If you haven't already heard of the Marshmallow Experiment it's worth Googling. In fact, even if you have heard of it, it's worth reading up more about it, as a lot of the early conclusions (from 1970) have now been challenged. Additionally, many of the conclusions have been employed somewhat "flexibly" in various contexts, from child development to sales management, to assert that if you didn't learn to resist one marshmallow for fifteen minutes in the pursuit of two when you were 5 years old, you will fail to find academic, professional, personal or financial success in your later life.
In fact this conclusion has now been debunked. Why? The original experiments were conducted on children in the Stanford University childcare facility ie these were children of gifted, intelligent, educated, potentially privileged adults whose backgrounds were already likely to lead to their children becoming successful later in life. When the experiments were repeated with a more socially representative group of children, the outcome of eating or waiting (also known as self-discipline or willpower) actually didn't predict future success anything like as robustly.
What made a bigger difference was the children learning whether the future reward was reliable or not ie if I don't eat this now can you promise me I'll get the reward later? Some children were taught through experience by the researchers that if they waited, their future reward would be exactly as promised. A second group was taught that if they waited they might get the reward they'd hoped for, or it might be a reward but not the one they wanted, or maybe randomly they might not actually get any reward at all.
If I learn that the future reward may not happen at all, or may not be the thing I'm actually hoping for, or may be disappointing in some way, with only a mere possibility of the things I'm waiting for, then the the value in waiting is much reduced.
James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, one of my favourite books on how to make lasting change, discusses it here.
So, what's the point in waiting and sacrificing pleasure now if I can't even be sure that it's going to be worth it? Well, this may sound harsh but : welcome to the world. It's naive to suggest that anything in life is as simple as not eating one marshmallow means I will definitively get two. The unreliability of outcomes in any sphere of human existence is "situation normal". Or as the military say, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Or as Mike Tyson says, everyone's got a plan til they get punched in the face.
So the problem with not drinking is that the potential reward from delayed gratification is firstly, not reliable and secondly, not necessarily tangible. If I don't have that drink today, what do I get tomorrow?
Now, in many places this is described as "playing it forward". Run that video through in your head of having the drink now and what is likely to happen later and tomorrow. And maybe that will put you off and you decide against that drink this evening.
Or maybe you persuade yourself that you don't always get a hangover, or maybe this is a really special occasion, or that it's the weekend tomorrow so if you feel a bit rough it doesn't matter, or not being a party-pooper today matters more than your blood test in a week's time.
The other real life problem is that what we hope for as a reward isn't always as tangible as two marshmallows. Maybe we wanted to save money. Unless we actually put the money aside each time we would have bought a bottle and use it to buy something tangible we wouldn't otherwise have bought, we may find we don't feel any better off. Maybe we wanted to lose weight. But numbers on the scale are very fickle and affected by many factors other than alcohol consumption or calorie counting and the scale sttubbornly refuses to move. We may have had a health scare, but whilst some test results like reduced blood pressure or change in liver condition can be measured, many of them can't.
And we simply cannot rely on unreliable or unquantifiable rewards to justify not drinking. The addiction and the power of the habits we've built up are just too strong for that. And then it's probably only a question of time before you hit the F**K it button and throw in the towel.
Which is why I keep coming back to the question : what is your WHY? When you see no change, when you feel no improvement, when you can't identify progress, when the scale doesn't move, what will keep you going, keep you saying no to alcohol and yes to the rest of your life? What are the two alcohol free marshmallows that you want tomorrow or next month or for the rest of your life that are worth more than the one alcoholic marshmallow that's on offer today?
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