Delayed Gratification: How to Get Better at Waiting for What You Want

Keeping your eyes on the prize is poor advice when the prize is sitting in front of you. In Walter Mischel’s experiments with preschoolers at Stanford in the 1960s and 1970s, and in the research that followed, looking at the treat and thinking about how good it would be was among the least effective ways for young children to wait.¹ That finding still shapes how to practice delayed gratification today: the skill depends less on gritting your teeth than on where your attention goes and what you decide before temptation arrives.

Delayed gratification is choosing a larger or longer-lasting reward later over a smaller one now. To get better at it:

1. Look away from the reward, or picture it in cool terms.
2. Decide in advance with an if-then plan.
3. Add friction, or lock the choice in.
4. Bring to mind the future you are waiting for.
5. Check that the later reward is likely to arrive.

Mischel’s own research found that children waited longer when they distracted themselves or pictured the treat in cool, abstract terms than when they focused on how good it would taste.²

What delayed gratification means, with everyday examples

Delayed gratification, also called deferred gratification, is the ability to resist an immediate reward in favor of a more valuable or longer-lasting one later. It is one part of self-regulation, alongside patience, impulse control and willpower, and it is the reverse of delay discounting, the tendency for a reward to feel less valuable the further away it is.¹

Examples are everywhere. Moving part of each paycheck into savings instead of spending it is delayed gratification; so is leaving the biscuits for after dinner, finishing a chapter before opening social media, or studying for a qualification that pays off in two years. Each one has the same shape: a small, sure, near reward against a bigger, later one. Naming both sides of that trade in your own case, and how long the gap is, is the first step for every strategy below.

The ability to wait is also the most famous thread in research on self-controlself-control: The ability to override an impulse or habit in favor of a longer-term goal, often called willpower. The popular idea that it runs on a limited fuel that each hard task burns up has not held up in large preregistered tests.Full entry in the glossary. What the follow-up studies of the marshmallow test did and did not show is explained in the guide to why self-discipline is part trait, part skill and part setting. This page stays with the practical question: how to wait better once you have decided waiting is worth it.

Why delayed gratification is so hard

Waiting is hard because a reward loses value in your mind the further away it is, and the reward in front of you is vivid while the later one is abstract. Researchers call the first part delay discounting: in Jillian Rung and Gregory Madden’s 2018 review, steep discounting is linked to problems such as substance use and obesity.³

Janet Metcalfe and Walter Mischel described the second part in 1999 as two systems. A “hot” emotional system reacts fast to tempting features (the smell, the sweetness, the buzz of a notification). A “cool” thinking system is slower, more reflective and the seat of self-control, and stress is one of the things that shifts the balance between the two.⁴ This is a framework, not a measured quantity, but it helps explain why the same person can wait easily on Monday morning and cave on Friday night.

Someone saving for a trip opens a shopping app after a long day. The sale item is a photo away from being theirs; the trip is a date on a calendar. Nothing about their values has changed, only which reward is louder. Stop treating a lapse as a character verdict and look at what made the near reward so loud.

Myth

People who can wait just have more willpower.

Fact

In Mischel's experiments, how children directed their attention changed how long they could wait.

How to train yourself to delay gratification

The best-supported ways to get better at delayed gratification work on attention, plans and setting. The four steps are ordered from the oldest evidence to the newest; pick the one that fits the temptation you face most often.

1. Look away, or cool the reward down

Mischel and colleagues found that self-distraction, such as looking away from the temptation, was a strategy successful preschool waiters used.² Reframing worked too: a child who thought of a marshmallow as a fluffy cloud or a cotton ball, rather than as a sweet, chewy treat, could wait much longer for the same marshmallow. Writing in 2011, Mischel’s team noted that these were short laboratory demonstrations, but argued they suggest the strategies for waiting can be taught.²

For an adult, cooling a reward looks like closing the tab with the item you want, putting the snack bowl in a cupboard, or describing a purchase to yourself flatly (“a third pair of trainers”) instead of picturing wearing them. Distraction counts as well: a walk, a call or a task that fully occupies you. Use this when the temptation is in front of you right now.

2. Decide in advance with an if-then plan

An if-then plan names the moment of temptation and the response you will make: “If I open my banking app on payday, then I move the savings amount first.” These plans are called implementation intentionsimplementation intention: A plan in if-then form that ties a specific action to a specific situation, such as 'if it is nine o'clock, then I open the report.' It hands the decision about when and where to act to the situation itself.Full entry in the glossary. A 2025 meta-analysismeta-analysis: A study that combines the results of earlier studies on the same question into one overall estimate. Pooling makes the estimate more precise, but it cannot repair the studies it pools: a meta-analysis of surveys is still survey evidence.Full entry in the glossary by Paschal Sheeran, Olivia Listrom and Peter Gollwitzer pooled 642 tests and found that forming them helped with thoughts, feelings and behavior, with larger effects when plans used the if-then format and were rehearsed.⁵

The method has also been tested on waiting itself. In two German studies, children who repeated the plan “Whenever a red picture appears, then I will wait for the blue one” waited more often for the bigger reward in a computer game than children who only set a goal to do well; this held for children with and without ADHD.⁶ The samples were small and the task was a game, so take it as a hint that the method carries over to waiting, not a measure of how much it helps.

Write one plan for the moment you most often give in, in your own words, and say it to yourself a few times. In those German studies, a plain goal to do well was not enough for children with ADHD; the specific trigger did the work.

3. Add friction, or lock the choice in

Changing the situation before temptation arrives may be an especially effective form of self-control. Angela Duckworth, Tamar Gendler and James Gross argued in 2016 that impulses usually gain strength as they develop, so situational strategies, such as the student who goes to the library without a phone, can stop a tempting impulse before it builds.⁷ Friction is the mild version: sign out of shopping apps, keep your card details out of the browser, put the games console in another room. For spending in particular, more tactics of this kind appear in how to stop impulse buying.

Precommitment is the strong version: you remove the option for your future self. Randomized field trials show it can work outside the lab.

The study

Moderate evidence

Locked app limits cut screen time in a 12-week trial

In a 2022 randomized experiment by Hunt Allcott, Matthew Gentzkow and Lena Song, US adults offered daily app limits that, in most cases, they could not override in the moment spent about 22 fewer minutes a day on the apps they found most tempting over 12 weeks, and 78% of them kept using binding limits.⁸

The Sloan Foundation funded the study, and one author has consulted for Facebook in litigation; the sample was younger and more educated than US adults overall.⁸ If phones are your main temptation, the guide to setting app limits before you need them covers the built-in tools.

In the Philippines, a 2006 trial by Nava Ashraf, Dean Karlan and Wesley Yin offered bank clients an account that let them commit to restricting their own access to their savings, and after 12 months those offered it had saved more than a control group.⁹ Another Philippine trial let smokers stake their own money on passing a nicotine test six months later; only a minority signed up, but the offer raised quit rates a little, and the effect held at surprise tests at 12 months.¹⁰ Dean Karlan, an author of both Philippine trials, co-founded stickK, a website for commitment contracts.¹¹ Take-up is the weak point: only a minority signed up for locked savings or a smoking stake, though most people given app limits used them, and those who commit tend to benefit. If a lock appeals to you, use one; if it puts you off, start with friction, which costs nothing to undo.

4. Bring to mind the future you are waiting for

Imagining a specific, positive future event in vivid detail, called episodic future thinking, tends to make people less likely to grab the smaller, sooner option. A 2022 meta-analysis by Jun-yan Ye and colleagues pooled 47 studies and found a medium-sized reduction in delay discounting, with positive future scenes working and neutral or negative ones showing no benefit.¹²

Rung and Madden note that many methods that reduce discounting suit one-off choices, but that future thinking could be built into longer programs.³ Most tests used laboratory choice tasks, so the link to real spending or eating is less certain. To try it, before a tempting moment, spend a minute picturing one concrete scene the later reward makes possible: the first morning of the trip, the day the debt reaches zero, where you are and who is with you.

Set up one wait this week

• Name the temptation and the moment it usually wins
• Move it out of sight or describe it in plain, cool terms
• Write one if-then plan for that moment and say it aloud
• Add one piece of friction or one limit you cannot undo on the spot
• Name one specific scene the later reward makes possible
• Check that the later reward is real and has a date

What the evidence shows for each strategy

The strategies differ in how they were tested, from preschool lab tasks to year-long field trials with real money. The table shows how much weight each one can bear when you apply it to your own temptations.

If you try only one, match it to the temptation: friction or a lock for something you meet every day, looking away or a cool description for something in front of you now, and a minute of future thinking before a single big choice.

Is delayed gratification always a good thing?

No. Waiting is a bet that the later reward will arrive, and it is only a good bet when the future is reliable. Joseph McGuire and Joseph Kable argued in 2013 that giving up on a delay can be a rational response when the timing of a reward is uncertain, because the longer you have waited, the longer you may reasonably expect to keep waiting.¹³

They quote the example of a bus that has not come: after a long wait with no schedule, taking a taxi says nothing bad about your willpower. The same applies to a promised bonus that keeps slipping, or a manager who keeps moving the promotion date. The marshmallow-test follow-ups in our self-discipline guide make a related point about trust.

There is a second limit. In research on what they called hyperopia, Ran Kivetz and Anat Keinan found that choosing work over pleasure tends to bring more regret as time passes; they linked this to guilt about indulging fading while the sense of having missed out grows.¹⁴

If the answer is “not sure”, shorten the wait, get the reward in writing, or take the smaller reward without guilt.

When waiting is harder than it should be

For some people, waiting is harder for reasons that go beyond strategy. A 2016 meta-analysis by Jacob Jackson and James MacKillop pooled 21 case-control investigations and found that people with ADHD discounted delayed money more steeply than people without it, a medium-sized difference.¹⁵

That does not mean anyone who struggles to wait has ADHD, and only a qualified clinician can assess it. If difficulty waiting has been lifelong, shows up at work, at home and with money, and causes real problems, bring it up with a doctor or psychologist. The strategies above still apply: in the German studies, if-then plans helped children with ADHD wait as well.⁶ For day-to-day systems, see organizing tips for adults with ADHD.

The bottom line

Pick the one temptation that costs you most and take it out of view or lock it away before the hard moment comes. Then write an if-then plan for that moment, and check that the reward you are waiting for is real and has a date.