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Nov. 19, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

18:33

2845 The Positives and Negatives of Impulsivity

Stefan Molyneux breaks down the positives, negatives and reality of impulses, impulsivity and the deferral of gratification.

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	Hi everybody, Stefan Molyne from Freedom Main Radio.
	Hope you're doing well, well, well, well, well.
	Three holes in the ground.
	Four, in fact.
	Question from a listener who says, basically, I, Steph, am an impulse-driven life form, or I'm just quite impulsive.
	What, oh, what, oh, what can I do to deal with my impulsivity?
	So I guess first let's differentiate between good and bad impulses.
	So when we develop a particular skill, we wish to act...
	Instinctually, automatically.
	You play piano, you play tennis, you just want to act quickly and instinctually and impulsively, so to speak, but it's trained impulse.
	You know, if you are a catcher and somebody throws a ball at you, you'll catch it probably on impulse, and nobody considers that a bad thing.
	Generally, impulses are considered bad when they have a negative effect on your long-term self-interest.
	Obviously, impulses in general serve the needs of the moment, otherwise they wouldn't be there at all, but they don't serve the long-term needs.
	So, an example of a destructive impulse would be, guy looked at me funny in a bar, I'm going to push him and try and start a fight, because I feel put down or something like that.
	So, that's sort of an example of a negative impulse.
	It serves your need for anxiety management and dominance in the moment, however, of course, It is none too positive for your long-term retention of, say, teeth or liberty.
	So that's an example.
	Bad impulse.
	Other bad impulses, they don't have to be short-term or immediate.
	So bad impulses could be, whenever I'm tense, whenever I'm stressed, I am going to eat potato chips and dip and chocolate and so on.
	So I have an impulse to do something like that.
	So whenever I feel down, whenever I feel low self-esteem, I'm going to go and Sleep with someone.
	Have sex with someone.
	Those would be examples of not great ways of dealing with those issues.
	Impulsivity can occur over a long period of time, but it's generally negative.
	So, I think that the important thing to remember is that we all start impulsive.
	That's the natural baby state of the species.
	We all start impulsive.
	A baby is uncomfortable, and it doesn't say, well, you know, my parents, I'm sure, are tired, so I'm going to let them have some sleep, and I'm sure I'll be fine in the morning, and so on.
	Babies experience discomfort and immediately voice it as loudly as they can, assuming that they're in the presence of competent caregivers and so on.
	Babies feel like the urge to crap, and by God, crap they do, to the point where it's pretty much like a Cape Canaveral liftoff.
	So these issues of impulsivity are perfectly natural and, in fact, perfectly healthy.
	The deferral of gratification is suicide for a baby.
	Babies need to eat every couple of hours, right?
	And if they defer that gratification, they can die, right?
	And so the deferral of gratification for babies is extremely dangerous.
	So, I mean, one thing you notice, of course, is that siblings tend to grab and hold on to whatever resources are around them, and this provokes, of course, significant conflicts and this, that, and the other.
	Well, that's, again, perfectly natural and perfectly healthy.
	It's important to remember that we, as a species, tended to have as many children as we could until having one more would cause everyone to starve.
	It's like that old Jerry Seinfeld bit about maximum Tylenol, maximum strength.
	It's like, whatever would kill me, just bring it back a little bit.
	And then that's called maximum.
	And that is the case with breeding.
	You have as many kids until one more will cause you all to starve.
	And given that...
	Most animals have as many species, particularly mammals who breastfeed, most animals have as many kids as they can possibly have without everyone dying.
	So understanding that, I think, helps us to understand that The deferral of gratification and putting your own needs last and supporting others and so on for siblings was not, I guess we could say, an optimum survival strategy.
	Oh, no, no.
	You eat first.
	Put a plate of cookies in front of a bunch of three or four-year-olds and they all just dive in and grab, right?
	And that's perfectly natural and Perfectly healthy, as we can see from the fact that half of Americans are diabetic or pre-diabetic, our body has not quite gotten round to figuring out that we are in a situation of significant excess these days.
	So that impulsivity to grab and to go for the immediate benefit rather than The longer-term benefit is how we're all born, and so the question isn't, why am I impulsive?
	The question is, why am I still impulsive?
	In other words, why have I not layered on the post-monkey beta buggy-as-hell expansion pack over the reptile grab-and-eat-and-keep?
	Once it's in my belly, the debate is over.
	Why are you still impulsive?
	Well...
	When it comes to resources, in general, kids want to grab and take and keep.
	When it comes to fun, then assuming...
	Remember, most children didn't exactly grow up with Chuck E. Cheese and Sky Zone and Playdium and stuff like that.
	There's no structured entertainment.
	So kids, basically, when they wanted to play, they all gathered together in a field or in a jungle and Or on a beach, and they had to figure out their fun.
	And if they didn't find a way to, like with most kids' games, the more players, the more fun.
	And so you have to find a way that games work for everyone.
	And so you have to negotiate.
	You have to find win-win situations and you have to say, okay, let's do something of what I want and then something in return.
	You do what I want.
	In return, I'll do what you want.
	We have to learn that sort of reception.
	So everybody wants to be in charge and everybody wants to have everything his or her own way as a child.
	That's perfectly natural.
	And everybody grabs sort of food and perhaps even parental attention where it is beneficial in the moment to grab more.
	Kids would try to do that, which is why there's a lot of conflict over resources that are finite.
	However, with unstructured play in the wilderness, right, in the outside, let's say, where it's not an Xbox and it's not some structured adult environment and so on, unstructured play in the outdoors is one of the most significant activities unstructured play in the outdoors is one of the most significant activities that develops empathy in children because the way that you win with unstructured outdoor play is, as I said, to get everyone involved, to get everyone on board, to find things that work
	I remember as a kid, I was in a bike gang and we were 12-year-old tough guys.
	I remember sitting out back of a mall, the Don Mills Mall, for hours trying to figure out what was going to be the name Of our bike gang.
	And honestly, I can't even remember what it was.
	But I do remember very vividly the process of negotiation.
	Now, we were all broke, all of us kids.
	We had no money.
	Our parents had no money.
	There was nothing to do.
	Every now and then, you'd scrounge up a couple of quarters and go to the bowling alley to play galaga and defenders.
	Defenders, pretty much the same as getting a bag full of bees and putting them over your head and then running in place with honey up your nose.
	But...
	A defender, actually a defender.
	But we all had to figure out what we wanted to do and we all had to negotiate about what we wanted to do.
	Free play in nature, unstructured play in nature, is one of the great counterbalances to the impulsivity and, quote, selfishness of early childhood.
	So my question would be to you, Did you engage in a lot of unstructured play in nature when you were a child?
	Because if you did, the impulse is for you or me or Bob or Sally to be in charge.
	That's our impulse.
	And what countervails or pushes back against that impulse is needing lots of people to participate in your games for them to be fun.
	You know, capture the flag with two people.
	Not a lot of fun.
	So the more people you need, the more you have to defer the gratification of being in charge to the point where things become more inclusive.
	I was going to say inclusory, but I don't think that's really a word.
	Things become more inclusive.
	So all of that is one of the reasons why impulsivity may have continued.
	And it's sort of a process I'm working on with my daughter at the moment that she wants to do things, but I also now am bringing my own needs to the table, things that I want to do, and we have to negotiate, because if I simply defer my preferences, then she's not going to grow up learning how to balance impulsivity with the deferral of gratification.
	Because you are amply rewarded for the deferral of gratification in unstructured outdoor play.
	Because then you get more kids to participate and it's more fun and so on.
	So not being in charge of negotiation gives you a much better outcome than being in charge.
	And it only really seems to happen with unstructured outdoor play.
	It doesn't usually seem to happen in other areas, which is why that is so...
	As one Maclean's writer put it, the glorious anarchy of childhood is so important and so diminishing.
	So have you learned that?
	Now, video games and screen time are not very good at teaching you to defer gratification.
	There's usually not like a marshmallow test in video games.
	You know the marshmallow test.
	It's been going on forever.
	Where a researcher puts...
	A marshmallow in front of a kid, a toddler, and says, you can have it.
	This marshmallow now, but in 15 minutes you get two.
	And those kids who are able to wait the 15 minutes to get two, in other words, deferral of gratification for the sake of greater gains, they do a lot better in life.
	Because a lot of life success is around the deferral of gratification.
	I did not want to get up early on Saturdays to do a paper route and on Sundays to go work in a bookstore.
	I did not want to clean offices at night.
	I did not want to have all the junky jobs that I had when I was a teenager.
	But, you know, I think they served me well in the long run.
	So, video games don't really help you defer gratification.
	Not a lot of video games where it's like, forego this weapon to get a more powerful weapon later.
	There's a little bit of that, like I think about the...
	The point system in Skyrim, where if you hoard your points, you can get more skills later and so on.
	It's very rare, and it's not usually a huge part of the game.
	So video games, screen time as a whole, is not good at teaching you the deferral of gratification.
	And one of the problems, of course, and the reason I'm talking about this is the APA, I think it's the American...
	Pediatrics Society Association recently released a report that said, on average, children are getting seven hours of screen time a day.
	A day!
	That's mad!
	I'm actually shocked.
	And think of everything that that's pushing aside, right?
	It's pushing aside conversation, although you can, of course, have limited and structured conversations in, like, say, TeamSpeak and Counter-Strike or something like that, but unstructured conversations, which generally become more philosophical, are pretty much off the radar completely when you're playing games or watching movies.
	You might talk about the movie, but that's, again, not the same as an unstructured conversation.
	Open-ended conversation.
	And reading, of course, is the big problem.
	So the guy who wrote in said, well, my parents wouldn't allow me to have a TV in my bedroom, but that promoted reading before bed, which I'm still very happy about.
	Yeah, when you read people who are good writers, and certainly when I was a kid, you didn't generally get published unless you had some skill as a writer.
	There weren't blogs or anything.
	When you read good writers, you're training your brain in good language.
	More so than, you know, just watching a good pianist.
	It doesn't make you a pianist.
	But if you read a lot, and of course if you write a lot, that hugely helps comprehension.
	And reading and writing comprehension is pretty bad these days.
	Chris Hedges has done, he quotes a study in one of his books which talks about, you know, you used to get presidential speeches at grade 10 education, then grade 8, then grade 6.
	I think we're certain around grade 5 and grade 6 at the moment.
	Reading comprehension is something that is just terrible these days.
	And part of it is just terrible schools, of course, but part of it is also that we all know that reading is better for us than a video game.
	But video games are easier, more attractive, more compelling, more immersive, more distracting.
	And so people, you know, kids in particular, gravitate towards screen time.
	And, you know, busy, harried, indifferent or neglectful parents, obviously they're not doing a huge amount to interfere with that.
	And I remember seeing one Supernanny where there was a, like a two or three year old kid, I gotta kill this frog!
	And he was so tense and so angry, and it was just way too much.
	And video games, of course, are not about negotiation, usually about destruction.
	There's some strategy involved, you know, which spell, which wand, which gun should I use?
	But generally, they're certainly not around negotiation.
	And so as a result, you are learning a lot about fast-twitch muscle responses and manipulating structure and rules within particular RPG games, but you're not learning how to negotiate, and you're not...
	Like, you can say to your friends, you want to play Battlefield 4, but that's not the same as saying, what do you want to play, and finding a game that works for everyone.
	And of course online you just find other people who like Battlefield 4 and you play that.
	Or Halo or whatever.
	You don't have to negotiate.
	So things are vastly different now and I think a lot has occurred that is not helping children to learn the value of the deferral of gratification which really is the opposing counterweight to the inbred and inborn impulse of gratification.
	So as a whole I would ask a couple of questions.
	So did I have a lot of unstructured free play outside in nature with other children?
	Used to be the norm for children and really that was the counterbalance, which is why kids are so driven to play because play teaches you the deferral of gratification when it's unstructured in nature and so on.
	So that's the counterweight.
	That's how children are civilized through play.
	They learn empathy and negotiation through play.
	I mean, one of the reasons why I think I'm not doing too bad in the old empathy meter is because of my history of Unstructured play, blah, blah, blah.
	So did I have that.
	Was my father around?
	Fathers are essential for the growth of empathy for reasons we've been into before.
	I don't really want to go through it all again.
	It was my father around.
	And again, it's not like empathy is the complete antonym for impulsivity, but in terms of impulsivity, which is destructive to your long-term interests, it means you don't actually have empathy for your future self, which is a significant problem.
	All self-destructive behavior arises out of a lack of empathy for your future self.
	Your future self doesn't want diabetes.
	Your current self wants a candy bar.
	And your future self wants mobility and strength.
	Your current self doesn't want to exercise, right?
	So we balance the needs of your current self.
	You can't defer all gratification so you'll be healthy in your old age, but we balance, right?
	Empathy is about balance, not win-lose.
	It's win-win.
	I want to win some of the present without destroying things in the future.
	So did you have free play?
	Did you have a father around?
	And did your parent or parents, did they model the deferral of gratification?
	It's very important for me, if my daughter says, would you like something, if she's eating something sweet, if I don't feel like it, I'll say, no, thanks, maybe later.
	Or, you know, I don't like lollipops, if she has a lollipop, no thanks, I don't want it, maybe I'll have some later.
	So you've got to model the deferral of gratification.
	So that kids can see it.
	So I think these things, you know, why am I impulsive?
	I would look in those areas.
	You understand it's not any kind of definitive answer, but these are areas, I think, where the first suspect sweep should be coordinated.
	And from there, you can, of course, begin to ask yourself the question, which is, Well, how do I change that?
	Well, that's perhaps a topic for another time.
	But in terms of why you are, these would be the first places that I would look.
	And thank you again so much for your question, as always.
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