We’re going to go on a little journey to get to this quote. I’m a quote nerd, and for me the journey is as cool as the quote itself.
Freedom is thus not the opposite to determinism. Freedom is the individual’s capacity to know that he is the determined one,
to pause between stimulus and response
and thus to throw his weight, however slight it may be, on the side of one particular response among several possible ones.
— Rollo May, “Freedom and Responsibility Reexamined,”
from Behavioral Science and Guidance: Proposals and Perspectives, 1963
[Emphasis and line breaks added]
Ok, the above quote is not the quote. It’s the quote that would later inspire the quote. I like starting there, because it’s all in there. It just isn’t as punchy. It’s a lot to remember.
We’ll slowly work our way towards the quote, talking about what matters for you and working with food cravings: To pause between stimulus and response.
There are a lot of people talking about mindfulness and eating, and all of them have some element of pausing and checking in. What most of them are missing is a structured container for that practice.
One of the most powerful guidelines you can add into your practice is deceptively simple:
Pause 10 Minutes Before Snacking
This might be my greatest contribution to the field.1
There’s nothing else that’s both as simple and as powerful as, when you have a craving, setting a ten minute timer. Set that ten minute timer, and wait to decide whether or not you are eating the thing until after that 10 minute timer goes off.
Just putting a gap in between wanting and having makes a huge difference.
Our worst eating decisions are often fast, nearly so fast as to be mindless. Some people notice that it’s almost like they’re trying to eat the stuff before they have time to think.
I can relate to that.
If we make our eating decisions that quickly we’re almost always going to default to our current habits.
The simplest solution is to slow it down.
Man has the capacity for pause between stimulus and response — he may choose among alternatives in responding (May, 1963). This is the taproot of individual freedom.
— C. Harold McCully, paraphrasing and citing Rollo May,
Guidelines, 1967
That one is a lot punchier. Now we’re getting somewhere!
The same idea though: Let’s put a gap in between the craving and the eating.
During the Pause: Check in With Yourself
So, you set a ten minute timer. You’ve put a gap in between stimulus and response. What do you do with that time?
First, take a few minutes to check in with what’s going on inside. Get an internal “weather report.”
- Can you name the urge as an urge?
- Can you notice your thoughts as just thoughts?
- Can you name your emotions?
- Can you notice any bodily sensations?
Notice and name those things, first. Then see if you can just sit with them, without having to fix or change them for a minute or two.
The gap between stimulus and response is one important piece.
The ability to sit with what’s in that gap is the next important piece.
Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness.
— Rollo May, The Courage to Create, 1975
[Emphasis added]
May takes another swing at it. Still a little wordier than McCully, but I like it.
I like that May expands on choosing our response so far as to state that it’s how we crate ourselves. That our consciousness and self-awareness is creating ourselves with choice.
The fancy name for this is meta-cognition.
Another way of saying meta-cognition is “thinking about thinking.” Our ability to notice our own thoughts as thoughts, when we slow down and look at them. To critically examine them.
Then, being able to consider multiple options, and choose the option that best creates ourself.
During the Pause: Sit With What’s There
Your ability to sit with what’s there might be the most important missing piece in your eating behavior change or weight loss journey.
In contextual behavioral science, we distinguish between psychological rigidity and psychological flexibility:
- Psychological rigidity would be always having to eat whenever we have some kind of distress (cravings, emotions, tiredness, boredom).
- Psychological flexibility would be the ability to sit with that distress and make a variety of eating choices, including choices towards a fitness aim (like healthy eating, flexible eating, or reasonable eating) or choices towards a personal aim (like connection or savoring).
Practicing sitting with your cravings is essential, because it creates a psychological gap for you to be able to consider your personal values.
Psychological flexibility is responding to distress in ways that accelerate progress toward valued goals.
— Todd Kashdan, on his website:
https://toddkashdan.com/psychological-flexibility/ Captured 7/23/26
Todd Kashdan is one of my favorite researchers and I really like his explanation of psychological flexibility.
It doesn’t fit with the progression we have of May, McCully, and Covey quotes, but it speaks to an important piece that is missing: What psychological skills are required inside of that gap?
In particular, hitting on the fact that we typically think of distress as something that throws us off of our goal pursuit. Here, Kashdan specifically points to responding to distress in a way that accelerates progress towards valued goals. That’s pretty juicy, right!?
My most successful clients end up shifting their stress and cravings from signals to eat to signals to 1.) Pause for 10 minutes, 2.) Practice willingness to feel, and 3.) Take the action that best fits their values.
During the Pause: Create Yourself
In contextual behavioral science, we “create ourselves” with values based choices.
- We choose our personal values about eating
- We outline what those choices look like in eating choices
- We “create ourself” by repeatedly taking the values based choice in difficult eating situations
Again, you’ll notice that one of the biggest reasons we don’t do this because we’re simply going too quickly. There’s a distressing stimulus (cravings, emotions, tiredness, uncomfortable thoughts) and then we immediately eat to numb it out. Normally, we eat before we have time to think.
We have to put a gap in between wanting and having, in between craving and eating. It’s in that gap that we can check in with our internal experience. It’s in that gap we can select a choice that fits our values.
Between what happened to him, or the stimulus, and his response to it, was his freedom or power to choose that response.
— Steven Covey, paraphrasing Rollo May,
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, 1989
Covey gives us the punchiest version so far. Short, sweet, to the point.
The System
We need all three of the parts that I’ve talked about:
- Pausing 10 minutes before snacking
- Willingness to feel cravings and emotions in that pause
- Selecting among choices we have: towards values or away from values
The quotes we’ve gone through really focus on 1 (pausing between stimulus and response) and 2 (choosing our response).
I’m adding in — from contextual behavioral science — the second one, willingness to feel. From the research on eating behavior and difficult eating behavior change, we know that that’s absolutely essential.
So, I urge you not to skip willingness to feel. It’s an important skill to develop over time.
“Between stimulus and response, there is a space.
In that space is our power to choose our response.
In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
— Steven Covey, paraphrasing Rollo May,
First Things First, 1994
Here we are. This is the quote.
You may have seen it attributed to Viktor Frankl. I love Frankl’s work, I wish it had been him. When it became my favorite quote, I thought it was from him.
Unfortunately, the Viktor Frankl Institut in Vienna states that he never said it. They attribute the quote to Covey.
Covey said that he was paraphrasing someone, but he doesn’t know who. He wrote that he thought this quote “sums up” Frankl’s work, not that it was from Frankl. Quote Investigator traces the idea back to May, a contemporary of Frankl’s and fellow existential psychotherapist.
Your Eating Skills Practice, Today
If you aren’t pausing 10 minutes before snacking, start practicing that today. That’s how you put a gap in between stimulus and response.
*No, you don’t need to pause 10 minutes before the intentional well planned snack you have before your workout. That’s not what this is for.
You want to pause 10 minutes before the snacks you eat mindlessly. Or the snacks you have when you’re tired. Or the snacks you have when your stressed out or feeling difficult emotions.
Then check in with your internal experience. See if you can sit with what’s going on for you, whether emotions or cravings. See if you can take a step back from difficult thoughts, and look at them almost like someone on TV was saying them (my favorite metaphor2).
Finally, choose which choice to make. Instead of the choice of what you want or what you’re craving, you’re choosing what most fits your values.
If you do this, you can actually use that quote with your eating in real life —
Putting a gap between stimulus and response creates an opportunity.
If you can sit with the discomfort of being in that gap,
you can make new choices that re-invent who you are (as an eater).
— Josh Hillis,
paraphrasing Steven Covey, who paraphrased Rollo May,
and adding in psychological flexibility, Josh Hillis’ Substack, 2026
So, that’s my spin on it. Putting a gap between stimulus and response is cool, but it has to be done deliberately. In that gap, let’s put some contextual behavioral science. When my clients have done that, I’ve seen them completely transform their relationship with food.
— Josh
P.S. If you can’t tell, I’m a huge nerd for quotes. This article was so much fun for me to write. If you liked it also, please let me know! This kind of nerdery is great for me, but I need to know if it’s cool for you too.
P.P.S. I’d love to know what your favorite quote about behavior change is!
Who is this Josh guy?
I’m a coach and author who helps busy professionals beat emotional eating.
My book, Lean & Strong, won the Benjamin Franklin Silver Medal Book Award for Psychology.
You might have seen me or my books in the Los Angeles Times, Experience Life! Magazine, Men’s Health, or The Denver Post.
I do one-on-one coaching. If you’re interested, DM me “coaching,” and I’ll send you the details.
I read a ton of research on contextual behavioral science and eating behavior. Most of what I teach comes from research into psychological flexibility as a whole and eating behavior, or a specific process called “cognitive de-fusion.” The only thing I’ve added is the “pause 10 minutes.” I’m baffled that, in all of the research that I’ve read, no one has ever provided a container for practice. Sometimes it really helps to have clear structure. This actually comes from my research into health education, where you provide scaffolding for difficult skills. A simple, clear guideline like “pausing 10 minutes” was my way of adding some scaffolding for the difficult skills like acceptance (willingness to feel) and de-fusion (perspective taking on cravings and separating the cravings from eating).
I created this metaphor! It’s similar to other cognitive de-fusion metaphors in that it allows you to do some perspective taking on your thoughts, it sets you back as the observer. I just like it because it allows us to extend the metaphor in important ways: Like, “Do you always do things people on TV say? Or can you evaluate things said on TV critically?” Or, much more usefully, “Can you let the TV be going in the background, without engaging with it at all?”
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