Desire Management

Desire management can be framed as a conflict between immediate desires (e.g., tasty food, alcoholic drinks, sexual interactions) and self-control goals and values (e.g., maintaining one’s weight, not driving drunk, staying faithful). Such conflicts arguably make up a great deal of self-control situations in everyday life. The price of poor desire management can be enormous. Public health statistics show that 40 percent of deaths in the U.S. each year are associated with unhealthy behaviors, such as unhealthy food, smoking, alcohol, unprotected sex, and illicit drugs.

What is desire? Desire can be defined as a positive emotion (motivation) toward a certain object, person, or activity. Desires vary in strength and consequently in their ability to motivate behavior. Whether people will give in to the desire at any given time depends on two things: the strength of the desire and the ability (strength) of the self to resist the urge. When a desire becomes stronger, the self probably needs to muster up greater self-control powers to overcome the urge to act. However, in the absence of desire, there is no need for self-control. The strength of desires may not be the same for everyone. People with low self-control are more vulnerable to failure.

How does desire emerge? In general, desire originates in a relatively automatic manner as the brain reward systems evaluate external incentives (stimuli) against the background of internal need states (e.g., hunger, craving, or feeling lonely) and an individual’s learning history. As the desire gains access to working memory, the person becomes conscious. The more attention a person allocates to a rewarding stimulus (a high-caloric food), the more likely he will be to experience a subjective feeling of desire. Moreover, the stronger desires typically lead to more distorted thinking (e.g., I have not had a drink for a while; this is going to be my last treat, and then I’ll start my diet!). In the extreme cases, desire may overwhelm working memory that crowds out all other alternative goals.

How problematic desires can be regulated? The following describes a few evidence-based strategies to manage desire.

Situation selection. Situation selection refers to avoiding certain places or activities to limit one’s exposure to temptations. Proximity can increase the strength of desire for goods (a piece of a cake for a dieter). Relapses are frequently triggered by environmental cues (e.g., watching others drinking alcohol).

Attention. Attention is a way of giving priority to information. In this strategy, people seek to direct their attention away from stimuli that give rise to unwanted desire. By diverting attention elsewhere, one may prevent full processing of the emotional aspects of a tempting stimulus and reduce the emotional impact.

Thought suppression. Thought suppression refers to the deliberate act of trying to force the unwanted information out of your awareness. Thought suppression is also a form of denial, which is the process of consciously trying to avoid certain thoughts. However, this is not an easy task. Like trying to sink a cork in water, the issue won’t go away. In a classic experiment, when the subjects were asked not to think about a white bear for a few minutes, they failed to suppress their thought about a white bear. The white bear doesn’t go away. It keeps intruding into your thought, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as a rebound effect. What we resist persists. For example, trying not to think of a cupcake makes you desire for it more.

Acceptance. Accepting desires and craving as temporary states instead of trying to suppress them may make it easier for people to disengage from the unwanted desire. The key is not to make effort to suppress your thought, just move on, and your thought will naturally move to other things. If you truly wanted to stop thinking of a white bear, you would be better off allowing yourself to think of one and then after a while, the thought would naturally go away.

Cognitive reframing. People can use strategies that modify how they view (value) tempting stimuli. Engaging in an abstract rather than concrete mindset appears to take the edge of temptation. For instance, in On Desire: Why We Want What We Want, William Irvine (2006) relates advice provided by a Buddhist monk on how to deal with tantalizing sexual desire by thinking about the human body in less favorable terms: “Don’t think about her full breasts and flaxen hair; think instead about her lungs ,… phlegm, pus, spittle.” (p187). By changing the focus you tip the balance away from the hot emotion to cold cognition (e.g., focus on the negative side of the chocolate cake—calories). You can attribute negative qualities and consequences to every temptation to offset its enticing features.

In sum, effective desire regulation can take place at various phases from exposure to desire, attention allocation to reappraisal, that prevent a desire from becoming overly dominant.