Delay your gratification to be healthy

We all derive pleasure out of palatable food that we eat. There is no denial that junk food tastes delicious to everyone irrespective of age. My one and a half year old kid understand the difference between snacks and fruits very well, and her first preference would always be to eat unhealthy snacks. Junk food gives you instant pleasure but sadly in the long run it does not help you to get a beautiful and healthy body.

Dont't eat the marshmallow yet.

There are two types of gratification or pleasure.

• Instant gratification:
This is the path where you avoid pain and difficult choices to get immediate pleasure. Consider a situation where you are starving and you choose to eat tray full of hot and crispy potato fries or may be some chocolate chip cookies to satiate your hunger. While eating these junk food you feel incredibly good at that moment, but after sometime a feeling of guilt and failure fill your mind, and you probably don't feel very good about the choices you made, may be because you are not able fit into your old favorite dress or may be because you don't have glowing skin.
• Delayed gratification: It is a more difficult path where you delay your immediate pleasure for bigger purpose because you have control over your mind and you know the truth that delaying gratification brings pleasure which makes you feel incredibly good everyday. If you are starving you make sure to make right food choices which keeps your body healthy. Leaving your comfort zone and going for biking, hiking, walking or any sort of exercise is another example of delaying gratification to keep yourself active and healthy.

The good feeling from instant gratification gets vanishes very shortly. While the impact of delayed gratification is much longer and perpetual. There is a certain kind of beauty associated with delayed gratification that you just can’t put into words. People who have the ability to delay gratification have better discipline in their life. They are more successful than those who want immediate pleasure and do not wait for bigger reward and long term happiness.

To prove this scientifically, In 1960s and early 1970s a famous psychologist professor Walter Mischel at stanford conducted marshmallow experiment to explain lot of benefit of delayed gratification. The lead researcher gave the children a marshmallow and an easy instruction: You can eat the marshmallow now, or wait 15 minutes and receive two marshmallows. The researchers found that the children who were able to wait for the second marshmallow without eating the first one performed better in schools, scored higher in SAT,  had higher self-esteem and better emotional coping skills, and able to abstain themselves from drugs.

In short when you delay the immediate pleasure, you learn discipline, you learn that there are no short cuts of hard work, you know good thing will happen if you are persistent towards your efforts, you don’t indulge into bad behavioral and habits and always make prudent choices for yourself.

Achievers don’t submit to the instant gratification- they invest in long term payoff.

So don’t eat the marshmallow yet.