The hidden cost of instant gratification
Whether it’s news, social media, shopping or streaming our favourite shows, smartphones offer us life “on-demand”. But experts think this convenience comes at a hidden cost. Diminishing our patience, instant gratification can be holding us back from reaching long-term goals.
Good things come to those who wait. It’s a saying many of us are familiar with. But with smartphones and apps offer us the potential to have almost whatever we want, whenever we want it. The days when we needed to wait for things seem long gone.
Many retailers now off er same-day delivery. We can get a lift at the click of a button on ride-share apps. We can consume news stories instantly, instead of waiting to read tomorrow morning’s newspaper. We’re nudged when a streaming service drops a full season of a new show to binge-watch.
While this “on-demand” culture offers comfort and convenience, instant gratification comes at a hidden cost. Some experts believe that this immediacy mindset is rewiring our brain: diminishing our patience, encouraging impulsive decision-making and conditioning us to prioritise short-term fixes over long-term goals.
Understanding instant gratification and dopamine addiction
If you’ve ever been frustrated by needing to wait for something, it’s probably not your fault. Experts believe that a desire for instant gratification and the pursuit of dopamine — a neurotransmitter and “happy” hormone — is most likely an evolutionary trait. Our ancestors who readily took advantage of immediate rewards were more likely to survive unpredictable environments where food and resources were scarce.
Sydney-based clinical psychologist and author of The Dopamine Brain, Dr Anastasia Hronis, says, “Smartphones and social media apps are designed to stimulate the brain’s reward system and activate dopamine. This occurs with every notification, like and comment. This can create a cycle where someone is constantly seeking ‘more’.”
Whether it’s likes and follows, progress bars, rewards, surprise discounts or other gamification elements, many apps stimulate dopamine. These apps are designed to create anticipation of a reward and offer validation – instant gratification.
“These quick and easy bursts of dopamine can lead to the brain craving immediate reward and short-term gratification,” explains Hronis. “Since it is so easy to access … it can make it harder for people to engage with harder activities for longer-term gratification.”
The long game
The bad news is that these more challenging activities are often the ones that are going to bring us more sustainable happiness. These are our long-term goals. Perhaps saving to buy a new home, meet a life partner, achieve career success or go on a dream holiday.
With immediacy culture keeping us trapped in a cycle of impulsivity, our future-orientated decisions are often de-prioritised in preference for short-term pleasure or convenience.
Perth-based clinical and counselling psychologist Kerstin Anderson-Ridge says, “I think this constant availability of that dopamine hit — things like social media or binge-watching TV — can make it so much more difficult to focus on tasks that really require more of a sustained eff ort.
“We have a weakened ability to set and achieve our longer-term goals [when being impulsive] — things like how we want our career growth to be, our fitness, our financial stability, which all take time, and they all take effort. But we’ve become so conditioned to expect everything instantly, we often give up really easily when things get a bit tough,” she explains.
Anderson-Ridge says the first step is to reframe the idea of rewards. Staying focused on our long-term goals, instead of always reaching for quick dopamine hits. “Instead of focusing on what you’re missing right that minute, it’s focusing on what you’ll get later. An example might be if you tend to quit something — a goal or a project you set yourself. It’s reminding yourself of the long-term satisfaction of finishing it, rather than the short-term pain of doing it.”
For example, online dating isn’t always fun. Especially if you mindlessly swipe through potential matches seeking instant validation. But pushing through the discomfort of awkward small talk may feel easier if you focus on your end goal — meeting someone you click with, even if (probably like you!) they aren’t “perfect” straight off .
Impulse control
With everything on-demand, delayed gratification — the ability to resist immediate rewards in order to achieve greater or meaningful rewards in the future — is becoming a lost art. But research suggests that developing the skills utilised in delayed gratification. Skills such as patience and self-control, can help boost your wellbeing in the long run.
The most well-known experiment on delayed gratification was by Stanford University in the 1960s. Researchers gave a group of preschool-aged children a marshmallow. The children were told they could eat the marshmallow right away. But, if they waited an extra 15 minutes, they would receive two marshmallows and could eat both.
When following up with the children later in life across several decades, the researchers found that those who had been able to wait — to delay gratification — for the second marshmallow ended up performing better academically. As adults, they coped better with stress and pursued their goals more effectively. They were also far less likely to be overweight.
Experts believe that having better and more well-practised impulse control allows you to make conscious, mindful decisions. Decisions which can lead to healthier choices around things like diet, exercise and relationships. It also enables you to resist the temptation of short-term rewards that could have a detrimental effect. Things such as alcohol, drugs, doom-scrolling and compulsive spending.
Offloading thinking
Anderson-Ridge thinks this culture of having everything on-demand is also affecting our short-term planning and organisational skills. If we want to travel somewhere, a few swipes can bring a ride-share driver to our door. We don’t need to plan ahead to check bus timetables or leave extra time for delays. If takeaway food can be delivered in 20 minutes, we don’t need to schedule time for a supermarket trip or for meal prep.
Relying on our smartphones for instant access to information also means we don’t need to use our brainpower or cognitive skills as much. For example, we can instantly receive directions to a restaurant on Google maps instead of calculating a route ourselves. Language translation apps can replace our brain’s need to memorise foreign phrases for our next overseas trip.
This can make it easier for us to avoid problem-solving and thinking for ourselves. A study published in 2015 by the University of Waterloo in Canada echoes this. The research suggested that smartphone users who are intuitive thinkers — those more likely to rely on gut feelings when making decisions — frequently use their device’s search engine rather than their own brainpower. The researchers found that these individuals may look up information that they actually know or could easily learn, but were unwilling to make the eff ort to actually think about it.
Instant gratification and frustration tolerance
By losing the skill of delayed gratification, experts also believe our tolerance for minor inconveniences is being diminished.
“There’s a skill we refer to as ‘frustration tolerance’. That is, our ability to tolerate frustration,” says Hronis. “We build this when we have to work hard to get something we want. It helps us cope with setbacks in life, manage difficult situations and regulate unpleasant and challenging emotions, without becoming overly distressed.”
A higher frustration tolerance helps us become more resilient and cope with daily annoyances. Small things like conflict at work, family arguments, or a delayed train. Even things like your favourite lunch-time snack being sold out.
“When we have access to instant gratification and things are pretty easy, then we lose the opportunities to build that tolerance to challenges and frustrations. This can certainly contribute to people becoming more impatient, as well as having shorter attention spans.”
If you get easily angry or frustrated at minor inconveniences like waiting for slow webpages to load, being stuck in traffic, or not immediately being able to find something in the office kitchen, you may have a low frustration tolerance.
Patience is a skill
The good news is that like a muscle, you can gradually train your frustration tolerance to increase it. Look for opportunities to expose yourself to frustrating moments and sit with them. Rather than always opting for the quickest and easiest option through your phone.
Every now and then, stand in line for the cashier at the supermarket instead of whisking through the self-checkout or ordering groceries for home delivery. Enjoy making a “wish list” and wait a week to buy something instead of impulsively clicking “buy now”. Instead of binge-watching a full season of a Netflix show in a weekend, watch only one episode a week. Make a conscious effort. Yes — even if it ends on a cliff hanger!
Finding comfort in discomfort
Pushing through discomfort can not only increase your frustration tolerance but help build your overall resilience and ability to focus.
According to Sydney-based psychologist and cyberpsychology researcher, Jocelyn Brewer, “We train our attention based on the media that we consume. If you’re consuming TikTok or very short-form video content, and you’re not making time to reflect or digest what you’re consuming, then it will chop your attention up into confetti.”
Studies show that attention spans are declining as smartphone usage increases. One study, by psychologist Gloria Mark of the University of California, Irvine, found that over the last 20 years, the average time that a person can focus on one thing has dropped from around two and a half minutes to 47 seconds.
Next time you want to open Instagram to scroll through reels or mindlessly swipe through more potential matches on Hinge, pause to question why you are opting to swipe, click or scroll. It may be a coping mechanism to self-soothe or distract yourself from life’s problems, instead of dealing with them.
To combat this, Brewer suggests a technique that she calls “urge surfing”. This is putting a space between the urge and the action, to help assess your need for it. Even just waiting 20 minutes for the initial urge to wear off could help. “Just notice that urge, write it down, distract yourself, see how long you can go without thinking about it.”
Brewer says this can help you consider whether it’s something you really need to consume. Brewer says to ask yourself, “Or is that just a massive distraction from doing the big stuff , the uncomfortable stuff , all the things that we procrastinate on, whether that’s work, home or processing our emotions.”
Choosing inconvenience?
Rediscovering the art of delayed gratification doesn’t mean throwing away all the convenience that technology offers us. It’s about finding balance. It’s about being mindful and patient in a world that constantly tells us to “act now or miss out”.
