How Short-Term Pleasure Steals Your Long-Term Goals
In this post we are going to look at what Brooke Castillo from the Life Coach School calls ‘buffering’. You may know it as:
Putting things off
Distracting yourself
Avoiding tasks
Wasting time
Procrastination
Distraction
Delaying tactics
I’m going to define what it is, give you some examples of buffering activities, examine why we do it and suggest how you can reduce this behaviour.
What is ‘buffering’?
The reason we ‘buffer’ is in order to avoid doing difficult tasks and by difficult tasks, I mean anything that we don’t want to do. Anything that you don’t feel enthusiastic about doing or feel resistance to doing, which if you’ve got a job you dislike is probably a lot of things. For me it is certainly something I feel every single day. I don’t want to get out of bed on a dark and cold winter’s morning to do Pilates. I don’t want to walk the dog when it’s raining heavily. I don’t want to write this blog post as it takes focus and I have to think carefully about what I want to write. I bet you can think of hundreds of examples.
Why we ‘buffer’
What buffering provides for you, the reward you get from this activity, is short-term emotional pleasure but the pay off can be long-term ‘pain’. It is engaging in ‘bad’ habits which have a short-term positive effect on you and usually a long-term negative one instead of engaging in good habits which have a short-term negative impact and a long-term positive impact.
So for example you stay in bed scrolling your phone and feel pleasure at consuming all the Facebook posts and commenting. You’re warm and cosy and feel good seeing all the lovely posts and feeling like you’ve got lots of friends, but you know that excessive consumption of social media can lead to increased anxiety and depression from constant comparison and lowered self-esteem, shortened attention span and difficulty focusing on deep work and eye strain and headaches.
Alternatively you could get out of bed and go to the gym and exercise. In the short term i.e. this morning it feels awful, it feels hard, but in the long term you will feel better for it. In fact you’ll probably feel really proud of yourself this afternoon and in six months’ time you’ll be reaping the physical benefits and be grateful to yourself for enduring the short term pain.
When people come to me and say they don't have time for something, it can often be that they are resisting doing tasks that they don't want to do. They are spending their time buffering instead of getting on with the tasks they supposedly want to do.
It’s your brain’s fault
As human beings, we have the ability to think long term, and we know that doing things that we don't enjoy doing will benefit us in the long term. But in the moment, we don't want to do them. We don’t want to experience the discomfort that they cause.
The reason for this is that the two parts of our brain are in conflict with each other. We have our primitive brains which want us to avoid pain, seek pleasure, and conserve energy. And in the moment, it is our primitive brains that are in charge. So when you are faced with that difficult task, that report to write that you've been dreading, or that dark winter's morning when you have said to yourself you will go out to the gym to exercise because you want to be fitter and stronger, your primitive brain will say ‘I don't want to do that’ because it is uncomfortable. It is not pleasurable. Laying here in a warm bed under the duvet and scrolling Facebook is much better to do. It’s pleasurable.
Your primitive brain offers you all of those buffering activities that will give you pleasure in the moment. And so you think about all of those other things that you could be doing, such as having a glass of wine rather than going out for a walk at eight o'clock in the evening, binging Netflix, scrolling on your phone. Buffering activities can arguably be constructive things, and I'm sure you have experienced or done ones like these, such as folding the laundry or emptying the dishwasher when you are working from home because you don't want to do the next task on your to-do list. And you tell yourself that you're doing something constructive, but you're not doing the thing that in the long term will benefit you e.g. help you keep your job and stop you from working on the weekend again. You are doing this activity to avoid what you really should be doing, what you planned to do.
How to reduce buffering
So I'm sure at this point you're asking yourself, how do you avoid buffering? And I think the first thing to do, like any change that you want to make, is becoming aware of it. And hopefully, this blog post is doing just that. And believe me you are not alone. We all buffer. Me, every day. Like most things, it’s a work in progress.
Firstly I want you to focus on increasing your awareness of buffering before you try to make any changes. So maybe keep a tally throughout the next couple of days of how often you are buffering and what buffering activities you are doing. Look at what you were meant to be doing when you were buffering. Are there certain types of tasks that you're avoiding doing or is it anything difficult? And then ask yourself what buffering activities you want to be doing? Because we all want to spend time relaxing, watching TV, scrolling Instagram, connecting with our friends on Facebook.
But instead of using these to distract yourself from doing the difficult thing, you could use them as a reward for having achieved the difficult task. After working on a difficult data analysis task allow yourself 15 minutes on Tik Tok. Every day that you go to the gym watch an episode of your favourite Netflix programme that evening.
A mindset tool to use is to focus on your future self. A way to imagine this is to look back and think about the activities in the past that you did that got you to where you are now. The hard studying you did at university to get that degree and the career you love. I’m sure you are grateful to the past you who in the moment didn’t want to study, but did it anyway and passed her degree. Now think about your future self and how grateful she will feel to the you now who gets herself out of bed at 6am three mornings a week to go to that yoga class.
I hope that this has given you some insight into why you waste time and ideas for how you can combat that so you can crack on with the hard stuff, get it over and done as soon as possible and then go and enjoy yourself.