The Mindset Shift You Need!

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Table of Contents

• Must Read Article💡

• Parker’s Breakdown: Gratification 🔑

• The Study 📖

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Must Read Article💡

IMPORTANCE OF DELAYED GRATIFICATION

The power to delay gratification can single handedly change your life. It can allow you to reach your life long goals and can open your world to new possibilities.

In this article by Tonyrobbins.com, they discuss the importance of delayed gratification over instant gratification, and how you can delay your own gratification. Here are a couple of the main points. 👇

• Instant gratification, prevalent in today's culture, often leads to frustration and false expectations.

• Delayed gratification involves resisting immediate rewards for greater ones later, fostering impulse control and thoughtful decision-making.

• The "Marshmallow Experiment" demonstrated that children who could delay gratification tended to be more successful in various aspects of life.

• Research suggests that delayed gratification is a learned behavior, indicating that individuals can train themselves to wait for rewards.

Parker’s Breakdown: Gratification 🔑

Chasing instant gratification, as most do, will only lead you down a road of an unfulfilling life. The drinks, the drugs, the partying, the endless social media scrolling, and the binge watching can only bring you so much satisfaction. It is not until you make sacrifices for something big, that requires you to delay that gratification, that you truly see the beauty of delayed gratification.

Delayed gratification requires the cultivation of patience, discipline, and foresight. It involves forgoing immediate rewards in favor of larger, more meaningful benefits that come over time. Whether it's saving money for retirement, pursuing higher education, working on a business or adopting healthy lifestyle habits, delayed gratification entails making sacrifices in the present to secure a better future.

Delayed gratification fosters a growth mindset, where setbacks are viewed as opportunities for learning and growth rather than insurmountable obstacles.

But it's a muscle you have to grow. David goggins didn't build up to his insane level of discipline overnight. It took time to build up to that level.

I have built a reasonable amount of impulse control over my recent years. I use 4 big tips to help me stay disciplined and to restrain from instant gratification that is going to negatively impact my journey to my goals. Here are the 4 big tips: 👇

1. Start small - Like I said, David Goggins didn't build his level of discipline overnight. It started as days that eventually turned into years of picking the hard right (Instead of the easy wrong) that got his discipline “muscle” so developed. Start with easy things like no phone for the first hour of the day, or go walk for 10 minutes every day, or go to the gym for 10 mins every day. Starting simple like these examples, starts to form the habit. From there, you can make it more difficult like say no phone for the first 3 hours, or walk for 1 hour every day, or hit a 45 minute workout every day.

2. Find balance - People often feel extremely motivated hearing something like this, and then go fill their day to day to the brim for the next week, with only time for work and extremely difficult workouts. They then find themselves in a rut after 2 weeks max and end up quitting. It's good to feel motivated, but don’t get too excited and overly ambitious. Start planning how you can work for delayed gratification, but mix in some rest days or rest times to avoid burnout.

3. Use instant gratification to your advantage - All instant gratification isn't necessarily bad. I sometimes combine or use instant gratifications that don't have a large negative impact to keep me motivated to keep going and sustain my journey of delayed gratification. Examples of this would be watching a show while doing cardio, or incorporating a cheat meal once every 2 weeks to help me stay on diet, or treating myself to an expensive coffee and treat after getting a large amount of work done.

4. Make the journey to the big goal fun - Just because you are working on delaying gratification and building your discipline, doesn't mean your life has to suck and that you can’t have any fun. Make your hard task fun. For example, if you want to lose weight, find a cardio sport that you love like basketball or pickleball with friends, or biking. If you want to eat healthier, don't just eat chicken and rice, eat foods you like such as steaks and watermelon and potatoes. If you want to knock out a lot of work, do it while listening to your favorite music and maybe with a friend to make it fun.

The Study 📖 

The neural basis of delayed gratification

The researchers worked with thirsty mice, teaching them to anticipate a water reward. They employed advanced methods to monitor specific brain cells' activity during this learning process. By altering the function of these cells, they discerned their role in the mice's capacity for patience, shedding light on the neural mechanisms governing this behavior.

Here’s what the study found:

• Mice can learn to wait for greater rewards by delayed gratification task training (Showing it's a muscle that can be built) - During the pre training phase, mice learned a one-arm foraging task where delay didn't increase reward. They reduced waiting and running durations to maximize reward rates. Later, in the delayed gratification paradigm, where reward increased with waiting time, mice shifted towards longer waiting durations over 3 weeks of training. The reward rate increased steadily, indicating successful learning to delay gratification.

• The activity of VTA DAergic neurons increases steadily during the waiting period - Recording calcium signals in VTA DAergic neurons revealed their activity patterns during the delayed gratification task. Activity started ramping up when mice entered the waiting zone and peaked upon reward receipt. Training reshaped these response patterns, with activity ramping up consistently during waiting.

• Computational reinforcement learning (RL) models suggested that ramping up of VTA DAergic activity signals the value of waiting, influencing decision-making during delayed gratification tasks.

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