Why It Works

You have 2 selves at war.

We call them the impulsive self and the disciplined self. They can be called lots of things:

• Id and Superego (Freud)
• Thinking fast and slow (behavioral economists)
• Amygdala and Prefrontal cortex (brain anatomists)
• Hot thinking and cold thinking (self-control experts)
• Feeling brain and thinking brain (addiction experts)

No matter what you call them, the goal is to let your thinking brain do your thinking. The waiting period helps with this. When an immediate reward is delayed, it is more easily resisted in exchange for a larger but further away reward. This is called hyperbolic discounting. With addictive substances, the small-but-soon reward is a pleasure hit, and the larger reward is freedom from compulsion.

Bottom line: What is convenient is much harder to resist. This is why grocery stores put candy in the checkout aisle. This is why Starbucks and McDonald's have drive-throughs.

We can use this to our advantage by making the things we want-but-don’t-want inconvenient. This is why the Plucky motto is: Hooray for inconvenience! It’s like freezing your credit card in a block of ice so you won’t make impulse purchases.

Odysseus knew this. To resist the Sirens, he had his men tie him to the mast of the ship before he heard them. Self-control experts call strategies like Plucky “hands-tying devices." Basically, you set your boundaries ahead of time. You limit your choices when you are clear-headed so that you can’t fall into temptation in the heat of the moment.