The Psychology of Motivation and Rewards
In this new category of blog post, guest columnist, John Burkholder, gives us the rundown about how restriction actually fuels temptation.
Abstract
“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it… I can resist everything but temptation.” -Oscar Wilde
Always take some time to question the internalized beliefs that you hold. Their intentions may be pure, but they may yield opposite results in the long run.
Temptation is a powerful demon that many people struggle with. Americans in particular are chronically addicted to sugar, salt, fat, sex, alcohol, video-games, entertainment, and most notoriously their smart-phones. This coupled with the fact that American society would have you believe that if you are addicted to anything it means you are weak, creates a particularly dangerous recipe for temptation. Not only is our culture saturated with the aforementioned vices, but our society punishes people for their vices. Alcoholics make fun of the obese, the obese make fun of smart-phone addicts, etc. and the cycle of shame and temptation becomes intensified.
This cycle of shame and temptation is known as The Forbidden Fruit Effect. More specifically, this effect involves a strong personal or societal stigma toward something (e.g. alcohol), followed by the person or civilization imposing strict restrictions (or impositions); the lack of availability then increases the value of said vice and temptation is born. This temptation drastically drains one’s willpower until they surrender to it. After surrendering to temptation, a strong period of shame and guilt may wash over the person, resulting in more negative feelings toward said vice… and the cycle repeats, indefinitely.
The only way to overcome temptation is to give oneself unconditional permission and allow a process known as habituation to gradually reduce one’s interest in said vice, over time. Only then can one reach homeostasis with their given vice.
Definitions
Willpower
One’s finite ability to delay gratification – overriding unwanted thoughts, feelings, or impulses.
The Forbidden Fruit Effect
The temptation that arises from a forbidden, dangerous, inaccessible, or difficult thing. One will always think about food when one is hungry.
Habit Loop
An unconscious cycle of behavior for a specific action – consisting of a cue, craving, response, and reward.
Habituation
The natural decrease in response to stimuli, after repeated exposure to it. One does not think of food when one is full.
Unconditional Permission
Allowing oneself to do anything one desires – allowing habituation to naturally regulate one’s desires.
Critical Notes
The Truth about Will (Willpower)
Anytime you place harsh restrictions on yourself or someone you love; you are creating a temptation where it previously did not exist.
The assumption is that one can overcome addictions, bad habits, or conform to an imposition solely via self-discipline and willpower.
The reality is that human psychology is far more complicated than (un)conventional wisdom would have us believe.
It is still believed by many that willpower is infinite and that any problem can be solved by simply “working harder”. Modern research shows, however, that willpower is finite; anytime you exercise restraint, you are exercising your willpower like a muscle. However, like any muscle, there is a finite amount of energy you can exert over a period of time and there are proper and improper ways to exercise a given muscle.
For some people, with strong genetics and years of gym training, bench pressing 200 pounds is child’s play. For others, it is not only difficult, but impossible.
The same can be said when it comes to willpower.
The Garden of Eden (The Forbidden Fruit Effect)
Neuroscience is less than 60 years old and modern Psychology is less than 150 years old, but humanity is a minimum of 200,000 years old!
That means that we did not even start to question our understanding of the mind, until recently; our species (America especially) is still riddled with many logical fallacies and false assumptions about the mind. The American Dream was built on ignorance of our own limitations and short comings because it assumes willpower is infinite.
To exercise restraint or self-discipline requires one to exercise willpower. The more times one has to do this in a given day, the more exhausted their willpower becomes. Given enough days in a row of exerting too much willpower at a time, one will likely give up and return to their old habits.
This is why the Forbidden Fruit Effect is so damaging to one’s habits.
By forbidding a once daily pleasure (like cookies, for example) it is the equivalent of starting your first day at the gym trying to bench press 200 pounds. Except the Forbidden Fruit Effect takes a much more brutal toll on our willpower.
Human Nature is staunchly opposed to prohibitions and impositions because they are seen as threats to our freedom. When something is forbidden, it catches our eye. We are motivated to learn about it, explore it, and/or achieve it. By doing so, we alleviate the heightened curiosity and remove the mystery behind it.
Curiosity and the desire for freedom are hardwired into our DNA.
Every time we overcome the barriers of this world, we are rewarded with pleasure, due to something known as conscious fear.
It is the reason we enjoy things like skydiving, roller coasters, or pursuing a love interest who may or may not feel the same. It is the reason we work twice as hard to prove someone, who doubted us, wrong.
Habit Loop
The Forbidden Fruit Effect is notorious for creating a negative habit loop, characterized by:
Having a stigma against something (e.g. ice cream, starches, video games, etc.
Imposing strict inflexible rules against said stigma
The stigma grows ever more appealing
One’s willpower gets exhausted from constantly fighting temptation
One finally surrenders to temptation, which creates a feeling of shame and guilt, and only further stigmatizes said thing – making the temptation even stronger
The Forbidden Fruit Effect can be detrimental because it catalyzes a negative habit loop. Take Dieting, for example:
This, combined with a slowed metabolism, helps to explain why so many people who diet, end up Yoyo Dieting.
Habituation
With all this in mind, one might ask whether there is a counterpart to the Forbidden Fruit Effect. This is called Habituation (see above).
This effect can be observed by simply recalling one’s music choices. It is the reason Christmas music becomes unbearable to many, especially with retail stores forgetting that Thanksgiving comes before Christmas.
Unconditional Permission
For example, dieting for weight loss reasons is not as good as dieting for general health reasons. Both these reasons do not yield immediate or directly enjoyable results, however. This is because humans have evolved to respond to short term rewards much stronger than long term rewards.
A better reason to avoid certain things is by thinking about how overindulging makes one feel in the short term. For example, I used to love chocolate, but after a while it started to upset my stomach. Now I typically avoid chocolate because I have a stronger association with the upset stomach than with a rich delicious treat.
By giving ourselves unconditional permission, we allow ourselves to enjoy something until we naturally grow tired of it, via the aforementioned habituation.
Important Caveats
There are some situations, however, where restraint is one hundred percent necessary.
The Forbidden Fruit effect may also be avoided by gaining an understanding of the bigger picture. By removing the unknowns from something, we strip it of its mysterious appeal. This is why, when you tell a child not to do something, it is vital to always give them a good reason (“because I said so” needs to be culled from the parenting vocabulary).
When it comes to habits, however, it is a little more complicated.
The Forbidden Fruit Effect and the ways to counter it, also apply mostly to psychological and mildly physical addictions.
For example, habituation and unconditional permission are not an effective way to overcome an addiction to heroine; this is because of a rapid tolerance increase, high likelihood to overdose, as well as physical addiction and withdrawal.
This also applies to anything that might harm other people or put you in jail.
The Forbidden Fruit Effect will also likely always exist with anything that is illegal. The best way to counter this is by creating good justifications for avoiding these situations and potential addictions.
Plan of Action
A. STOP dealing Arbitrary Impositions
Stop making decisions based on conventional American wisdom. The American cliché of “pull yourself up by your boot straps” was originally intended ironically (considering it is impossible to legitimately pull oneself up by their bootstraps), but quickly got misinterpreted as a legitimate goal. According to Deep Work author, Dan Pink, the finite limit to deep work (different than hard work) for a human being, according to neuroscience, is 4 hours of intense concentration (with breaks interspersed). This means that the vast majority of people who work 40 hours a week, could only reasonably be expected to perform meaningful tasks for about half that time, with the rest of that time quickly filling with hot gas.
For the vast majority, the Arbitrary imposition of 40+ hours a week needs to die on a societal level, but if one is lucky enough to be one’s own boss, the wartime relic of a 40+ hour work week has to be one of the first things to go.
B. STOP Quitting Habits cold-turkey
Instead of strictly limiting one’s consumption and telling oneself “no” to the many vices of this world, one should instead do the opposite. Research shows that the people who avoid addiction use less willpower than those who are clinically addicted, which means that passive long-term habituation will almost always yield stronger long-term results than short-term extreme dieting.
So instead of adding restrictions and impositions while making your life duller, plan 1-2 days of the week to go nuts. Really! Let yourself go all out with whatever you want (besides Heroine) The psychology behind this is explained below.
C. Leverage Habituation using Unconditional Permission
By giving oneself unconditional permission, one is allowed to enjoy something until they naturally grow tired of it. This removes the negative stigma from one’s vice – effectively neutering the Forbidden Fruit Effect and breaking the negative Habit Loop. Instead of continuously repeating the habit loop described above, one’s actions might look like:
Accepting that everybody has a vice.
Give oneself unconditional permission with said vice.
The vice loses its appeal, gradually over time, through habituation.
One conserves energy and willpower because one need not use any in this case.
After a while, an equilibrium (or homeostasis) is met and the vice is consumed in healthy moderation.
D. Leverage your Creativity with Substitution
Another solution to the Forbidden Fruit Effect is to provide yourself with alternatives, without completely removing the original desire. For example, if your primary snack is a greasy potato chip, you may find an alternative that is less calorically dense but tastes way better (usually a different brand than one is used to), such as popcorn.
Summary
Despite conventional American wisdom – believing one can resist temptation through sheer willpower – the prevalence of underaged pregnancies in pro-abstinence states would indicate that this “common sense” has no basis in reality. By making something a taboo that one cannot talk about, a level of homeostasis can never be reached, and thus the cycle of addiction – stigma, strict impositions, temptation, surrender, and guilt – continues indefinitely. It is only by giving oneself unconditional permission (with the occasional deliberate binge day) that one can truly break the cycle of addiction. Aside from a couple extreme vices (i.e. heroine), enjoying one’s vices in moderation is the key to living a healthy, fun, and balanced life.
References
Restriction Causes the Forbidden Fruit Effect – Coach Tiffany
The Forbidden Fruit Effect – Exploring Your Mind
Further Reading
Legal Drinking Age: The Forbidden Fruit Argument
https://sites.psu.edu/ryanfassakcivicissues/2016/01/29/legal-drinking-age-the-forbidden-fruit-argument/
How to Rid Yourself of the Diet Mentality and Stop Dieting Once and For All
https://www.self.com/story/get-rid-of-the-diet-mentality
Age and violent-content labels make video games forbidden fruits for youth
https://research.vu.nl/en/publications/age-and-violent-content-labels-make-video-games-forbidden-fruits-
Article Written By: John Burkholder