’ve found to help in my own examination of temptation is Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. I’ve found it incredibly illuminating because it details the struggles we all face as a species in order to answer the question of:

how do I show up in the world as my best self?”

Known to everyone is this invisible, omnipresent metaphor of “the Devil” or “Satan” who somehow controls someone’s free will and forces them to do his bidding.

In the Screwtape Letters, two of Satan’s handymen correspond between each other on the best ways of how to tempt and corrupt people, separating them from God. Instead of thinking of “Satan” or “demons” as a metaphysical entities, I want you to think about them in terms of “the shadow self”, the darker and more sinister side of our nature. I want you to think of “God” as our highest self, our purest ideals.

I’m going to be pulling from the book and giving you some examples of instant gratification, why it exists, and how to armor yourself against it.

What is Instant Gratification? Why Do We Desire It?

“The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel.” – The Screwtape Letters

Instant gratification is simply the act or temptation of forgoing future rewards for immediate short-term benefit. These are usually incredibly pleasurable sensations, that cater to our baser, more primary desires (food, sex, status).

Evolutionarily, instant gratification was advantageous. The world our ancestors lived and evolved in were incredibly scarce in terms of resources. Anything that could guarantee survival needed to be immediately consumed (sometimes even hoarded) and they were rewarded by doing so. The ones that survived got to pass on their genes and survival was almost dependent on gratifying instant urges.

Obviously, we do not live in that environment today. Many first world environments are the polar opposite of what our ancestors experienced and thus, our instincts are an environmental mismatch. Instant gratification can be good, however. When you’re in serious pain, ibuprofin or some other drug can offer fast-acting relief.

However, this is an immediate survival need, not something that creates long-term lifestyle foundations – like behavioral change.

Six Ways How Instant Gratification Affects the Brain of An Individual

There are many ways that immediate pleasure affects the brain over a specific length of time. Here’s six of them.

1. You Become Addicted to Sensory Pleasure

“All the healthy and out-going activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at least he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, ‘I now that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.” – The Screwtape Letters

Most forms of instant gratification are inherently pleasurable to the senses. The pleasure principle states that the more something pleases us, the more likely we are to repeat it. This is the basis of operant conditioning.

2. You Don’t Put in the Effort Required

You come to expect easy wins, especially in the big areas of life. Not only that, you shorten the timeline you expect to achieve it in and the effort you believe should be expended It is all too easy to mistake signal for noise and pleasure for fulfillment. Pleasure can make you feel good but it isn’t necessarily fulfilling.

Since we are goal oriented creatures, we feel the best when we’re striving towards a goal. That may not always fill us with a sense of pleasure, but it certainly makes us feel whole. If you constantly indulge in instant gratification, you are training your brain to only go for instant pleasures and low-hanging fruit. When you’re presented with a big challenge, you’ll find it hard to step up to the plate and get it done.

This is the first step in developing a habit of procrastination.

3. You Start to Think Short Term

When you’re focused on sense pleasure, you are only concerned with how you feel in this moment.

There is no progress without some degree of pain and if you focus too much on the pain (discomfort) you’re experiencing now, you completely blot out the future. You want some distraction to come and relieve you of your mental and emotional anguish so you don’t have to feel the anxiety of suffering any longer.

But instead, if you are willing to take the pain and persist in the face of discomfort, you emerge on the other side with some artifact of your efforts (money, a skill, a relationship, etc.).

4. You Become Soft

Think about what happens when your alarm goes off at 6am. Snooze. 6:15? Snooze. 6:30? Snooze.

Just a few more minutes…it’s nice and warm in here.

That’s you when you get stuck in an instant gratification mindset. It’s like a cocoon. You can just stay in the cocoon all your life if you want. But of course, you miss out on the larger world because you were too busy being comfortable.

5. You Abandon Your Values

Your values are a way to make sure what you’re doing right now is consistent with who you want to be in the future.

Since instant gratification is focused on “right now” (and usually only right now), you eliminate the future by default..

If you choose instant gratification over your values, you are essentially throwing all of that out of the window and saying they don’t matter.

6. Makes You Accustomed to Immediate Feedback

Instant gratification makes you accustomed to instant feedback but real life isn’t instant.

Many of the things you do in the short term, you won’t see the results of them until much later.

An example you say? There’s many, but let’s take something relatively benign: retirement. For many of us, retirement is seemingly light years away. This makes saving for retirement a lesser priority, which at this point – it should be. There are other things in our immediate environment and immediate time horizon that need attention whether in time, money, or energy.

But this doesn’t make retirement a “non-issue”. “Retirement“ will eventually happen in some fashion. You will age and you won’t have as much energy as you do right now. What happens when you didn’t save for it? You won’t have the money when it comes time – simple as that. The feedback (retirement money) happened years after the fact (saving money during your prime working years).

Instant Gratification’s Effect on Society

As said before, instant gratification has a massive impact on the individual level. Since society is made up of individuals, instant gratification will start to show large impacts in how massive groups of people live and interact.

The millennial generation was the first generation to experience wide-scale appeasement of basic itches. Whether it’s posting a witty status on social media and getting a flood of “likes” or logging onto to an erotic site instead of actually dating, millions of people (who are now entrenched in adulthood) grew up with a world that catered to their whims. Generation Z doesn’t know a world without the immediate gratification of the Internet and now they are entering adulthood.

With a massive amount of people who have been trained to accept instant gratification as something that they’re entitled to, what will happen to the fabric of society and our own expectations from it? Only time will tell.

But one thing’s for certain – our societal future will be dictated on the ability to manage expectations and as a result, instant gratification.

How to Avoid and Overcome Instant Gratification

1. Surround yourself with people who encourage you and push you

“…the patient is now getting to know more Christians every day and very intelligent Christians too. For a long time it will be quite impossible to remove spirituality from his life.”

In the Screwtape Letters, the protagonist is shielded from temptation by surrounding himself with other well-meaning people. These people exert a subtle social pressure on him to be an upstanding person.

This can be the same with you. Surrounding yourself with other people who force you to be a great person is a key way to solidify things until they become a habit. When those people and things aren’t in your life any more, it won’t matter because you’ve already solidified the good habits.

Action step: Get someone to keep you accountable for something you’ve been putting off for a while. For example, tell a friend that you are committing to a certain goal and not to let you off the hook.

2. Practice emotional management

“If once they get through this initial dryness successfully, they become much less dependent on emotion and therefore much harder to tempt.”

Human beings are emotional creatures contrary to popular belief.

Many things, like buying are based on impulse.

Emotions can be a sign however that something is wrong, but many times they are a “red herring”.

You’ve likely had many times where you’ve been frustrated, angry, or sad and have retreated into “I can’t handle this mode”.

Action step: Think of the top performers in any field. Or, think of a parent. A top performer or a parent knows they have to perform despite their emotional distress. There may be a significant personal or professional event that takes them down from a 10 to a 1 or even a 0 on the mood scale. Instead of just giving their emotional side all the ammo, they just show up anyway and do what they need to do. This is the essence of self-discipline.

3. Examine your underlying motives

In order to get at a real reason “why” we do something, get at the underlying motives.

This is also called the “sponsoring thought”. For example: you may want to earn more money.

Why?

To get a better car, move into a new apartment, etc.

Why?

To possibly get a girlfriend. Ok…

Why?

To be happy? *ding ding ding!*

A lot of our underlying motives are based around achieving pleasure or avoiding pain. A lot of people want to be “happy” but they don’t understand they are aiming at pleasure, not happiness.

Action step: Happiness doesn’t exist from consuming stuff or getting stuff, it exists in stretching yourself past your limitations and achieving long-term goals. Examine an area of your life where you are trying to “get” something, especially consumption-related. What is your underlying motive? Is it legitimate? If not, then how can you achieve that in other ways?

4. Put distance between yourself and temptation

It’s much harder to be tempted to bad stuff when the temptation is nowhere in sight.

If you want to lose weight, throw out all your junk food so you won’t eat it.

If you want to stop spending your money on drinks, take cash with you to the bar/pub and not a credit card.

If you want to stop going on unsavory websites (you know which ones I’m talking about), install an app that blocks these websites.

Likewise, you want to shorten the distance between you and good habits.

If you want to make going to the gym a habit, set your gym clothes out where you can reach them first thing in the morning or take your gym bag to work with you.

If you want to eat healthier, stock your fridge with fruits and veggies.

If you want to establish a writing habit, make it incredibly easy to write.

Conclusion + Wrapping Up

“Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts…”

The Screwtape Letters is a good work of fiction as it easily talks about all of the ways in which we are tempted and it’s helped me examine its role in our lives.

While temptation is ever-present in society, it’s effect on us can be managed and even overcome through grace.

You do this by examining your motives, controlling your emotions, surrounding yourself with good people, and putting space between you and temptation. You create a massive (social) barricade around you and “bad stuff”.

Once you do that, you establish a strong locus of control, the world is your oyster.

And the best part? It’s all on you!

But it only happens when you take charge and decide to stop being tossed around like a leaf in the wind based on your feelings and emotions when you are rattled.

What do you think about instant gratification? Let me know in the comments.

6 Responses to “How to Overcome Instant Gratification and Stay on Your Path

  • Great post! Although, you talk about this/many other quorans talk about this on Quora. Still useful and a refresher! Thanks 🙂

  • Wow. The past two days I’ve been reading as many articles as I can from you Sim, I truly think this has come at the perfect moment for me.

  • Red Thunder
    6 years ago

    Great article!!! What other books do you recommend to understanding and overcoming this shadow? Thank you!

  • Megan Edmunds
    6 years ago

    Sim, I don’t think it will fit as neatly with your paradigm as The Screwtape Letters does, re: supporting quiets etc., but I hope you’ve also had a chance to read C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce.

  • Hey Sim, congratulations for this post. I love it 🙂

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *