Delayed Gratification

Gratification, like all emotions, is a motivator of behavior and plays a role in the entire range of human social systems.

Many people worry about humanity’s seeming inability to self-regulate. The ability to have whatever we want in an instant weakens our self-regulation muscles. Most goals can be reached, but they don’t happen by accident. They also don’t get realized in an instant.

Goal achievement requires self-awareness and the ability to delay gratification in favor of more desirable rewards at a later time. While self-regulation may not be at the top of most of our lists of strength, it is within all of us. It can grow, like all other strengths.

Come along and read how you can learn to delay gratification and open yourself up for improved self-regulation and higher goal achievement.

Delayed Gratification Exercises

One of the easiest ways to begin exercising your delay muscles is by practicing mindfulness to undo “autopilot” thinking.

The more aware we become of our automatic behavioral reactions to impulses, the better prepared we are to delay those impulses. Interrupting the default mode does require more energy and can be uncomfortable at first. It can, however, make us more mindful of our behavior and reactions.

Another way to exercise delayed gratification is through the use of strengths. A great way to bring forward a lower strength is by using a core strength (Niemiec, 2018). If self-regulation is on the lower portion of your strengths list, core strength can pull it forward.

For instance, someone who has ‘Love’ as one of their top three VIA character strengths can use that strength to tow self-regulation forward. An example might be saying to yourself, “I love you too much to eat that cookie right now.”

Another way to bolster a lower strength is by using it in a new way every day. This will likely feel inauthentic and difficult at first, but it can have long-term rewards. Here are some steps to build a lower strength, like self-regulation:

1. Choose the strength you’d like to build.
2. Create a visual cue.
3. Make the strength’s use part of your daily routine.
4. Give yourself a reward when you successfully use it.

Here are some specific actions you can take to help build your delayed muscles.

1. Monitor your distractions first. Phone, TV, and the internet may be a good place to start. You can install apps to monitor your usage and see how you’re really spending your time.
2. Eliminate objects of temptation. It’s much easier to avoid junk food when it isn’t in our homes.
3. The next time something upsets you, try to control your emotions. Focus on the choices that you have in handling the situation. When emotions are more easily digestible, it can be easier to make clear decisions in real-time.

5 Useful Delayed Gratification Worksheets

The Avoidance Plan Worksheet can help you plan avoidance strategies.

The Reward Replacement Worksheet can help you switch up rewards.

The Abstraction Worksheet can help you tap into the capabilities of abstraction.

This worksheet will help you tune into Self-Directed Speech.

The If-Then Worksheet is a plan for hiccups.

Activities for adults & kids

We know from research that the initial practice of self-regulation results in short-term ego depletion (Muraven, Baumeister, & Tice, 1999).

However, the long-term benefits of the effortful practice of self-regulation may be able to strengthen the “muscle” overall.

The more opportunities we have to practice, the more we can exert our power over impulse.

Here are a few activities that can serve as practice for adults and children:

Tracking and journaling is a reliable way to improve our overall capacity to delay gratification. If someone has the goal of weight loss?, logging food intake is a great way to begin the journey toward that goal. The activity welcomes self-awareness and mindfulness in impulse control.

Goal setting is an important piece when attempting to delay gratification. Creating a “keep your eye on the prize” situation can enable you to envision a positive future that can manifest in the real world through real-time habit change. A specific, attainable, and measurable goal needs to be in place before delayed activities can be fully experienced.

Children need to see their parents modeling the type of behavior that they are asked to exhibit. Parents who act impulsively concerning food and other delay-requiring practices could inadvertently encourage children to do the same.

Wish lists are great ways to help children delay their impulses for the “must-have” toys they are eager to possess. These lists help kids reevaluate their impulses at a later time and reduce parent-child stress in real-time situations. It isn’t hard to imagine the little monsters we could create by buying kids something every time they visit the store. This is a fun and powerful “not right now” lesson.

Achieving improvement in health, wealth, and overall well-being is possible through alterations in goal-setting behaviors. Setting If-Then parameters for delaying gratification can be helpful along the way. When pursuing a goal, creating scenarios ahead of time allows for easier real-time decision-making when pitfalls present themselves.

For instance, when pursuing a health goal, setting up a precise way to respond if a temptation pops up allows a response that will delay gratification. Here’s an example:

If I want an extra snack, then I will do 20 squats and drink a glass of water first.

We all have vices, and our impulse to give in to those vices can be countered with positive replacement behavior. Habits become automated after approximately 66 days of continuous use (van Sonnenberg, 2015). If someone wished to overcome a vice, replacing that vice with an alternative positive behavior can aid in delaying the impulse for that vice.

For instance, replacing an unhealthy choice with a healthy one provides a positive aim for habit change. Here is an example:

Instead of going to bed watching Netflix, I will read for 30–45 minutes instead.

Positive self-talk is a skill that many people are unaware they can build. Negativity bias gives significantly more weight to negative experiences than to positive experiences. We continually punish ourselves by allowing our negative bias to outweigh a positive voice. With practiced self-compassion, positive self-talk can rewire our brain toward solution-focused inner dialogue.

How to Practice Delayed Gratification in Daily Life

Avoidance is a practice that successful gratification delayers employ.

When you have a health goal, creating an environment where healthy choices are easily accessible is essential. Delaying gratification can be an energy-depleting activity.

When we avoid the necessity of overriding our impulses, the instances that we have to delay gratification and, in turn, deplete ourselves are lessened. It is so much easier to avoid fast food when you’ve already planned ahead with healthy choices for the hunger that inevitably erupts.

De-emphasis of rewards is another area to grow a delayed gratification practice. Rewards aren’t defined by physical properties, but rather by the behaviorally induced responses attributed to those rewards (Schultz, 2015). Fully recognizing what behaviors lead to perceived rewards gives us a driver’s seat to delaying gratification.

The warm, comfortable feeling an alcoholic beverage may bring to someone struggling with excessive alcohol consumption can be de-emphasized. Behaviors that bring that warm, comfortable feeling in a healthy way can put off the need for that drink, replacing behaviors that are harmful with healthful rewards and delaying the gratification experienced for that original behavior.

It takes hard work to delay the feeling of physical need, but the rewards of longer life and better overall health can begin to outweigh the need over time.

Rewards can produce learning opportunities. Through new positive neural pathways, behavior shifts result in new ways to experience pleasurable rewards. Emphasizing rewards that are healthful shifts behaviors when intrinsically motivated.

Positive distraction is another way to practice delaying gratification. Creating opportunities for play where positive distraction pulls someone away from the urge to act on impulse is helpful. Studies have shown that certain games can help people move forward when they’re no longer focused on the pain? of the current experience.

For instance, children singing songs and creating play during the famous marshmallow test were better able to delay the impulse to consume their marshmallows.

Other animals use self-distraction as a technique to delay gratification as well (Evans & Beran, 2007). It is interesting to know that with proper motivation for behavior change, improving self-regulation is possible across species. The only problem with distraction is when it becomes a new unhealthy habit instead of a tool to change a habit.

Abstraction is another pathway to delayed gratification practice in daily life. The ability to cognitively isolate common characteristics is essential for higher level information processing. For learning from experience to take place, we must have the ability to fully understand behavior and consequences.

Self-directed speech is considered a developmental milestone for children and is another way to practice delayed gratification in daily life. Historically, thought and language have been deeply interconnected and researched. Self-directed speech is a metacognitive ability involved in self-motivation and task-oriented behavior (Mulvihill, Carroll, Dux, & Matthews, 2020).

Children begin to master this internal dialogue between the ages of 10 and 12. Utilizing this ability and maximizing its effectiveness can improve our self-regulatory behaviors. Consciously delaying impulses through our inner dialogue is an incredibly effective way to avoid something for more significant gain later on.

Delayed Gratification for Productivity

Delayed gratification is a great way to optimize your productivity, but before you find out ho w to do this, you first need to understand the concept of delayed gratification more.

To convince yourself to put in a little extra work now for a better outcome down the road, practice the following.

1. Know Your Goals

Without a reason to delay gratification, you’ll struggle to do it. Think through which long term goals you want to achieve and what you can do to get there. It could be:

Personal

Have you always wanted to run a marathon? If so, you’ll need to train for it. Although it’s tempting to sit on your couch and watch television, delayed gratification is what gets you to lace up your sneakers.

Financial

Nearly 90% of Millennials say they would like to own their own home, but two-thirds of them will need to spend two decades saving up for it.^[3] Putting a little money away each month — despite the fact that you’d rather spend it on vacations or dinners out — is a matter of delayed gratification.

Professional

No employer is going to hand you your dream job simply because you want it; you have to work for it. Spending four years going to college, attending tedious seminars, and practicing your craft in your free time are all examples of delayed gratification.

Social

Friendships are not formed in a minute. If you want more friends or deeper friendships, you’ll need to invest in them. Delayed gratification might lead you to take a connection out to lunch, learn more about a shared interest, or volunteer for a cause he or she cares about.

Emotional

When you’re frustrated with a family member, you might be tempted to snap at him/her. How do you resist that temptation? Delayed gratification. When you love a person, you owe them your patience.

Spiritual

The big questions of life can only be answered with self-reflection and study. Looking deeply into yourself or reading religious texts can be uncomfortable. The reason you do them anyway is delayed gratification: You know you’ll be happier once you build out your belief set.

2. Think Through “What If” Scenarios

Typically, the best decision becomes clear when you look down the road. One of the oldest and best tools for doing this is called a decision tree.^[4] Decision trees allow you to visualize the follow-on effects of each choice. You can see a very basic example of a decision tree below^[5].

Say your car breaks down. Should you repair it, or should you buy a new one? In a decision tree, you might start with cost: Can you make a down payment without taking out a loan? If not, you might decide against buying a new car.

But should you go for a temporary fix, such as adding oil every week to a leaking engine, or a permanent one, like replacing an engine gasket?

Delayed gratification is a good guide at both levels. You put yourself in the best position to save money by not just keeping your car, but also by opting for the less expensive solution.

3. Use Tools to Take Away Temptations

Delayed gratification is particularly important when you have a job to do. Sure, it might be more fun to scroll through Facebook than make that next sales call, but you can’t afford to waste your workday.

Technology can get in the way, but it can also keep you on task. You can actually block apps and set limits for yourself. Not only can keeping yourself from accessing Facebook between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. make you more productive, but it can help you enjoy your evening social media time more.

4. Get an Accountability Partner

If you’re married, you and your partner probably share your finances. Why not leverage that partnership to make delayed gratification easier?

Start by setting ground rules. What expenses, exactly, are you worried about? Do you tend to shop for random gadgets when you’re stressed?

If so, decide when it’s appropriate to purchase gadgets and when it’s not. Agree on consequences in case you slip up, and ask your partner to hold you accountable. Perhaps you’ll make up for unnecessary purchases by not going out to eat that week.

You can find an accountability partner in almost any context. At work, you have colleagues. If you go to church, you sit next to someone who can encourage you to attend sermons.

5. Reward Yourself for Following Through

Inherent to delayed gratification is some benefit you earn by doing the hard work upfront. If you struggle with delayed gratification, you can make it easier by giving yourself a little something extra.

You don’t have to use time-consuming or monetary rewards. You could simply watch a movie, play an online game, or go on a hike.

Strategies To Promoting Grit And Delayed Gratification In Students

Here are some ideas to get you started.

1. End of the day reward

Set up simple (and frequent) opportunities for your students to practice delayed gratification. If you have young children in the classroom, it can be something as simple as an end-of-the-day reward. If your students had a good day, offer them a token that goes towards a free homework pass (10 tokens = pass). Most kids will want to take that token and start building their cash flow, but offer something a bit better if they wait.

For example, if they forfeit the free homework pass each day for a week, at the end of the week, the kids who did get an extra 15 minutes of recess. You’ll quickly see who likes the immediate gratification and who is willing to wait it out.

2. Visual savings

Use a jar of marbles or some sort of visual so your students can watch it get filled up as they perform tasks, help each other, and showcase good behavior. A full jar can equal an ice cream party or some other special reward.

3. Math fact practice

If your goal as a teacher is to have your student fill out 100 multiplication facts in five minutes, use it as an opportunity to teach resilience. Rather than waiting until you’re sure they can meet the goal easily, set up a chart for practice and growth. Explain to them that you don’t expect them to meet the goal, but to simply record the time it takes to do the 100 problems.

First time around, it may take the student 15 minutes. Have him/her write it in the chart. Each day or week, have them redo the exercise and record the time – watching as it slowly gets lower and lower as the days pass. When he/she finally reaches that 5-minute mark, there will be tremendous sense of accomplishment.

4. Break down big projects

First, you need to make sure your students are engaged in a long-term project. Just like running, athletes train very differently for a sprint than a marathon. The long project will help them to learn about processes, mini-goals, and step-by-step persistence to a final destination.

5. Give an assignment that isn’t meant to have a perfect ending

In other words, once in a while, it will benefit your students to give them a problem or worksheet that they cannot complete perfectly. Warn them ahead of time that the goal of this exercise is simply to try – not to succeed. In the end, hand out a reward or grade that is dependent on their effort, not their aptitude.

6. Group assignments

Nothing promotes learning how to “grit your teeth” and get through it more than group work. In these situations, kids must not only produce a product or presentation, they must also learn to work with other students and use teamwork to accomplish the goal.

7. Create a classroom bank

If you have the time and motivation to set up a classroom bank, you can teach all sorts of delayed gratification lessons. In one corner of the room, set up a store. You can sell homework passes, pencils, Chapstick, etc. Each child starts out the year with a certain amount of classroom cash. They can earn more throughout the year doing various things, but as you add new and better “items” in your store, the students will have to forgo the immediate reward in order to save up for the item they really want.

8. Use educational simulation computer games

The Oregon Trail is a classic example of this type of game. You have to get your family to the West Coast safely, and budget your supplies and money accordingly. The same principle works in games like SimCity, where the student is master over a domain and must learn how to manage his/her resources.

9. Group competitions

If you have the students’ desks arranged in groups, have them participate in friendly competitions. For example, to encourage healthy snacking, have each team earn a point every day the whole group brings in a healthy snack. The reward will be something that happens in the future (like an ice cream party or movie). In this case, students will have to be mindful of their snack each morning at home when they pack it.

10. Offer positive distractors to help during difficult tasks

During long state-mandated testing or big tests, offer the students the chance to chew gum, something that isn’t normally allowed but might help with focus and/or concentration. The same goes for listening to music in earbuds (provided you can trust them to not cheat).

11. Play-it-out visual exercises

When children can imagine and follow through with a scenario in their mind, it is easier to make a decision that delays gratification. For example, if you are offering a child a free recess instead of a chip in a jar, walkthrough with them how it will feel on that day when the sun is beating on their arms and the smell of fresh grass signals spring. Engage the senses to they have the motivation to wait it out.

12. Delayed gratification in physical education

Sports like golf and cross-country running help develop an appreciation for long-term rewards.

13. Write down goals and hang them up

If the children have a concrete reminder of what it is they are reaching for, they are more likely to wait it out. When you are helping your students assess their goals, have them decorate a paper and keep it in front of the room or in their cubby. It should be seen daily.

14. When a student doesn’t show grit, offer a time of reflection

Help him/her to see how it feels when the immediate reward wears off. Usually a disappointment sets in because it wasn’t part of the ultimate goal. If they can remember that feeling, it might deter them in the future.

15. Avoid the “all or nothing” disease

Children can see things in black and white. If they haven’t gotten a 100 on a test, it might as well be a zero. It helps to model a positive attitude of progress. Getting some right is better than nothing.

16. Don’t test willpower to the point of exhaustion

These sorts of activities mentioned above must be balanced with positive reinforcement. Just like dieting can induce binge eating, you want to make sure the stress isn’t going to lead to a pendulum swing in the opposite direction. A good mixture of delayed and immediate rewards are the best way to keep a student motivated.

Test Yourself With These Tests

The Bredehoft-Slinger Delayed Gratification Scale (Slinger & Bredehoft, 2010) can be taken to determine your ability to delay gratification.

You can find permission to utilize this scale here. This assessment uses a seven-point Likert scale measuring impulsivity, task completion, and anger/frustration to determine the participant’s ability to postpone impulse.

If you want to test your willpower, here is a scientifically backed test to see whether or not you’re ready to take on that New Year’s Resolution.

You can find the widely used Barratt Impulsiveness Scale for measuring impulsivity here.

The Cookie Test is a test of willpower you can perform on yourself. Grab a freshly baked cookie and place it in front of you. Note the time it takes for you to avoid consuming it. This won’t work for those who don’t love cookies quite as much as the cookie monsters of the world.

Conclusion

Delaying gratification takes a considerable effort, resulting in energy depletion. The benefits of creating strategies to understand our impulses and hinder them in favor of better rewards down the road are many. The skills of highly successful people are accessible to anyone who has the desire to change their life.

The ability to delay gratification can be lifesaving. Epidemic levels of obesity, drug and alcohol misuse, and financial scarcity are important reasons to begin to change how we approach our impulsivity.