The things you'd never admit to enjoying—those little guilty pleasures—might be doing more for you psychologically than you realize.
Guilty pleasures are psychologically distinct from addiction. They're intentional, controlled, and private.The real emotion behind a guilty pleasure isn't guilt at all. It's the embarrassment of being seen.
In a culture that optimizes everything, your guilty pleasure might be the last thing that's uniquely yours.Don't worry. It's nothing dangerous, nothing illegal, nothing that would make national headlines. But I'm still not going to tell you what it is. Not here, and probably not ever.what I'm talking about—that thing you do on a consistent rhythm, maybe daily, maybe weekly, that you would never bring up at a work dinner. The thing you'd only tell a close friend after lowering your voice, glancing around, and prefacing it withMost of us have one. And the psychology behind why we have them, why we hide them, and why we might desperately need them is far more interesting than I ever expected.I first heard the phrase"guilty pleasure" when I was 10 years old. My friend Bryan and I walked home from school early to play video games. Bryan's mom, Sharon, was like a second mom to me. Her kitchen was an open headquarters for every stray kid in the neighborhood. That afternoon we opened the front door and found Sharon sitting alone at the kitchen table, a See's Candy bon-bon halfway to her mouth.A grown, responsible woman in her kitchen, eating a piece of candy she'd bought with her own money on a perfectly ordinary afternoon. She shrugged and said,"You caught me.I didn't understand it then, but something about the moment stuck with me for decades. Why did Sharon feel caught? What was she guilty of doing? Why did she feel like she owed two kids an explanation for enjoying a treat in her own home?These questions came rushing back recently, over drinks after a guest lecture I gave at Columbia Business School. I was talking with Michel Tuan Pham, one of the most cited consumer psychologists in the world, and the founder of Columbia's Research on Emotions and Decisions lab. He told me that he and doctoral researcher Jingxuan Liu were building a formal theory of guilty pleasures. Then he started explaining what they'd found, and the conversation went somewhere I wasn't prepared for., which is defined by loss of control. It's distinct from regular indulgence, which doesn't carry emotional conflict. A guilty pleasure is something more nuanced: it's an experience in which you're enjoying something and, at the same time,I immediately thought about Sharon. The See's Candy, the blush. But now it started to make sense: Pham and Liu's research shows that guilty pleasures are marked by a kind of. They almost always happen at specific times, in specific places, usually alone. They involve hiding, selective sharing, and some internal negotiation:Even though it's never just today; it's every Tuesday, every night at nine, every Friday when the week is finally over. That rhythm matters. It's part of what separates a guilty pleasure from a real problem. Pham's and Liu's framework draws the line clearly: Guilty pleasures are intentional violations. They're fairly innocuous, and they're under your control. You can stop, but you choose not to—for now. Addiction is when that choice disappears. Sharon could put that bon-bon down, but an addiction wouldn't let her., giving person who puts everyone else first. The guilty pleasure was in Sharon getting to be just a person who wanted something for no reason at all. Turns out, in guilty pleasures, your identity is tied to the values being violated, not to the source of pleasure. You're never ashamed about the thing itself. You're embarrassed because enjoying it contradicts the story you've been telling yourself about who you are.After the conversation with Pham, I went home and started reading more widely. The research got weirder. A research team led by behavioral scientist Kelly Goldsmith discovered that guilt amplifies pleasure instead of diminishing it. That's right:Across their experiments, people primed to feel guilty reported greater enjoyment of indulgent experiences—from chocolate to videos to romantic escapades.them to feel disgust or sadness did nothing. The effect was unique to guilt. The explanation? We've heard"guilty pleasures" so many times that our brains have fused the two into one circuit. Activate guilt, and pleasure lights up alongside it. They travel together.mantra to"stop feeling guilty about your guilty pleasures" might have it totally backwards. Strip that guilt away and you might lose the mojo that makes the whole thing work.Guilty pleasures ask something strange of us psychologically. They require us to hold two contradictory feelings at once—enjoyment and self-judgment—and not resolve the tension. Psychologists call this, and we're generally pretty terrible at it. We crave clarity. We want to know whether something is good or bad, worth our time or a waste of it. A guilty pleasure refuses to be one or the other. And staying in that discomfort, enjoying something without being able to justify it, is actually a marker of psychological flexibility. It means your identity isn't so rigid that it shatters the moment you do something off-brand. That matters in a culture obsessed with self-curation, where every choice is supposed to cohere into some polished narrative about who we are. Your guilty pleasure is where that narrative cracks. And nobody is forcing the crack open, because we police these things entirely from within. The constraint is self-imposed. We are both the indulgerWe just refuse to give ourselves credit for it because it looks like stuffing chocolate in our faces at the kitchen table.I think about guilty pleasures differently now. Especially in this moment, when the world seems to be accelerating past our ability to keep up with it. When. That's the whole point. Guilty pleasures feel like the last corners of our lives that belong entirely to us, and they exist for no other reason than we are human beings who simplyI work with AI every day, and I teach my own MBA class on it. I can tell you: AI will never have a guilty pleasure. It will never blush over a bon-bon. It will never feel that private, ridiculous thrill of doing something completely pointless and loving every second of it.Your guilty pleasure probably has a rhythm to it—the same time, same place, same trigger. While we beat ourselves up over a lack of discipline, that's just your psychology doing exactly what it's supposed to do.Be selective about who gets to know and who doesn't. Part of what makes a guilty pleasure work is that it belongs to you. You certainly don't owe it to anyone as content, as conversation, or as a confession. But that means you can't let anyone, including yourself, talk you out of it, either. The things that can't be justified are often the things that hold us together.With thanks to Michel Tuan Pham and Jingxuan Liu at Columbia Business School, whose ongoing research on the psychology of guilty pleasures informed this piece.transitioned to business after earning his Ph.D. in psychology. He's held leadership roles at YouTube, Spotify, Instagram, and Bonobos and is currently serving as the CEO of The Human OS.Self Tests are all about you. Are you outgoing or introverted? Are you a narcissist? Does perfectionism hold you back? Find out the answers to these questions and more with Psychology Today.
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Cardinals Must Ignore Biggest Trade AssetThere's no reason why the Arizona Cardinals should move off this star — yet.
Read more »
Our personal standards of politeness and social discomfort when interacting with AI.Why do we feel compelled to be nice to artificial intelligence bots?
Read more »
The lack of evidence for extraterrestrials may say more about us than them.Why we might discover ETs by looking at ourselves more closely.
Read more »
Dan Campbell Responds to Taylor Decker Being GhostedDan Campbell expresses why he did not contract veteran Taylor Decker.
Read more »
The 'I Have Nothing to Wear' ParadoxWhy your full wardrobe is making you feel less stylish and more stressed
Read more »
Family, lawyers demand answers after 37-year-old man was found dead in patrol car outside Azusa police stationFamily and lawyers demanded police explain why Eric Valencia wasn’t found sooner and why a police patrol car was left unlocked.
Read more »