How to Free Yourself From Unwanted Temptations

Growing up, I envied the lithe girls who seemed to eat whatever they wanted. While they became more beautiful with every bite, I mournfully tried to keep my eyes and hands off tempting treats.

Fast forward a decade and I am researching the workings of willpower. My passion is to uncover ways to reduce the pull of unwanted desires in the heat of the moment and to help people enjoy the pleasures that life has to offer. Which led me to the study of postponement.

We are born to want, but early in life we learn to say no. That painful task remains arduous throughout life. As Mark Twain astutely noted, “to promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.” Study after scientific study backs that up and goes beyond: restraining yourself from a temptation increases your desire while simultaneously weakening your resolve to say no. A double whammy. If that’s not unfair enough, saying no backfires the most among those who are trying to control their eating.

How to break the cycle of restrict then binge…restrict then binge? Recently published research from my laboratory suggests one effective solution: instead of telling yourself “no”, tell yourself you can have it “some other time”. To many, this seems a very scary proposition. Allow yourself to have that forbidden chocolate cake? Yet the strategy is successful because it capitalizes on the workings of the mind.

Just as saying no leads to wanting it even more, postponing a tempting treat leads to the sensation that you do not want it so much after all. When my participants were randomly assigned to form a plan to tell themselves they could have a troublesome food temptation “some other time”, they wanted it less, noticed it less in their daily life, and they consumed less of it too, for up to one week after the study began. People who were randomly assigned to say “no” to the tempting treat showed an uptick on those scores. Because your behavior (postponement) serves as a clue about your desire, postponement must be your choice. If someone makes you postpone, it’s not going to work.

But why does postponement lead you to believe you don’t care so much about the postponed temptation? Consider the last time you postponed a meeting with a friend. If you made a specific plan, “I can’t meet for coffee today but let’s have coffee on Friday at 2pm” then you probably felt a strong commitment to the plan. If you said, “I can’t do coffee today. Some other time, though”, you probably felt only a weak commitment. This example illustrates the research finding that specific plans evoke a strong motivation to follow through with the plan whereas unspecific plans elicit a weak motivation. Applied to strong desires, unspecific postponement weakens the drive to have the tempting treat.

Now, having grown up, I realize that few people eat whatever they want, whenever they want. That was just an illusion. Instead, when I look at happy consumers I see people who practice moderation rather than denial. The key is to get out of the binge, restrict cycle. To do this, never say never, but tell yourself you can have it some other time and actually mean it.

Watch a short video summary of this research: http://discovery.rsm.nl/articles/detail/219-tame-the-desire-tell-yourse…