Train Your Brain To Outsmart The Biscuit

Thought For The Week

To have whatever we want whenever we want it might sound like the dream scenario, but it can cause problems. Prioritising short-term pleasures over more meaningful, long-lasting achievements fosters impatience, impulsiveness, and poor decision-making - characteristics that are at odds with long-term, sustainable health and fitness. If we want the latter, then learning to delay gratification is essential.

Exercise Tip

If you’re just starting out, make the goal less about a specific outcome (bikini-body in 8 weeks) and more about consistency (a tick for daily movement against every date on the calendar). Just showing up is more important than anything else in these early stages. If you’re feeling low on energy, swap your strength session for a yoga class; if you’ve got more than expected in the tank, go for a run instead of a walk at lunchtime. You want wins on the board and pushing too hard when your body’s not willing drastically increases the chance you’ll give up entirely. It’s not sexy, but committing to daily movement and embracing the process will get you the fitness results you’re after.

Nutrition Tip

If you find your hand in the biscuit tin before you’ve even given it a thought, you might like to try short-term/long-term brain: Mindlessly making your way through a tin of biscuits means short-term brain is winning. But long-term brain wants weight loss. The key is to try and bring long-term brain into the conversation, and ultimately have it win the argument against short-term brain. The first step is to become aware of what you’re doing. This might take some practice. Then, you want to start having that conversation. Short-term brain puts forward the arguments for eating the biscuit; long-term brain makes the case for leaving it. If short-term brain wins this time, reflect on how you felt, and whether you’ve learned anything that you might be able to use to help long-term brain win next time. If long-term brain wins, reward it (just not with a biscuit)! Verbal self-praise can be a surprisingly powerful way to reinforce positive behaviour, because when we feel good about ourselves, our self-esteem gets a little boost, and short-term brain enjoys that too.

Links & Resources

Recipe: It won’t take much more than 30 minutes, but that’s longer than a takeaway or ready meal: Practice some delayed gratification by making my smoked mackerel and tenderstem risotto.

Book: One of the most famous experiments in the history of psychology, the marshmallow test proved that the ability to delay gratification is critical to living a successful and fulfilling life. In his more recent book, Walter Mischel explores the cognitive skills that influence willpower and show how these can be applied to everyday life.

Resource: A whole host of exercises to help you practice delayed gratification.

Inspirational Quote

"He who seeks truth shall find beauty. He who seeks beauty shall find vanity. He who seeks order shall find gratification. He who seeks gratification shall be disappointed."

Moshe Safdie