… or cookies, or salt, or drama, or sunlight, or connection, or rest, or anything at all. We might be doing our own thing focused and fully immersed. It doesn’t really matter what you’re doing – and then a little notion pops up. The notion is you’re “in the mood for xy”. You can ignore it but it burrows in and gets louder.

You may feel a craving for something salty, a need to call up someone and chat, a need to sing, to get loud or quiet, or have an insatiable hankering for cherries or some carnal pleasures. Taking into consideration it’s not something pathologic or auto destructive, the body is very well adapt to nudging us towards what we need. You may be really lacking some nutrient, your blood sugar may have plummeted, you’re low on energy, in need of some social bonding or are ovulating, or are processing something on the back burner that could use some social context right about now. Our body and mind talks to us all the time from below the detectable conscious level and asks what it needs. This need will manifest itself as an action generating thing, a sort of a subpersonality that doesn’t care about what you’re doing now and it will distract you in order to find satiation and relief. Once you figure out what it is this autonomous subpersonality wants you go out searching for it. When satiated it subsides and lets you get on with whatever it as you were doing or you just supress it and move on a bit more distracted (because it is still here, sort of independent of you and not fully under volatile control).

Although you will feel some satisfaction if you fill this need, temporary satisfaction is not to be confused with long term satisfaction and pleasure. The fleeting satisfaction is connected to instant gratification and is not in itself problematic if you learn how to balance it with long term pleasure and satisfaction more associated with setting goals that take more effort to achieve. There is nothing wrong in taking a study break and go do what the sub personality wants you to do for a while – as long as the long term goal of passing the exam or arranging that presentation doesn’t get expunged by just chasing these temporary impulsive satiations. General life success and mental stability is intertwined with the ability to delay gratification in order to get a bigger reward later aka the ability to sacrifice the temporary need for what needs to be done and accomplished. This does not mean a vacant grudging crawl towards the goal. If the thing you’re aiming at is properly set and important (to you) every step in the right direction and every breakthrough will also reward you with a dopamine hit and positive emotions, no matter how hard the task was. In fact, the harder the steps towards the task, the more emotionally invested we are and the more value we attribute to attainment.

It may not be the best idea in the world to always get what we want. More times than not getting what we want gives as a very short lived high and then we plummet into aimlessness and being lost and confused, stuck in a way as the goal provided motivation and positive emotions as we approached it. The longer we worked on something the bigger the aimlessness once it is achieved. So the old wise suggestion that the journey may be more important than the destination itself is actually psychologically correct. There are many things we presume about the way our minds and motivation works. Give yourself some perks of instant gratification but keep your eye on the ball, whatever the ball is be it getting your degree, organizing your pantry, being a better parent, or planting an herb garden.

If an insufficient state of jam, or anything else, allow yourself some if it doesn’t interfere with the main long term goal too much. Some things will really be necessary some just a bid for procrastination. You need to figure out which one it is. For example – are you really hungry or just bored with what you’re doing or maybe confusing dehydration for hunger? We need some allowances to no just feel like a beast of burden but we need some structure and self-control too to not just instantly chase every need that pops into our mind. Seems that the key to all things in our lives, just as in nature, somehow always circles back to balance, doesn’t it?