And hello to you and welcome to the Richard Nichols podcast, the Personal Development

podcast series that's here to help inspire, educate and motivate you to be the best you

can be. I'm psychotherapist Richard Nichols and this is episode 188. It's titled Impulse Control.

And if you're ready, we'll start the show.

Hey there, pod fans. How's it hanging? We're over the hill, folks. Of 2020, anyway. It's August.

What a right off this year has been, eh? I can't believe... I can't believe I stopped up on New Year's Eve to welcome it in. I wouldn't have bothered if I'd known it was going to turn out this way. But hey, we're getting there. We're getting there. We're localising the lockdowns if there are any sort of regional spikes in COVID cases.

So hopefully we can all play our part, wear our masks and not spoil it by going out too much.

I find it odd that if we come back from Spain, we're not allowed to then leave the house for two weeks,

but we're allowed to go to a crowded restaurant and I've actually been encouraged to do so by the government to eat out to help out, because

the economy is so important, and giving us half-priced government subsidised meals. Amazing!

And I think the reason it feels so conflicting is because we're being trusted to not take the Mick. But it's

hard not to, for some people. I know the half-price thing is captured a tenor, but there's

nothing stopping us from having a half-price starter in one restaurant, half-price main course in

another, half-price dessert at third restaurant, half-price main course in another, half-price

dessert at third place, every Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday throughout the whole of August.

Or we could just wait.

Just because the options there doesn't mean we have to take it.

And that's something I want to talk about today and how it relates to impulse control.

I was chatting with somebody about controlling impulses recently because they'd never heard about the famous

Stanford marshmallow experiments. And it's too easy for me to think that everyone must know about

Walter Mitchell's old marshmallow experiment because it's so famous, but that's probably just my frame of reference.

It's an experiment that doesn't work too well anymore because society has changed a little bit,

...