Maybe it’s a new way of looking at something similar we’ve all heard about before, but have you ever considered using delayed discounting when making dietary changes? It may help us to develop a new view of food.
Delayed discounting is a process that’s sometimes used in addiction treatment. It refers to the tendency to value immediate rewards more highly than future ones – for example, that impulsive urge to eat bad food when you know you shouldn’t. Essentially, you learn to swap the opportunity for immediate gratification for the chance of developing the body of a Greek God, along with all the adoration and potential health benefits that go with it.
In professional treatment, the aim is to shift the preference for immediate gratification by increasing the perceived value of future rewards. Techniques such as contingency management, cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT), and motivational interviewing are employed to encourage healthier choices.
An interesting aspect of all this is that the brain’s reward system is kind of turned back on itself. Treatments target this system to reduce impulsivity and improve decision-making processes.
Although it may not work for everyone, raising awareness about the long-term consequences of choices can motivate individuals to delay gratification and opt for more sustainable outcomes and enhanced life choices.
Well, that’s the theory anyway, and logically, it makes sense. For those who are heavily addicted to substances like alcohol, some counsellors might liken the approach to “channelling the committee meeting in the head.” It’s a reference to the continuous mental ‘noise’ or ‘head talk’ that recovering addicts (once they admit the problem) constantly work to overcome, especially in the early stages of recovery.
Learning to think more about specific events in the future appears to reduce impulsivity, improve decision-making, and shows potential as a therapy for alcohol use disorder, a new Virginia Tech study found.
The study, which involved 24 participants whose brains were scanned during both resting-state and task-based fMRI, showed brain connections were altered by future thinking.
The research, published recently in the journal Brain Connectivity, was among the last led by the late Warren Bickel, professor and director of the Addiction Recovery Research Center at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC.
Bickel, who died of cancer last September, was a leading researcher in the field of using “episodic future thinking” – the capacity to vividly imagine events that might happen in your future – to address addiction.
The findings easily relate to food use (or abuse) because they involve breaking a pattern of thinking, which, with practice, leads to better food decisions and the establishment of new pathways in the brain. The Brain Docs, Dean and Ayesha Sherzai have previously referred to the development of new neural pathways, a fact that has been proven with fMRI – functional magnetic imaging resonance.
“What we were trying to understand was how episodic future thinking works as a kind of therapeutic approach,” said Stephen LaConte, professor and corresponding author of the recently released paper. “What we found is that training people to think more about their future changed the extent to which they value immediate rewards over those in the future, and we’re seeing related changes in connectivity in key regions of the brain along with that.”
The Fralin Biomedical Research Institute study is the first in which participants practised imagining specific, personal future events in the lab before returning to those thoughts during an MRI brain scan to identify brain activity changes.
For example, a subject might think, “In one year, I will be opening my first art gallery in Los Angeles,” along with details of the sights, sounds, and feelings of the gallery opening.
Alcohol use disorder is characterised in part by an impaired ability to think clearly about the future and a tendency toward impulsive decision-making. The phenomenon is called delay discounting, or valuing delayed rewards less than immediate ones.
Previous studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of episodic future thinking in reducing delay discounting and promoting making healthier choices, and it’s emerging as a potential behavioural intervention for substance use disorders.
“We found that in the delayed discounting tasks, people who had this higher functional connectivity actually were able to perform the hard tasks more quickly,” said LaConte, who is also interim co-director of the Addiction Recovery Research Center. “What that means is that either the episodic future thinking is making the tasks easier, or it’s freeing up some brain resources and temporarily changing their delay discounting. We don’t yet know which.”
The study provides a baseline for future research, said Jeremy Myslowski, the paper’s first author.
“We see this as a fruitful opportunity to examine potential changes in brain connectivity by collecting data both before and after the intervention,” said Myslowski, a doctoral candidate in LaConte’s lab when he worked on the study.
He has since graduated. “And when we move into performing work with a real-world alcohol consumption component, we have something tangible in the brain data to point to.”
Further research is needed to determine how long-lasting the behavioural and connectivity changes are.
