Avoid Temptation & Do the Deep Work

Conflict between the desire of immediate temptation and long-term goals consume our thoughts for forty-percent of each day. That’s almost half your day in a mental tug-o-war between what you want right now and what you want for the future. You can use that mental energy in better ways.

Let’s break it down.

Desire and emotions have a complex relationship. While desire is not an emotion, desire does arise from emotion, and vice-versa.

Happiness, comfort and security align when we get what we want. Depression, anger and sadness when we don’t. As with emotion, a broad range of desire is experienced in everyday life and how we respond is the same as other behaviors, driven by moment-to-moment decisions. 

Emotion can trigger multiple ways to reach a different state of being. Any object of desire would do, a purchase or a sensory pleasure like sweets or substances, just to reach the optimal emotional state. 

Desire is different, a step above emotion, it is obsessed over a specific object of desire, rather than a state of being because desire knows what it wants in order to reach the optimal emotional state. What can make desire troublesome is the path taken to obtain what you want.

Here’s a mild example. Consider being tired and wanting coffee. Tired is the emotional trigger, assuming you don’t want to be in that state, and there are multiple ways to get from being tired to having energy. But you desire coffee. It is the one object you want that you are willing to wait in line at Starbucks for fifteen minutes to get it, even though faster and cheaper alternatives exist. 

What’s happening here?

There is a craving, the emotional connection to what we want takes hold, and old neural pathways are triggered. This increases your desire. A multisensory simulation of you experiencing or consuming the object of desire plays on this big screen in our mind, like in a movie theater, and you are the observer. The taste, texture, appearance and emotional satisfaction are experienced as if they are real.  

Thoughts about what is strongly desired replay over-and-over in the mind and compete with other wants. Take the coffee example, you wait in the Starbucks line for fifteen minutes even though it causes you to be late for work, where you desire to be reliable, and keep your job. Your coffee desire can also compete with future plans to save discretionary money for a trip next summer. Hence the conflict between immediate temptation and future goals.

Now that we have a grasp on the intersections of emotions and desires, let’s go down the rabbit hole, literally, on how desire takes hold and influences our thoughts and decisions.

Desire turns from a want to need based on the number of times you repeat the same narrative in your mind. Elaborating on the desire by creating longer storylines increases the amount of visuals you are served about your desire, further strengthening the urge. Even more so when a social component is incorporated by including other people in the story. 

Strengthening can be associated with positive and negative desires. Have you ever heard someone mention they are obsessed with working out or running? They are actually thinking about these activities frequently when they are not doing them, in turn, reinforcing the neural pathways towards a specific desire and outcome because visualizing what you want increases expectations of transformation.

Which leads me to the next concept, if you’re not doing something, you’re thinking about doing something. 

Desire and rumination require space in your mind to create the narrative. Engaging in a task that captivates your attention uses up the available mental resources and reduces temptation. The caveat is that what you do needs to take up a large amount of working memory; information-heavy, conceptual tasks where there is less time for the mind to wander. Folding laundry isn’t going to be a task that reduces visualization because your mind goes on autopilot since cognitive resources aren’t needed. 

Boredom from not engaging in an activity or task that is exciting results in an unconscious search for dopamine, driving a desire to fill your time in a different way. That’s to say, it’s not necessarily that you need to blow off steam afterwork from stress, it could be that your work is mundane and the mind is searching for something to create excitement. 

It works both ways. Desire disrupts your thoughts when cravings are high. When you’re on a restricted diet, or fasting, and food is readily available, as in most modern societies, the craving can disrupt your ability to perform tasks. Consider you’re working in an office and your coworker brings in donuts and sets them on the table behind your desk. You’re going to be thinking about those donuts repeatedly.

Alright, what can you do to get your mind back on track and in the present moment?

In this case, resistance really is futile. Attempts to suppress your imagination around the desire can be counterproductive and create an even stronger urge, as well as increase your behavior. Consider you’re a smoker and you are at work for two hours and have suppressed the desire for a cigarette. On break you may be tempted to smoke two, an increase in behavior, since you anticipate the time between now and your next cigarette will be just as long if not longer.

All that to say, you’re not screwed, you’re still in control.  

We started here with the components of desire in order to understand them and use them to exploit the benefits. A way to workaround your desire is to redirect it. When a dam breaks you don’t try to plug it, you create a new path for the water to take. These paths are going to be new neural pathways. 

Let’s start paving.

Visualization, in either direction, towards positive or negative desires, maps your internal energy into that state of being. Aligning your focus with the benefits of a positive desire rather than the consequences of a negative desire will aid in directing your energy into creating the outcome you want. 

Consider a horror film; you know that it’s not real, that the characters and situations are fake, but it still leaves you anxious and fearful while you’re watching, because the mind does not distinguish between reality and fantasy. There are limits to this, the subconscious knows when it is being lied to. But, similar to how we view the stories we create in our mind, you, the observer, cannot watch and logically discern between what is real and fake in order to control your emotional response. To use this when creating what you desire, the story should elaborate on the positive, productive elements rather than destroying what’s counterproductive because your mind can’t tell the difference between what you want to and what you don’t want to happen. 

Recall, these visualizations play on a big screen in our mind. It may be easy or hard to acknowledge but you are also the director. It is within your control to project a new picture onto the screen and narrate new desires, and a new future for yourself. 

Imagining a better future comes naturally to us, we all want that for ourselves. Desires can ruminate for months or years without fulfillment, rising to our attention when we are bored or when something reminds us of the story we want to live. Where we get caught up is how to get from where we are to where we want to be, the distance between the two seems daunting and too far off, and our assumption of how we’ll feel in the future is biased by how we feel right now. 

The key to visualizing a future desire and acting on that desire in the present is to reinforce the short-term reward of the steps you take to get there over the long-term benefits of acquiring what you want.

Habit formation is no easy task, our mind is on autopilot, like Netflix, simply playing the next episode, until we take the remote and change the show. Approaching the story and how you see with awareness supports discernment and provides the space to redirect what is being projected. 

Thank goodness for modern technology. Schedule time each day and set a reminder through the alarm on your phone to repeat the narrative you want to live. As the director you call the shots, you say when to act. Sync up a home practice of visualization to a routine task, such as watching your ‘story’ while taking the dog for a walk or taking a shower. That’s what I call a two-for-one. Take it one desire, craving, or outcome at a time to maintain focus and direct visualization efforts. Over time, with consistent practice, this will become easier and second nature.

As you begin this practice of visualization you may notice old narratives creeping in. To strengthen discernment between conflicting desires, you’ll want to incorporate strategies to enhance your awareness in addition to visualization which will help you practice noticing and interrupting these old thought and behavior patterns. 

Meditation gets a lot of air time for its ability to enhance awareness and bring mindful attention to the narratives playing in your mind. But it can also increase emotional responsiveness to what is seen without an immediate outlet to process it. Meditation is a wonderful practice, though I wouldn’t start there as a newbie because it’s all in the head. Strategies that enhance awareness of physical sensations and responses, such as body scanning from Yoga Nidra (also NSDR) helps block fantasy imagery, because you are focusing the mind on the body, on something tangible and rooted in reality, and not solely on the ‘screen’. A very grounding practice. Body scanning gives you the space to explore the sensations as they arise, the opportunity for curiosity, and time to describe, mentally, what you are feeling. Once you have a hold on your emotional triggers, and where they come from, you can move into a meditation practice of directing and focusing narratives as they flow in and out of your imagination.

As you practice different forms of mindfulness training you’ll understand on a practical level that, as discussed, you are the director creating the story and you are the observer in the audience. A key element of visualization is to play the narrative like an advertisement where you are the main character, so you are also viewing a story about yourself. This is a very Jungian approach to mindfulness. As the conscious observer, removing yourself from the narrative allows you to see it objectively, without the influence of emotions, as well as gives you a broader perspective to all the different approaches or narratives available to you, not only the ones you have been conditioned to over time.

Now here’s the cherry on top.

With a consistent practice of connecting to the center of your being, you may come to realize over time that every longing or craving we experience is, in essence, a deep-seated desire for union with the divine or the ultimate reality, even if we aren’t consciously aware of it. 

Desires are characterized by a sense of incompleteness. We seek fulfillment in various ways—through relationships, success, material possessions, or sensory pleasures—but these pursuits often leave us feeling unsatisfied in the long run, we still feel incomplete. 

Desires reinforce sleeping in a fantasy out of fear of waking to reality. For example, the pursuit of wealth or status is sometimes an attempt to find security, significance, or love—qualities that spiritual traditions argue are truly found in the divine. Our finite desires are reflections of a deeper, infinite longing that can only be fulfilled by something transcendent.

From this perspective, God or the divine is seen as the ultimate source of all goodness, truth, beauty, and love. Our desire for these qualities in the world is ultimately a desire for the source itself.

Mindfulness and other spiritually-based practices transform our desires, redirecting them toward the divine. The more you practice mindfulness, the deeper you go, until you find the source of the divine that lives within each one of us. That is why we practice. To find and connect to the divine within and remove the need for external fulfillment.

The Psychology of Desire, edited by Wilhelm Hofmann, and Loran F. Nordgren, Guilford Publications, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/asulib-ebooks/detail.action?docID=2051155.
Created from asulib-ebooks on 2024-09-05 16:35:25.

Papies, E. K. (2020). The Psychology of Desire and Implications for Healthy Hydration. Annals of Nutrition and Metabolism, 76(Suppl 1), 31–36. https://doi.org/10.1159/000515025

Richins, M. L., & Balducci, B. (2021). Visualization ability and the elaborations that sustain product desire. Psychology & Marketing, 38(9), 1591–1607. https://doi.org/10.1002/mar.21516

© 2025 Tara Hansen, LLC