Question. How do you do the things you need to do? In life there are things you want to do, and things you need to do, however these two states of being are often out of alignment...
As long as it is not cost prohibitive or physically impossible, and gives an immediate reward, nobody has problems with doing the things they want to do, you have a desire, and then you act upon it. Simple.
The problem comes when the stuff you want to do, is tied to something you need to do. In that circumstance the need can get in the way of the desire.
For instance, you might want to lose weight, which means you need to exercise and eat healthier than you currently are. However, you find it difficult to find time to exercise, and convenience food is just so damn, convenient!
This state of affairs can lead to feelings of depression and helplessness, which in turn lead to over-indulgence of the want, as the need becomes harder and harder to attain.
So how do we fix this?
Aligning Your Needs
Whether you want to carry out an action, or whether you need to, you are trying to achieve a particular outcome. If you want to eat a doughnut, you are trying to achieve a pleasant sugary rush. If you need to get a job, it is because you are trying to earn money.
If you want to play a computer game, it is because you need to get to that next level. If you need to read a book, it is because you want to pass that exam. So in these cases your wants and needs are aligned.
Sometimes it is easy to align your needs; I want to be warmer, so I need to put on a jacket.
At other times it is not so easy;
I want to buy a new car without credit, therefore I need to save money for the foreseeable future.
If you take a look at your own desires, you will notice that the things you need to do are easier to perform if there is an immediate feedback into the thing you want to do.
So it is easy to put on a jacket if you are cold because you get immediate benefit. It is simple to shove a doughnut into your mouth because you get that sweet sugary hit before you've even swallowed any.
It is much harder to perform the needs when there is a delayed benefit. This isn't because there is something wrong with you, or because you are undisciplined, it is because the human brain is wired to find instant gratification much more attractive than delayed reward.
The Dopamine Pact
If we rewind earth's history around two hundred thousand years and are able to view our plain dwelling ancestors, they would very much resemble wild animals.
A wild animal lives in an immediate feedback loop, that is to say, what it does or doesn't do from moment to moment has an immediate effect on it.
If a small animal hears a rustling in the bushes behind it, it runs away. This is because a small percentage of the time a rustling means there is a predator there. Better to run away and take the chance, even though most of the time it's just wind.
If that same animal comes across food, it will eat, even if it has eaten fairly recently. This is because it may not find food for days, therefore it is best to eat now, rather than risk the chance of going hungry later.
This is how the human animal would have behaved right up until the advent of farming, roughly twelve thousand years ago.
Today we are in a situation whereby society has evolved much quicker than the human brain. In so much as today, most human beings - especially the ones living in cities - live in a delayed feedback loop environment. So in other words, the sweetest rewards actually come from actions that were performed way before we get that pleasure hit.
This is actually more troublesome than it sounds, because of the currency of pleasure; dopamine.
The reason you experience pleasure, is because of a chemical in your brain called dopamine. When you are happy it is released in your brain and it makes you feel good.
Everything you do, and I really do mean everything, is centred around getting more dopamine, or avoiding its loss. If someone were to remove that portion of your brain, you would literally sit there doing nothing until you starved to death.
Scientists have seen this exact thing happen to a bunch of mice whose dopamine receptors they removed. The mice whom had happily been completing maze puzzles for food rewards, now just sat there. Even when food was placed directly in front of them, they chose to ignore it.
This is because the feeling of hunger, is directly related to dopamine. You feel hungry because you are anticipating a dopamine hit when you eat. So no dopamine, no hunger.
So what does that mean for the modern human being like yourself?
It simply means that things that will give you a dopamine hit in a year's time, like going on holiday with all that money you saved, are not linked to tangible cravings like hunger.
Therefore, we are stuck in a situation whereby, the best things in life come to those who wait. Yet waiting, because it goes against the grain of our evolutionary heritage, is quite literally the last thing we want to do.
So; what to do?
Desire Bundling
In his excellent book Atomic Habits, James Clear talks about the desire bundling technique. This is whereby you bundle something you need to do that carries with it a long-term benefit, with the more exciting thing you want to do, giving you a short-term benefit.
This is subtly different from habit stacking, which we talked about in the first Path To Focus essay, whereby you stack a new habit that you're trying to start, on top of and old one you already do.
When you habit stack, you list all your automated habits, some which you may have become almost blind to, like boiling the kettle for your morning cup of tea or coffee. Then making a conscious effort to perform your new habit straight after your old one. Which looks like this;
Boil kettle [Old habit] > Do ten push ups [New habit]
However desire bundling is different in that you attach your new habit to a feeling rather than a deliberate action. Which looks like this.
Have craving for a cigarette [Desire] > Do ten push ups [Action] > Have cigarette.
So what you are doing here, is associating the feeling of having a cigarette, with exercise. You still go on to have the smoke, however after some time you will drop the cigarette afterwards.
Okay, with smoking you probably wouldn't use ten push ups, because of the impracticality of that, especially if you are a so-called social smoker, whereby you only smoke when you go out for an evening with friends.
The trick with desire bundling, is to match up an appropriate action with the craving you're experiencing. So for instance, smartphones and desk-sitting mean that most people have a bad posture, so a more appropriate action to bundle with a smoking desire would look more like this:
Get craving for a cigarette [desire] > Correct posture, stand/sit up straight, engage core muscles [action] > have cigarette [reward].
This is extremely powerful, because you are hacking into the usual reward flow which looks like this:
Cue [finish eating] Craving [feel like a cigarette] Response [get small dopamine hit] Reward [Smoke cigarette]
Notice the response, getting a dopamine hit, comes before the reward of smoking a cigarette. This is because once you have embedded a new habit, you no longer need the habit itself to satisfy you, merely the craving for it is enough to trigger a dopamine response.
This is why a gambling addict can't walk past a betting shop without entering, or an alcoholic can't be with people who are drinking. Because they get the dopamine hit, and then they expect the reward, which in this case is gambling. Leaving an addict without the reward will make them highly irritable, making it difficult or even impossible for them to function properly.
So when we desire bundle we are hacking into the process like so:
Cue [finish eating] Craving [feel like cigarette] Response [Get dopamine hit] Desire Bundle [correct posture] Reward [Have cigarette]
By jemmying in your desire bundle in this way, the posture fix slowly becomes the reward, and so the dopamine flowchart ends up looking like this.
Cue [finish eating] Craving [feel like cigarette]
Response [get dopamine hit] Reward [correct posture]
Over time, the craving you have to smoke after each meal turns into a desire to correct your posture.
Cue [finish eating] Craving [feel like correcting posture] Response [get dopamine hit] Reward [correct posture].
So in the long run you are taking the feeling you get in an immediate feedback loop and supplanting it onto the reward of a delayed feedback loop.
Of course with smoking there are many contextual cues you come across throughout your day that make you want to smoke. So in this particular example, you would simply cure yourself of wanting to smoke directly after a meal. Which is still a good thing, it's just not solving the entire problem.
So while smoking may take many bundles to completely get rid of the habit, on less complex habits desire bundling is very effective.
I have a habit of stroking and playing with my beard, it is a soothing action which I do without thinking, and often find myself doing it whilst talking to people. I find it mildly irritating that I do that, so I started doing pelvic floor exercises any time I felt the urge to stroke my beard.
Before long I was getting a craving to do my pelvic floor exercises, which I can do without anyone noticing as I'm standing or sitting, by simple clenching and relaxing my core muscles.
So now I am getting a small dopamine hit, every time I do something that will benefit me in the long term, and I no longer have the desire to mindlessly stroke my beard.
Conclusion
We are wired to prefer short-term benefits over long term gains, this is why it is easier to spend money than it is to save. Or why it is simpler to eat fast food and smoke, rather than eat healthy and exercise.
Therefore our long-term needs, are not always aligned with our short-term desires.
In order to adjust this balance, you need to attach an action with long-term benefits, like exercise, to a habit that gives short-term pleasure, like smoking.
After a relatively short time, this desire bundling technique will enable you to get short-term pleasure, from an activity that gives long-term benefit. Similar to when a person becomes 'addicted' to working out.
Habits such as smoking are complex because they have multiple cues, therefore any desire bundling effect will be situation-specific. Meaning it will take more than one 'bundle' to entirely eradicate your smoking habit.
Desire bundling is an extremely effective way to get short term pleasure from long-term-benefit actions, and works best with oft-repeated bad habits.
The Path To Focus:
The Path To Focus: How To Start A New Habit
WHERE IN YOUR LIFE DO YOU THINK DESIRE BUNDLING COULD HELP YOU? WHAT ARE THE THINGS THAT YOU NEED TO DO, THAT YOU WISH WERE EASIER?
WILL YOU TRY THIS METHOD OUT? OR PERHAPS YOU HAVE YOUR OWN PSYCHOLOGICAL TRICKS TO CARRY OUT YOUR IMPORTANT TASKS? THEN AS EVER, LET ME KNOW BELOW!
Title image: Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash