There is a boom in the business of healthy lifestyle in the Kingdom. There are a lot of diet control centers, companies offering the so-called-balanced meals to your doorsteps, and tens of gyms and public arenas to jog and walk.
It is a good trend, and hopefully we could see its results with a decline in diabetes, hypertension and obesity cases. The current published data are horrifying; this part of the world is recording high rates in all of the above.
However, the availability of dieting centers and gyms is not the whole story, there is another ingredient to it.
The decision to keep your healthy diet after three weeks of being in the heart of the battle between starvation and temptation, or the resolve to keep your promise to your wife and kids of staying away from cigarettes after a couple of days of continuous headache and bad mood are all dependent on one thing and one thing only … self-control.
For a lot of people, what starts as an exciting journey, dieting or abandoning cigarettes or exercising or sticking to driving rules (as some of us do from time to time), loses its glamour as time passes. The conflict between the immediate pleasure versus the long term value gets intense, visualizing the end results gets blurry, and the determination to stay on course weakens and eventually fades.
To understand this phenomenon, Walter Mischel from Sanford University, conducted what became known as “marshmallow test” on a group of preschoolers back in 1960.
In the test, Mischel asked a preschool child to choose between receiving a small reward now, in the form of marshmallow or a cookie, or waiting for a short amount of time, around 10 minutes, and receive bigger rewards, say two marshmallows or two cookies. Each child test was conducted by having him or her sit in a room free of other distractions with a single marshmallow placed on a table. Mischel filmed the children as they hardly tried to resist temptation and jumped on the table to catch the immediate prize. Videos of the contemporary versions of the test show children sitting on their hands, covering their eyes, looking away from table, staring at the marshmallow, smelling it, tasting a piece of it, pretending to eat it. It’s a truly hard exercise for a 5-year-old kid.
“In Mischel’s view, this is a test of willpower,” reported the New York Times. “The ability to use the brain’s executive, rational functions to overcome the immediacy — and emotional potency — of desire. In subsequent studies of his original subjects, Mischel found that children that were able to withstand temptation and wait for another treat were likely to have higher SAT scores, achieve higher educational degrees, earn more money and have a lower body mass index, an indication of healthy weight.”
The result of this study and many others show that our brains are accustomed to undervalue the bigger payoff in the long run for the immediate pleasure of the short-term goal.
The good thing is that we are able to train our brains to abandon this spontaneous reaction to get the immediate result for the sake of attaining the long-term objective. Mischel states, “Adults can learn from the children’s spontaneous attempts to resist temptation. Children were most successful when they tried to occupy their attention with something else — make up a song, say, or turn their back on the marshmallow — or transformed the object of desire in their mind, perhaps by imagining it as a piece of cotton or pretending it was smelly or dirty. Likewise, adults are better at avoiding temptation when they employ methods of distraction or distancing. Don’t eye the basket of bread; just take it off the table,” reported the New York Times.
The trick Mischel suggest is to counter something that is emotionally “hot” with something “cool.” For example, remember the “cool” aftermath of following a diet of being fit and in a good health rather than immersing yourself in the “hot” desire of eating too much of that greasy and sugary food.
David DeSteno, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University, suggesting another approach that leads to same the result. He argues that learning to deal with impulses isn’t so much about building up self-control itself, but it is about training yourself to appeal to emotions that have moral prize like gratitude, compassion, and pride. For example, put that cigarette down so you could be the hero who saves his kids from exposure to secondary smoking.
Change is all about thinking the long term, so the next time you want some change in your life, plan carefully visualizing the end results.
