How To Break The Instant Gratification Cycle: From Obsession To Fulfillment
I BROKE Netflix and the doughnuts.
I used obsession and berries—they shatter instant gratification like glass.
Read time: 0.4% of your day.
Your average social media scrolling: 9.9% of your day.
Return on time? 2,475%—if it saves you just one day of scrolling.
What’s the problem with instant gratification?
Instant gratification is as old as humans.
If you ate your berries too soon, winter starved you.
Natural selection in action.
Today it’s even harder to resist the berries.
Why?
Capitalism uses instant gratification against us.
The smartest people in tall glass offices work on killer algorithms.
Or the most addictive fast food recipes.
Fake berries blind you from the real ones.
How to get the real, juicy ones?
Shatter the instant gratification cycle like glass.
What cycle?
Instant gratification works like this:
- You do hard stuff.
- The hard stuff triggers an urge to do fun stuff instead for instant pleasure.
- Giving in to fun stuff is rewarding because you get dopamine.
… and you just built a self-reinforcing habit.
How to break the cycle?
Focus on what you can control.
The source of instant gratification is mostly external.
Think sugary foods, social media, or that one more episode trap.
The rest?
Internal—deeply wired into biology.
So, you can’t mute my monkey brain yelling, “Watch Netflix” every time you’re triggered by doing hard things.
But you can:
- Outsmart triggers
- Regulate urges
- Replace instant pleasures
And with that, the monkey goes in a cage.
It still shouts—but it’s not running the show.
First, we break the glass of instant pleasures. Then, we deal with biology.
Here’s how. Took me 5+ years to learn.
Align your purpose with your values
Work on what truly matters to you.
Take two people who value health, nature, and family.
One works as an investment banker in a fancy, tall glass building on Wall Street.
He pulls 80+ hours a week, often sleeping under his desk.
Odds are, he’s:
- Unfulfilled
- Miserable
- Burned out
… because his work clashes with his values.
He’s out of alignment.
Now take the farmer.
He works hard to take care of his farm and family.
Every Saturday, he sells fresh produce at the farmer’s market in New York.
He knows his customers by name.
He enjoys intentional free time with family and carves wood as a hobby.
He earns less but lives more.
He goes to bed with a smile every night.
Now, I’m not saying everyone should quit their job and become a farmer.
The point? He’s aligned.
He’s found his version of success.
Your path may look totally different—and that’s okay.
It’s about finding what works for you.
You might value money, power, or influence.
Then finance or politics might be a perfect fit.
But whatever you choose, your values need to align with it.
Find your values. Find your purpose.
How? Ask yourself:
- What truly matters to me?
- What am I naturally drawn to?
- What makes me lose track of time?
Here’s my favorite way to know you’ve found your purpose:
It looks like a never-ending mountain but feels downhill.
You obsess over it.
You get instant pleasure from doing it.
That’s how you replace instant pleasures with a meaningful obsession.
An obsession aligned with your values and purpose.
It’s your compass for a meaningful life.
A map to the real berries.
Value yourself for working on what matters
You made a promise:
Buy those shoes—and you’ll be happy!
Once you tried them on, it felt rewarding.
But the feeling disappeared.
Because you tied your happiness to getting the thing.
You made happiness an emotional response to an outcome.
“If I win, I’ll be happy. If I don’t, I won’t.”
It’s an if-then mindset that leads to a never-ending chase.
There’s always a bigger, better, nicer yacht around the corner.
The sad reality?
Instant pleasures get more painful with time.
You can earn back money.
But you can’t earn back time or potential.
The solution?
Value yourself for doing the thing—not for getting the things.
The doing matters.
The journey matters.
What you fill it with, and whom you spend it with.
The best games in life cannot be won.
They must be earned every day.
You can’t win a fit body, a calm mind or a marriage full of love.
You must keep playing them each day.
Once you taste working on what truly matters, chasing fake berries won’t feel as good.
You’ll crave the real ones.
Design your environment
Your environment owns you.
It determines how deep and how long you can work.
Bad environment?
Social media beeps nonstop.
Bad carbs scream, “Eat me!”
It takes 63 minutes to get to the gym? You won’t bother.
Good environment?
A calm space with good tools (Notion, quality screens).
Healthy food within reach.
The gym? A 3-minute walk away.
Designing your environment removes friction and helps you regulate urges.
It’s not about willpower—it’s about systems.
Prepping one meal at a time? Drains energy.
Batch-prep instead. I prep my morning oats two weeks ahead.
Healthy. Fast. Predictable.
Design your environment like planting a garden—grow the best berries, keep out the pests.
Make sure you can harvest them all.
Do hard things
You can’t escape triggers.
Your brain is wired to save energy.
We can’t change that.
But we can outsmart it.
Your brain adapts.
What seems hard now?
Becomes normal later.
It’s not that your brain can’t tell the difference—it just gets used to the challenge.
At some point, it stops feeling hard.
Take working out before work.
Seems tough?
You’re right. It is.
But stick with it, and soon—it’s just part of you.
It’s the new normal.
Science backs this up.
Research indicates that regular exposure to stressors can recalibrate the autonomic nervous system’s (ANS) response, effectively raising the “set point” for stress tolerance. (Guan et al., 2018.)
Your stress threshold rises.
Run a marathon before work?
Then someone cuts you off in traffic.
Do you lose it? No. You smile.
The choice is yours.
Raise the level of triggers now, or face harder things later.
Like regret, unmet potential, or chronic disease.
So don’t wish for an easy life.
Wish for the strength to bear it.
Because your ANS will adapt.
Will your feelings?
The takeaway?
Tame your monkey brain:
- Outsmart triggers → Train yourself to do hard things
- Regulate urges → Design an environment that works for you
- Replace instant pleasures → Get dopamine from obsession and purpose
Now, the monkey is tamed.
You’ve broken free.
You’re aligned with your values.
You value the process over the outcome.
And that’s how you grow, and eat your berries too.
P.S. Appreciate you reading this far and fighting off the average 8-second attention span (according to a Microsoft study).
Keep breaking the instant gratification cycle!
It’s made of glass.
Your brain just thinks otherwise.
Sources:
- Scrolling social media on average takes up 9.9% of your day, which is 2 hours and 23 minutes on average, shows research from GWI.
- Guan, L., Collet, J.-P., Mazowita, G., & Claydon, V. E. (2018). Autonomic Nervous System and Stress to Predict Secondary Ischemic Events after Transient Ischemic Attack or Minor Stroke: Possible Implications of Heart Rate Variability. Frontiers in Neurology, 9, 90.
Got insights or burning questions? Drop them below—I’d love to hear your take!
