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We all know the feeling of eating the last Tim Tam even though we said we’d stop, or putting off the gym even though we know we’ll feel better after. There’s a simple psychological framework behind this tug-of-war, and it’s more nuanced than “willpower” or “laziness.”

Four combinations, not two

Most people think of this as one axis — instant vs delayed — but really there are two separate questions: when something happens, and whether it’s a reward or a cost. That gives four combinations:

• Instant gratification: reward now (a cigarette, a scroll through social media, a splurge on payday)
• Delayed cost: the price paid later (lung damage, lost hours, an empty bank account)
• Instant cost: effort or discomfort now (a hard training session, saying no to dessert)
• Delayed gratification: the pay-off later (fitness, health, savings)

These naturally pair up in everyday life — instant gratification tends to travel with a delayed cost (gluttony, addiction, procrastination), and instant cost tends to travel with delayed gratification (discipline, exercise, saving). But they’re not the same thing by definition; they’re just common bundles. Sometimes you get gratification with barely any real cost (an afternoon nap), or cost with barely any real reward (over-saving to the point of never enjoying your money).

Why the future feels so much less real

The underlying mechanism is called temporal discounting — our tendency to value a reward less the further away it sits. Offer someone $50 today or $100 in a year, and plenty will take the $50. The future reward gets “discounted” in the mind, even though it’s objectively worth more. This isn’t a flaw exclusive to people struggling with addiction or avoidance — everyone discounts the future to some degree. What differs from person to person is how steeply.

A more specific quirk sitting inside this is present bias — an extra, disproportionate pull toward anything happening right now, over and above normal discounting. The classic sign of it is a preference reversal: someone might happily choose $100 in 31 days over $50 in 30 days when both options are off in the future. But offer them $50 today versus $100 tomorrow, and many flip to taking the smaller amount immediately. Nothing about the maths changed — only whether “now” was on the table. This is the same mechanism behind grand plans made the night before that evaporate the next morning: the plan looked easy when “now” was still hypothetical.

Why does this happen? Economists originally assumed we discount the future smoothly and consistently — a steady, predictable decline in value the further out a reward sits. Real behaviour doesn’t work that way. Instead, people follow what’s called a hyperbolic discounting curve — value declines really fast for anything in the near future (i.e., pushing a reward from today to next week costs it a lot of its appeal) then flattens out for anything further away. But pushing a reward from five years away to six years away barely changes how appealing it feels at all. The decline is steep early and flat later. That steep early drop is what makes “right now” so magnetic, and the flat tail is why consequences six months away can feel almost as unreal as consequences five years away, even though they’re nothing alike in real terms.

Where this shows up in society

This isn’t just an economics quirk — it explains a lot of everyday human struggle:

• Addiction runs almost entirely on this pattern: an intensely immediate reward (a drink, a hit, a bet) paired with a cost that’s not just delayed but sitting on that flat, barely-felt part of the curve.
• Avoidance behaviours (procrastination, dodging a hard conversation, skipping medical checkups) work in reverse — the relief of avoiding discomfort is instant, while the cost of avoidance quietly compounds somewhere out on the flat tail.
• Overeating or “gluttony” fits the same shape — the pleasure of eating is immediate and vivid; weight gain or health decline is real but distant and abstract, so it barely registers in the moment of choosing.
• Under-saving and impulse spending are the financial version — a purchase feels good today; retirement or a rainy-day fund is decades away and easy to discount to near zero.

Why this matters practically

The useful reframe here is that struggling with this isn’t a personal failing or a lack of insight — it’s the human valuation system doing exactly what it evolved to do, just more steeply in some people than others. That points toward practical fixes that work with the curve rather than fighting it: shrinking the delay before a good choice pays off (visible progress, milestone rewards), making the cost of a bad choice show up sooner rather than later (a streak, a check-in, immediate feedback), or removing the in-the-moment choice altogether through precommitment (automatic savings transfers, not keeping temptation in the house). Trying to simply convince someone to “care more” about the distant future tends not to work, because the problem was never a lack of caring — it’s that the future is quietly, structurally, worth less to the mind than the present.

The word ‘trauma’ originates from the Greek word ‘wound”, which at the time, was primarily used to refer to physical injuries. Today, trauma is also frequently used to refer to “emotional wounds” that can cause psychological symptoms any time after the traumatic event has occurred, including years later. Emotional and psychological trauma can be lifelong.

The word ‘trauma’ has been popularised, and is arguably used carelessly or inaccurately, to indicate almost any kind of unpleasant experience or stressor by an individual (Haslam, 2016). A stressful life experience is more commonly being labelled as trauma or a traumatic experience. While both stress and trauma can impact our wellbeing, we must differentiate the two for diagnostic and treatment purposes within the mental health field.

Emotional and psychological trauma is associated with significant unexpected incidents that are, or perceived as, threatening to a person. The most recognised examples of traumatic events include unexpected natural disasters, a serious car accident, war, rape, bullying/intimidation, or losing a loved one. Traumatic experiences are often described as overwhelm the nervous system and experienced as deeply distressing events, and adverse short or long-term impacts are commonly experienced. It is also worth noting that some people may not recognise they have experience trauma. I once heard a story of a boy in high school who accidently severed a major artery of his peer with a school prop while joking around. His peer was taken to hospital and survived, but ears later he began having night terrors of the incident.

The following is a definition from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) in the United States: “Individual trauma results from an event, a series of events or a set of circumstances that is experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful or life threatening and that has lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being.” (SAMHSA, 2014a, p. 7)

“Traumas can affect individuals, families, groups, communities, specific cultures, and generations. It generally overwhelms an individual’s or community’s resources to cope, and it often ignites the “fight, flight, or freeze” reaction at the time of the event(s). It frequently produces a sense of fear, vulnerability, and helplessness.” (SAMHSA, 2014b, p. 7)

The determinants of acquiring post-traumatic symptoms are influenced by how individuals interpret their circumstance(s), their developmental stage, cultural beliefs, availability of resources and support, and the physical and psychological disruptions they experienced (SAMHSA, 2014b). I have heard the word ‘trauma’ used to describe neglect and abuse during childhood. It’s important to note that while some caregivers may have neglected the emotional and psychological needs of a child, or used ‘smacking’ (positive punishment) to discipline children, not all individuals will develop symptoms that meet the current criteria by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DMS) for Trauma. It is fair to say that all people have likely experienced life stressors that have conditioned them to think, behave, and react emotionally in specific or general social contexts, and will effect their quality of life and health.

As a rule of thumb, for trauma to be classified as a clinical psychological or emotional condition, I consider the 4 D’s: is there post-traumatic symptoms of DISTRESS, DYSFUNCTION in daily living, DANGER (to self or others), or DEVIANT behaviour. I think the word ‘deviant’ has prejudicial connotations so to clarify, it means departing from usual or accepted standards, especially in social or sexual behaviour.

Thank you for reading. Of course, there’s plenty more to say on the topic of emotional and psychological trauma, especially how cultures differentiate it from more commonly experienced yet individually meaningful life stressors. Stress that doesn’t fit the clinical criteria of ‘trauma’ is still valid and can be detrimental to our health. It can be helpful to seek psychological or psychiatric treatment, or spiritual alternatives to traditional Western health care.

References:

1. Haslam, N. (2016, August 15). The problem with describing every misfortune as ‘trauma’. Chicago Tribute. From website.
2. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA, 2014a). SAMHSA’s concept of trauma and guidance for a trauma-informed approach. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. From website.
3. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. (2014b).  A treatment improvement protocol: Trauma-informed care in behavioral health services TIP 57. From website.

Inattentional Blindness is the failure to notice an unexpected object in a visual display.

Cognitive Psychology is an approach to understanding human cognition by observing behaviour of people performing cognitive tasks. It is concerned with the internal processes involved in making sense of our environment, and deciding what behaviour to be appropriate. These processes include attention, perception, learning, memory, language, problem-solving, reasoning, and thinking.

The most famous experiment that shows evidence for inattentional blindness is the Simons and Chabris (1999) experiment where an audience or viewer watches a group of people pass a ball to one another wearing either black or white, and a woman dressed as a gorilla enters the frame for 9 seconds, then walks off. Results reported that 50% of the observers did not notice the gorilla enter the frame. In all honesty, when I saw the video for the first time at university, I did not see the gorilla enter the frame either.

In reality, we are often aware of changes in our visual environment because we detect motion cues accompanying the change. This information suggests that our ability to detect visual changes is not only due to the detection of movement. An obvious explanation of the gorilla experiment findings is that the visual representations we form in our mind are sparse and incomplete because they depend on our limited attentional focus. Simons and Rensick (2005) point out that there are other explanations, such as: detailed and complete representations may exist initially but may either decay rapidly or be overwritten by a subsequent stimulus. It needs to be said that in the gorilla experiment, the observers are instructed to count how many times the ball passes, so really, our attention is deliberately compromised. The real-life implications of inattentional blindness reveals the role of selective attention in human perception. Inattentional blindness represents a consequence of this critical process that allows us to remain focused on important aspects of our world without distraction from seemingly irrelevant objects and events.

Being present, in the moment (mindfulness) can help aid our attention. Distractions such as using our mobile phones, advertising material, other people, “multi-tasking” and internal emotional states all contribute to our lack of focus and attention. Think of a magician’s ability to manipulate their audiences attention in order to prevent them from seeing how a trick is performed. There are also safety implications, as you would know … if you’ve been paying attention, haha.

Just food for thought, my readers, and friends 🙂