An Approach to Delaying Gratification: Time Barriers
A behavioral psychologist’s trick for making healthier food decisions
If you were in a hospital staring at a scan of your chest, and the radiologist was pointing to a bulbous aneurysm, and you could shrink it immediately by surrendering a breakfast pastry, most people would.
But when the pastry is right there in front of you and the aneurysm is remote and hypothetical, we eat pastries for breakfast.
There’s a concept in behavioral economics called temporal discounting. It means that the further out (in time) a reward is, the less valuable it is to us right now. The classic example is a person choosing $10 today instead of $15 next month. Applied to health, it means people choose soda and shelf-stable pastries now over cardiac function later. A habitual proclivity for
