Temptation bundling is the idea that in order to motivate you to do something you would like to do more, bundle it with something you would like to do less so you only ever do the two together.
The thing you would like to do more it typically something you want to do “tomorrow” or will be happy you did “yesterday,” but is very hard to get started doing “today.” The prototypical example is exercising or doing chores.
The thing you would like to do less it typically something that is easier to do “now” and something you might regret “tomorrow.” The prototypical example is binging dumb series.
So, temptation bundling is only doing the thing you want to do less when you do the thing you want to do more. The idea is that the allure of the guilty pleasure helps motivating you to do the more healthy thing, while bundling the two sets limitations on the waste of time. Thus, you should be able to do the thing you’d like to do more and the thing you want to less less, and even if you fail one of the goals, you’d only be doing better on the other goal. Really, it’s just about only watching dumb TV when you exercise.
I’m fairly certain I first heard of it on this podcast, but cannot find the episode, and I’m not going to link the podcast I can find it on because they got annoying. You can find it, I trust you. All the annoying click-bait lifehack blogs have listicles about it too, but “exercising while watching netflix” is literally all there is to it. The science backing it up was a bit lacking last I checked, but it intuitively seems like it could work.
Anyway, this post is all just framing for flexing that my spinning today expanded to 2 hours because I wanted to see how Camp Star going up against Camp Rock would end.
