Ask someone if they’d rather take $5 today or $10 next week and they’ll know which option is better.
Author
- Amy Errmann
Senior Lecturer, Marketing & International Business, Auckland University of Technology
Yet that idea of “today” can have a magnetic pull. It’s precisely the reason many shoppers purchase things they can’t afford yet through ” buy now, pay later ” schemes – and often regret it afterwards .
We might put such unwise choices down to weak willpower or poor self-control.
But our new research suggests something else may be going on: it’s not that our brains undervalue the future, but that they hate waiting.
We have also found that mindfulness meditation – which can make time feel slower, the future more expansive and waiting less costly – might offer a potential solution.
Why our brains hate waiting
Our research centres on a psychological concept known as delayed gratification , which occurs when we choose a larger reward later over a smaller one today.
This might seem a simple trade-off. But every decision involves weighing two different resources: money and time. We judge not only what the future reward is worth, but also what the wait will cost us.
Unlike money, however, time isn’t always experienced consistently.
Research shows people treat it as a resource whose perceived value changes with circumstance. A week can feel insignificant when life seems spacious, yet painfully long when we’re already feeling time poor.
For decades, psychologists framed delayed gratification as a contest between our sensible future selves and our impulsive present selves. Stanford University’s famous marshmallow test reinforced that idea by turning waiting into a measure of self-control : disciplined children waited; impulsive children ate the treat.
But the marshmallow may have received too much credit. A 2024 study found that once children’s backgrounds were considered, how long they waited had little power to predict adult outcomes.
This suggests delayed gratification may also reflect other factors – such as how costly waiting feels in the first place.
One factor may be the way we experience time itself. Five minutes in a supermarket queue can feel endless, yet an hour of scrolling on our phones can zoom by .
Can mindfulness ‘change’ time?
In our research, we found that mindfulness – deliberately paying attention to the present, including breathing, bodily sensations, sounds and thoughts – appears to slow the subjective passage of time .
Other researchers similarly found that even a brief meditation session measurably slowed people’s sense of time passing.
As the present feels more expansive, people also tend to feel they have more time ahead of them, making the wait for a future reward seem less costly.
We tested this idea across six studies, using both laboratory experiments and choices with real consequences.
In one study, people attending a mindful walking class chose between a $5 gift card immediately and a $10 gift card one week later. Before the class, only 36% chose to wait. After the mindful walk, 69% selected the larger, later reward.
We found the same pattern in a bakery. Customers watched either a short mindful-eating video or an ordinary food video before choosing between a smaller coupon immediately and a larger coupon two weeks later.
After the mindfulness video, 78% waited for the larger coupon, compared with 51% in the other group.
In another study, people who watched the mindfulness video were more likely to choose US$30 in four months over US$20 immediately. Even though the task took the same amount of time, they perceived time as passing more slowly and felt they had more time ahead of them.
When we extended the waiting period from three months to six months, delayed choices fell in the control group but remained steady among mindful participants.
Yet mindfulness made no difference when we increased the size of the future reward. In other words, it changed people’s sensitivity to time, but not to the size of the reward.
The power of purposeful attention
The modern world, which enables us to shop, eat, watch and communicate almost instantly, constantly reinforces habits at direct odds with delayed gratification.
These conveniences are useful, but they can also make any delay feel like something has gone wrong. Mindfulness, however, can help counter that feeling of being perpetually time-poor.
Our findings suggest that purposeful attention can influence everyday choices where waiting pays off, from saving money and sticking with a long-term goal, to earning a larger loyalty reward or holding out for a better discount.
Of course, later doesn’t always mean better. A future reward may be uncertain , or circumstances may make waiting unrealistic.
But when the future reward is reasonably secure, patience may not require us to fight harder against the present. Sometimes, experiencing the present more fully can make the future easier to wait for.
