Delayed Gratification – Is Sacrifice Required to Achieve Long-Term Goals?

Delayed gratification refers to the ability to sacrifice an immediate reward to gain a bigger reward in the future.

For example, achieving my goal of losing 10kg might require me to stick to an exercise programme and:

• Go without fast-food
• Stop treating myself to ice-cream and chocolate sauce in the evenings
• Avoid long nights at the pub with friends.

If I achieve my goal, then making such sacrifices might just be worthwhile. On paper it seems easy enough, but is it?

In reality, we live surrounded by products and services designed to provide us with immediate pleasure. Whether its fast-food, junk-food, alcohol, social media, or ‘Tinder’.

Such readily available, extensively promoted products/services lure us towards immediate gratification, at the expense of longer-term objectives.

As such, delayed gratification is tied up with the concepts of patience and self-control. Those who are able to resist immediate pleasures in pursuit of longer-term goals are perceived as virtuous and strong-willed. But those who can’t, get tarred with the brush of being ill-disciplined and lacking willpower.

So is this fair? Recent research suggests it might not be.

Because there are implications for how we support health and fitness clients, this article investigates:

• Delayed gratification – what are the assumptions underlying it?
• What does recent research into delayed gratification suggest?
• Why is progress a crucial reinforcer for clients?
• Self-control – is it over-rated?

Delayed gratification – what are the assumptions underlying it?

The term delayed gratification emerged from a classic psychological experiment in the 1970s known as the marshmallow test.

The test involved providing pre-school children with a choice. Children were offered one marshmallow as a reward they could consume immediately. However, they were told that if they waited for a period of time without eating the single marshmallow, they’d receive two marshmallows.

The children were left in a room with the single marshmallow for approximately 15 minutes. They ‘passed’ the test if they resisted eating the single marshmallow.

It was assumed that passing the test indicated the child’s ability to relinquish immediate pleasures for longer-term goals.

Studies have subsequently linked the ability to delay gratification with:

• Future academic success
• Higher socioeconomic status.

Additionally, studies have linked the inability to delay gratification with future:

• Drug abuse
• Behavioural problems
• Obesity.

With regard to health and fitness, there are two relatively recent studies worth mentioning.

The first study [ref 1] followed 44 participants over a 16-week weight management intervention.

The participants weight loss success was compared to their scores on a ‘recency’ measure. A low score on this measure indicated the ability to process ‘time distant’ information in complex decision-making tasks.

The study found that:

• Successful dieters (those who lost more than 5% of their bodyweight) had lower recency scores than unsuccessful dieters.

In layman’s terms this means they were better at understanding where their current actions may lead in the future.

Because the recency measure had been linked to a region of the brain associated with effortful information processing and inhibitory control (the anterior-prefrontal cortex), the authors concluded that:

• Dieters who can engage in more effortful information processing are more likely to change their habits and lose weight.

But is delayed gratification really all about willpower?

It’s worth noting here that the study’s sample size (44 participants) is very small. So while this finding may be interesting, we have to be careful about reading too much into it. This is a point we’ll revisit shortly.

The second study [ref 2] investigated differences in delay of gratification (DoG) across 96 participants from different age-groups. The study also measured the following factors that are closely related to DoG, namely:

• Delay-discounting (DD): the degree to which the perceived value of a reward reduces over time. E.g., a $200 reward today versus a $250 reward if you wait either one week, or three months. For most people, waiting three months for the extra $50 will be far less appealing than waiting one week.
• Future time perspective (FTP): the degree to which a person is oriented on the future, as opposed to the past or the present.

The study found:

• Strong correlations between FTP and both DD and DoG
• No differences between age-groups in DoG
• DD was lowest in young/middle aged adults and highest in children and older adults.

The authors concluded that:

• Individuals who generally think and act in a future-oriented manner have a stronger ability to delay gratification

Additionally, with regard to the differences in delay-discounting across age-groups, the authors made some valuable observations. Young and old-aged individuals live with more uncertainties than middle-aged individuals.

Why delay gratification when you’re approaching your ‘twilight’ years, or when you’re unsure if your future will have much in the way of reward in it?

This suggests that the ability to delay gratification may have:

• More to do with the environment we live in and our life experience
• Less to do with willpower than originally thought.

What does recent research into delayed gratification suggest

Recently, psychology has been undergoing what some refer to as a ‘crisis of replication’.

The findings of many classic studies are being queried as subsequent research fails to replicate original findings. The marshmallow test is but one example.

Watts et al [ref 3] attempted to replicate the test using a large sample of over 900 children. (The original study used a relatively small sample of fewer than 90 children).

Additionally, their study was more representative of the general population in terms of ethnicity, household income and parental education level. In contrast, the original study was based exclusively on the children of parents from Stanford University in the USA.

Watt’s et al found that:

• The capacity to delay gratification was shaped in large part by a child’s social and economic background
• Social and economic background determined the children’s long-term success, not their ability to delay gratification.

Intuitively, this makes more sense. The authors also observed that:

• Daily life holds fewer guarantees for kids living in stressful, low socioeconomic situations. Hence, waiting for a reward is risky. Their experience may be that the promise of a future reward will likely get broken out of financial necessity
• Delaying gratification is easier for kids from higher income, better educated households. Their experience tells them that adults have the resources and stability to keep the fridge well stocked. Hence, it’s not risky to wait for a bigger reward.

If we generalise these observations to health and fitness clients, we might conclude that:

• Those who have previously benefited from healthy exercise or dietary behaviours, will find it easier to focus on longer-term goals
• Those who haven’t benefited, will need regular rewards to help build such behaviours.

Why is the experience of progress essential for clients?

Operant conditioning is perhaps the most commonly used model of learning. Its central tenant is that behaviours are more or less likely to recur as a function of their consequences. Reinforcing a behaviour makes it more likely to recur.

There are two types of reinforcement, namely:

• Positive reinforcement – where a pleasant consequence (reward) follows a behaviour
• Negative reinforcement – where an unpleasant consequence is removed.

It’s important to note that rewards don’t need to be treats, such as marshmallows, sweets, fast-food or drinks with friends.

Rewards can include praise, recognition, and the celebration of success.

A core part of our Personal Trainer and Weight Management Programmes is the ‘progress review’. This critical activity enables the Personal Trainer or Weight Management Coach to provide clients with:

• Positive reinforcement – highlighting, celebrating, and building on the progress they’ve made. Praising, and recognising the actions they’ve taken and the effort they’ve exerted
• Negative reinforcement – discussing factors that have hindered their progress and addressing, or where necessary, removing them.

Beginner clients should experience a formal, structured progress review every four weeks as they work towards their goal(s).

And outside of the progress review process, we labour the point that trainers and coaches must always support their clients. This support includes the provision of praise, recognition, and encouragement at every contact (whether in-person, or on the phone).

You see it’s not about expecting clients to ‘delay their gratification’. It’s about providing clients with a regular, healthy source of reinforcement that reduces their need to find immediate gratification elsewhere.

When we’re surrounded by unhealthy sources of immediate gratification this is easier said than done. We need a few extra tools to help…

Is self-control important or over-rated?

While we can provide clients with healthier sources of reinforcement, we can’t change a simple reality. We live surrounded by easily accessible, unhealthy sources of immediate gratification – fast-food, junk-food, alcohol, and oodles of online entertainment.

Which provide immediate pleasure upon consumption, making them particularly effective reinforcers.

The ability to resist these reinforcers lies at the heart of the delayed gratification ethos. Those who resist and are able to achieve their long-term goals are assumed to use self-control or ‘willpower’.

But are the assumptions underlying willpower as flawed as those underlying delayed gratification?

A 2017 study [ref 4] followed a group of tertiary students over one semester. The researchers monitored the frequency of, and the students responses to, temptations that might conflict with their goals.

The study found that:

• Using self-control to resist temptations induced feelings of mental fatigue and tiredness
• Students who experienced more temptations were less likely to achieve their goals than students who experienced fewer temptations.

The study supports a school of thought that views self-control is a ‘limited resource’. As such, its best not to over-use the resource. Our time is better spent helping people to experience fewer temptations in the first place.

In our Weight Management programme we introduce students to the technique known as Stimulus Control.

Rather than trying to resist the temptations that might interfere with longer-term goals, Stimulus Control is used to reduce exposure to temptation. Amongst other things, Stimulus Control may involve:

• Deleting unhealthy food apps and un-liking fast-food companies from social media feeds
• Muting the ads on TV or subscribing to an ad-free media platform
• Avoiding fast-food outlets
• Only purchasing food from a grocery store with a pre-prepared shopping list.

It’s certainly a lot easier to ‘resist’ something that you’re not being constantly reminded of!

A final word

In this article we asked a simple question – are sacrifices required to achieve long-term results?

In short, the answer is ‘yes’ – some form of personal sacrifice is usually required. But this sacrifice doesn’t need to be large and there’s a lot we can do to minimise it.

It’s clear that some clients will find it harder to build exercise and/or healthy eating behaviours. They may:

• Not have positive experiences to bank on
• Have significant temptations in their environment
• Lack the resources to deal with those temptations and sustain positive change.

Therefore, the best approach is to provide all clients with consistent reinforcement by:

• Providing reward (praise, recognition, connection, celebrating early success)
• Removing negative reinforcers (barriers, temptations, and disincentives).

There’s no need to ‘delay gratification’ when healthy sources of reinforcement are the norm and fewer prompts for immediate gratification exist.

References

1. Koritzky et al. (2015). The biggest loser thinks long-term: Recency as a predictor of success in weight management. Frontiers in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01864
2. Gollner et al. (2018). Delay of gratification, delay discounting and their associations with age, episodic thinking, and future time perspective. Frontiers in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02304
3. Watts et al. (2018). Revisiting the marshmallow test: A conceptual replication investigating links between early delay of gratification and later outcomes. Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797618761661
4. Milyavskaya & Inzlicht. (2017). What’s so great about self-control? Examining the importance of effortful self-control and temptation in predicting real-life depletion and goal attainment. Social Psychological and Personality Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550616679237