Yesterday we looked at the Marshmallow Experiment from the perspective of the rewards we might get for delayed gratification.
Today I want to look at the strategies that the children adopted when faced with a 15 minute wait for the promised reward. Now clearly for a 5 year old, 15 minutes in a stark university research room, sitting at a table with a marshmallow in front of you will feel like infinite lifetimes of terminal boredom! But their distraction and avoidance techniques are likely to be natural ones that we as adults are able to leverage successfully in our own lives.
The Stanford marshmallow experiment is important because it demonstrated that effective delay is not achieved by merely thinking about something other than what we want, but rather, it depends on suppressive and avoidance mechanisms that reduce frustration (my emphasis).
Read that again. It's not just about thinking about something else. It's about finding ways to suppress and avoid the frustration of not being able to have the thing.
"(some children) covered their eyes with their hands, rested their heads on their arms, and found other similar techniques for averting their eyes from the reward objects. Many seemed to try to reduce the frustration of delay of reward by generating their own diversions: they talked to themselves, sang, invented games with their hands and feet, and even tried to fall asleep while waiting - as one successfully did."
Why does this matter?
Let's compare this with the sober journey. I always counsel getting all alcohol out of the fridge and out of the house, or at least put it somewhere you can't see it and it's the wrong temperature, like the garage, the attic or the car boot. But sometimes you simply can't do this and a bottle of wine in the fridge, maybe because your partner is still drinking, or you're hosting a family party, is like looking at the marshmallow.
So the important thing is not to simply not look at it, but to engage in actual diversions. As adults living in the 21st century with amazing global connections at our fingertips, we have an almost infinite number of possibilities when it comes to generating diversionary activity.
We can spring clean or declutter. We can do an online dance or yoga workout. We can go to the gym and lift some weights or do a spin class. We can sign up to an evening class and learn dress-making or cake decorating. We can start on that redecoration project or make a start on the home vegetable garden. We can go for a walk or a cycle ride. We can find a sober MeetUp or simply meet up with other sober friends for a breakfast or morning coffee. We can get piano or guitar lessons, or learn a language, or take up swing jive or salsa. Try online or face-to-face bridge clubs, or seek out local history groups or volunteering opportunities. We can take up dog-walking for a local refuge, or join a band or a community choir. We can take the children or grandchildren to any or all of these and build stronger relationships with them.
If we know the risky days and risky times when we're going to be staring longingly at our alcoholic marshmallow, we can target the timing of these diversions, when our brain is so occupied with the task in hand it forgot it was supposed to be craving alcohol. And we now also know that cravings are about seeking pleasure and are effectively resolved with dopamine, so something that gives us pleasure and a dopamine high will do the job particularly well.
If you're struggling to think of what kind of diversionary tactics will work for you, book a call (totally free, no obligations, no commitments, no product sales or marketing for expensive coaching programmes) and maybe talking it through with an impartial and 100% supportive sober coach and mentor will help you make progress on your sober journey.
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