5 Reasons Why Delayed Gratification Will Improve Your Life

How Learning to Control Your Impulses Can Lead to Better Outcomes

5 min readApr 24, 2020

Learning the importance of delayed gratification, especially when you now have access to everything instantaneously via smart devices, will help you better control your impulses.

It is common to expect most things quickly today. While that is valuable on occasions, most times, it can lead to impatience or disappointment if you don’t get what you expect.

As you build in delayed gratification into your daily experiences, you will experience a shift in your expectations.

What is Delayed Gratification?

It is the ability to hold off your urge for a quick or immediate reward, to receive a better one later. It’s resisting the desire for something now, to get something of a high-perceived value in the future.

How well you control your impulses will determine the advantage you gain later.

Dealing with delayed gratification is about training yourself to resist the temptation of a quick win or a short-term emotional high, for a long-term win and greater satisfaction.

Examples of Delayed Gratification

There are many opportunities daily to take advantage of delayed gratification. These can include:

Continuing to stick to an exercise and meal plan even though results are slow.
Not buying something today and investing that money towards a bigger goal.
Avoiding distractions such as television or social media to focus on a project.
Saying no to social activities so you have time to develop a new skill.

Knowing what your priorities are will make it easier to use delayed gratification the right way.

When I started creating new weekly content a few years ago, there was no traffic to my site. Even though initially no one was reading my content, I knew the payoff would come if I stayed consistent.

As I added more original content, the traffic to my site increased. First, it was a handful of visitors per month, then it became a hundred, then two hundred, then a few hundred. Now, several years later, I am getting thousands of visitors per month to my site.

This is because I understood the power of delayed gratification and stayed persistent with what I wanted to achieve. Had I looked at the traffic initially and decided it was not worth it, I would not be experiencing the rewards now.

5 Reasons Why Delayed Gratification Will Improve Your Life

It takes commitment to resist immediate satisfaction and focus on delayed gratification. Here are five reasons why delayed gratification will improve your life, which means you will achieve better outcomes over the long term.

You will develop more patience. Having an impulse response is often associated with impatience or frustration. As you practice delayed gratification, you will train yourself to resist immediate satisfaction and remain patient, while working towards a better reward.
You will have greater clarity. Knowing what you want will make it easier to focus on what will get you there. Greater clarity will also help you eliminate distractions and stay committed to what you want.
You will make better decisions. When you know the importance of delayed gratification, you will give more thought to the consequences of your daily choices. As the quality of your life is determined by your decisions, you will improve your decision-making ability.
You will become more persistent. Delayed gratification implies receiving something later instead of now. This will require you to be long-term focused, which means you will have to be persistent to keep going to get what you want. As you develop persistence, your self-confidence and your level of commitment will also improve.
You will develop new habits. Most people are in the habit of going for a quick win and settling for a short-term gain. Practicing delayed gratification means you are training yourself to control your impulses better. This will require you to change existing habits and adopt new ones to stay on track.

Things You Can Do to Control Your Impulses

To successfully adopt delayed gratification, you have to learn to control your impulses. Things that will help you with that include:

Have an accountability partner or coach.
Eliminate known temptations that can derail you.
Have clear goals and plans to achieve them.
Identify challenges or risks and have strategies to deal with them.
Create milestones and reward yourself appropriately when you reach them.

Final Thoughts

You can practice delayed gratification anytime. If you do, you will train yourself to rise above short-term gains and focus on bigger wins. The benefits you will gain will continue to improve your life.

If you don’t focus on delayed gratification, your short-term wins will feel empty quickly. You are more likely to experience regret, which means you won’t achieve the things you really want, when you want.

Action Step: Practice controlling your impulses by focusing on long-term benefits when you are choosing what to do. Pick one area of your life, such as health, and focus on getting a bigger reward later, instead of a smaller reward now.

Question: What are other reasons why delayed gratification will improve your life?