Life is full of temptation. When facing uncertainty, difficulty or fatigue, our brains can find temptation in things that would otherwise be mundane, like scrolling through an uninteresting social media feed or endlessly flipping through TV channels. It is also normal to be tempted away from challenging tasks towards procrastination. Fortunately, there are several techniques that we can use to help deal with problematic temptations before they overcome us. Try the following techniques and see if they help with your temptations.
Every time you resist temptation, you are exerting willpower. Willpower is finite, so you will eventually run out of it. By satiating inevitable and frequent desires, like hunger or the need for rest, we avoid using willpower to overcome them and so have more willpower available for other things. Avoiding using your willpower to overcome temptation will leave it available for other things. It is helpful to satiate inevitable and frequent desires, like hunger and the need for rest. These steps can help:
Temptation starts with a feeling in our bodies that our brain, often unconsciously, turns into a desire for a specific object. We might, for example, feel tired, thirsty and hungry, so our mind decides that we want a cola. But if we were to take a moment to examine the feelings prompting the desire, we’d discover that cola isn’t the only or even the best tool for satisfying those feelings. Your brain has decided to fixate on cola because it remembers that in the past, cola has helped to quickly relieve feelings of tiredness, thirst and hunger. Armed with this understanding, we can see that water is a significantly more effective and healthier way to quench thirst. Sleep is the best way to relieve tiredness, and eating whole foods is a superior way to quell hunger.
When tempted by procrastination, take a moment to sense the underlying feelings that are prompting it. Once you have identified those feelings, you can take appropriate steps to deal with them. For example, being tempted to play a video game while working might be due to boredom arising from your task. With that knowledge, you could make your work less boring by changing the task, playing music or making a game of it.
Sometimes our temptations become so ingrained that we stop paying attention to the experience of satisfying them, like when we eat our favorite food but focus on our phones instead of the flavors. It can help to focus on our senses when satisfying our temptations. Doing so allows us to learn more about our temptations and satisfy them more fully. For a temptation like watching a TV show, you may find that the pleasure you get from the show itself is minimal, but the rest you get while watching it is deeply satisfying. In that case, you could identify ways to rest better during your day, like taking short breaks every hour or meditating.
We can reduce temptations by focusing on elements of the temptation that are undesirable, uninteresting or abstract, for example: the pretzel is dry and brown and tasteless. Social media is a collection of pixels arranged on a screen, prepared largely by strangers promoting something. One great thing about reframing is that the association can, over time, become an unconscious response to the temptation.
For particularly unnecessary or overwhelming distractions, it can help to associate your concept of the temptation with something unappealing or disgusting. The smear can be completely fictional, for example, you could imagine:
The more vulgar and detailed the smear campaigns are, the more they can reduce the appeal of the temptation.
Temptations strengthen when our brain associates an action with rewarding feelings. Playing a video game is associated with the pleasure you get from playing it, so the temptation to play grows. You can therefore weaken temptations over time by sabotaging the feelings that arise from the action. You could, for example:
You can learn more about overcoming these common temptations: