If you want to lose weight, get fit, save-up, start a business, move house or whatever your aims are, you’ll need to resist temptation all the time in order to get there.
You’ll need to delay your immediate gratification – that quick, impulsive satisfaction or reward (i.e. that biscuit) – in favour of your long term goal (i.e. losing weight).
Resisting temptation is easier said than done
The reason why resisting temptation is so hard is that, when you have the possibility of pleasure or satisfying a need or want every time you feel like a snack, you could succumb to that immediate reward by indulging your temptation numerous times per day. Over the course of a week, you could have felt this reward 14 times, if you have a treat twice per day.
What makes it harder is that, if you delay that gratification all week, you still might not lose much weight. 1 pound or 2.
This might make you feel good, but will your sense of achievement – your reward – be bigger and better than the accumulation of those little spur of the moment rewards throughout the week? Maybe, maybe not.
That’s why it’s hard to lose weight and easy to give up your diet. Because the feeling of satisfaction you’ll get from losing weight takes a lot longer to achieve, and the ‘small’, weekly wins along the way are still relatively sparse, unpredictable and occasionally disappointing.
I know a few people I went to school with who ended up becoming professional footballers and they had to resist temptation every week. When their friends were going out drinking every Friday and Saturday, they couldn’t. They had to stay in, get an early night to be up early for training.
If you want to save up for a new car, a house, to fund a business or for a rainy day, then you’ll also need to regularly resist temptation.
You’ll have to resist that new pair of shoes you fancy, not bother with that new coat, cook instead of eating out, maybe even reduce your overheads – cancel Sky TV, your gym membership or do without Netflix. These short term sacrifices are hard and, again, the reward you get from seeing your total slowly tally up may not be as great as the series of immediate rewards you’d get from watching a movie whenever you feel like it or eating out once a week.
The big pay off might not be so big, but that’s ok
When you finally have enough for your car or house or business, the pay-off from all of your sacrifices might not be as big of an emotional triumph as you initially think.
Maybe you’re mentally ready to buy that house and just want to get on with it. Maybe you’ve been destined to run your own business so you’re comfortable and eager to crack on.
But just because your sense of accomplishment might not feel like an overwhelming accumulation of all those mini rewards that you resisted all bunched up together and hitting you at the same time, that’s no reason not to go for it.
The struggle of resisting temptation will always be more painful than the joy of achieving. But you’ll never get to where you want to be without that struggle.